Allow Yourself to Be Awkward
That's Philosophical #2
Humans are ambitious as hell. Today, you can explore an infinite amount of hobbies and pick your favourite one with a quick search. But sometimes we avoid the thing we always wanted to try just because of the fear of being an awkward beginner. Our motivation to start doing something new is quickly shadowed by this fear.
And it’s entirely okay to feel that way. We just put too much pressure on ourselves when we are at the very start. You can be afraid of doing new things because you are going into the unknown, it can be scary, and it looks like others will judge your competence. However, what I encourage you to do is this:
Allow yourself to be bad at things.
We are so caught up in overnight success stories and people who are the best in their field that we forget who they once were. They all were bad. Beethoven’s first symphonies were trash, but he was a kid, so he didn’t care. After ten years, he became a world-class composer. He had to go through the “awkwardness” stage. He had to get those thousands of hours to master his skills.
You can feel like a loser in the beginning because you are constantly failing. People will criticize you and suggest doing something else instead. But what matters is whether you are standing up after these failures.
Thomas Edison failed thousands of times before he invented the light bulb. Here is the exact quote by Edison from an 1890 interview in Harper's Monthly Magazine:
"I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory.”
When asked about the many thousands of failures he had when trying to create the light bulb, he famously said:
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Edison wasn’t afraid to admit that he didn’t know the answer. He kept trying nevertheless, and eventually, he reached the gold. He didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.
Your first 50 paintings will be bad.
Your first 80 essays will be bad.
Your first 500 photos will be bad.
Your first 40 videos will be bad.
Your first 100 songs will be bad.
The only way you can climb to the top is by making those mistakes in the beginning. There is no shortcut. Don’t be afraid of acknowledging that you are bad at something. It’s a vital part of your journey.
I started writing knowing that I am definitely bad at it. So I made a goal of writing as many articles as I could until the quality of my stories went up. After a year, my writing is still not the best, but it definitely improved compared to where I started.
Of course, it was a bit scary to show how bad I am. But when you focus on the quantity of your pieces in the beginning and not their quality, then it becomes easier to cope with this fact. Now I have started a newsletter, I know that I have to do this for a long time to become great at it.
That fear of being a beginner holds some people back from starting something they will love. Sometimes we are so caught up in doing the thing right, that we are not doing it at all.
Even if you get what you want from your first try. Let’s assume that your first-ever business succeeds. You still don’t have that much experience running one because you didn’t fail in the past. So you will stumble across many mistakes anyway. Failures teach us more than successes do. That’s why you will have some awkward problems that you will have to figure out in the future.
In success, there are always a lot of behind-the-scenes processes that are not as interesting as the result of this work. People who are the best in their industry most likely failed more than others and that’s why they managed to succeed. Everyone talks about Thomas Edison’s light bulb, but not many people know about the thousands of his previous attempts. Everyone talks about Steven King’s success as a writer, but not many know that he wrote stories since his teenage years and his first novel was rejected 30 times.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is the reason why we often feel like we are bad at something. Let’s say you start a new hobby and get a small win right away. This boosts your confidence and you think that you are the next genius in the industry. However, it is a known phenomenon and you can quickly realize how actually bad you actually are.
Many people give up because of disappointment, but that’s just how our brains work. You have to mindfully overcome this phase. See the graph below to understand the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Aside from the fact that being a beginner is awkward, it also can be hard not to give up. Repetition can be boring or tedious, that’s why so few people ever master anything. But only until you get that certain amount of experience, you are able to become good at something.
The best way to start doing the thing you want is to do it spontaneously. Start before the thoughts of you being bad at it enter your head. I started some things spontaneously in my life: signed up for tennis sessions, wrote my first article, and said yes to social opportunities. And I didn’t regret any of it because all it did was not give me time to overthink.
Everyone is bad at the beginning anyway, so why not just go at it? Do those first mistakes that will help you in the long run. All the heavy lifting is done at the start.
Don’t get caught up in a lie that you have to be great at the thing you do. You don’t. Most people don’t know what they are doing. Don’t be scared to put yourself out there and try to do it anyway. Don’t rush to be the best, learn to walk before you run.
Show up. Be bad at stuff. Enjoy it anyway.
Enjoy your weekend, see you next Wednesday!