You Should Start Something that You Suck At
You Should Start Something that You Suck At
Seriously. It's important.
I've always loved the advice from Eleanor Roosevelt to 'do something every day that scares you’.
She wrote:
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
I'd like to offer a corollary to that:
Start something new that you suck at, regularly.
Not just something you're bad at, I mean complete, totally "I-can't-hold-the-instrument-right" beginner.
Why?
Well, explaining that will take a story of course.
Get Thrown Ass-over-teakettle in One Simple Step
Last year, pandemics being what they are, I was kind of coasting.
I don't mean at just one thing—At literally everything I was doing. Work. Reading. Exercising. Cooking.Everything was kind of...blah.
The days kept blending together. I wasn't trying anything new and as a result, I wasn't really getting any better at anything.
Then, almost on a whim, I started Brazilian Jujitsu at a dojo a few minutes away.
Mind you, I haven't done any physical competitive sport since my epic two-week career in youth football in...6th grade?
Yeah. It'd been a minute.
So I showed up. Put on a gi, and to the surprise of no one (including myself), I was no-good-horrible-very-bad at it.
I was thrown head over heels for the first time since I was 11.
I couldn't get out of a chokehold no matter how much I tried.
I tapped multiple, multiple times.
But I showed up again. And again. And got justa little bit better.
I continued to show up and I noticed that, class by class, I keep getting better. I still have so much to learn but as of this writing, it's been almost 3 months.
I've met some great people and had regular deliberate practice in being humble, learning again with a beginner's mind.
Why We Hate Sucking at Things
We're always told to try new things but why does that seem like such a scary prospect?
As a society, we don't respect works-in-progress.
This isn't new. Even Nietzsche wrote that:
"Everything that is complete and perfect is admired ; everything evolving is underestimated"
If we're good at something right away, great! We're talented. If not, we quickly sweep the idea under the rug and hope nobody notices the lump.
To illustrate this point further, I'll use one of my favorite apocryphal stories.
It's about a famous composer. I forget who. Fill in the blank with your favorite.
(Extra points if it's Chopin. Seriously, just listen to this)
Anyway. It goes like this.
After a dinner party performance, a woman came up to the pianist and said, "What I'd give to have your God-given talent".
"Why madam," the pianist answered, "It's far from God-given. Anyone can have my talent. You just have to sit down at a piano for 8 hours a day for 40 years."
[Insert Sitcom Laugh Track]
This is not to say that talent is a myth.
Talent exists. I've seen it. You've likely seen it. Kid picks up a baseball bat and hits a home run on their first at-bat, etc.
But being talented is never enough. There's still work to be done.
Angela Duckworth writes in her (absolutely positively stellar) book Grit:
"Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn't. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive"
Duckworth calls these people who put in the effort "Strivers".
In the end, Strivers versus the naturally gifted (but lazy) will only have one outcome.
She writes:
"The Striver who equals the person who is natural in skill, by working harder will in the long run, accomplish more"
Talent comes easy.
It's the effort that's hard—but that's where the true work lies in any craft, whether it's writing, sales, marketing, or knitting.
Start Something You Suck at Today
Another Roosevelt (this one, Teddy) said that:
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
Choosing to try more difficult things teaches two important concepts:
You've come a long way to be accomplished at the skills you have
You still have a lot to learn, even with things you think you've mastered
So if you're a painter, take up woodworking. If you're a musician, take up crocheting.
There really is no losing in trying something new.
Try it and like it? Great you've got a new passion.
Try it and decide it's not quite for you? Great. You've exercised that muscle of trying new things.
And if by chance, you try something and absolutely positively hate it with every fiber of your being?
Great, now you have a story to tell at your next dinner party.
Like what you read? Share it with someone. Go ahead. I double-dog dare you.