To be good at something, learn to be bad at it first
To be good at something, you need to be bad at it first. So many times it happens with us that we want to be good at something. If we talk about today’s era then skills like animation, graphic designing, coding and many artistic skills have taken over the world and people are striving hard to be good at any of these skills.
We often want to be good at something but refuse to be bad at anything even at the beginning. But that attitude is what keeps us from growing in the right direction in our career and pushes us to the negative side.
Let’s take an example of a good video creator. If you look at their first few videos you’ll find out that they weren’t this great right from their first video. But yet they started off and learnt their way up to the point where they are today. Even if you take an example of a graphic designer then you’ll find that they weren’t selling amazing logos right from day one. They have been through the times when nobody even bothered to look at what they’ve created.
What I am trying to say is that in this era we are gradually becoming so impatient that if something seems too challenging to us then we either try to find a shortcut or we tend to replace that thing with something else.
The longer we are not going to accept that we are bad at something the longer we are going to keep ourselves from being good at it. The problem is that we are so focused at trying to make everything so perfect right from the time we start that we start hating the process when we are bad at it.
We have that unnecessary urge to be best in the minimum possible time that we want to accelerate the whole process without actually bothering about the quality of what we are doing. One needs to realize that they can never be a great artist if they aren’t willing to get criticized for their initial songs they wrote or the pictures they’ve taken. One can never be a great coder if they can’t stand the fact that their code is going to break a million times in their initial projects and then only they might become amazing enough at that stuff that one day they could handle a sole project worth millions.
Judging too early by initial failures and saying I am bad at this and I need to move to another direction isn’t the answer. Instead the answer is accepting that you are bad at it but still willing to give every bit of yours to get the output you need.
You can’t just think of something that you are passionate about and be good at it in no time. So the improvement starts with accepting that you have flaws and limitations and yet you can conquer them to be the best.
The core reason why we lose interest
As human beings we have a bad habit of romanticizing things. By romanticizing I do not mean being romantic, instead I mean we often create a big deal of something in our head even before it’s the right time. Just like it’s not fine to picturize your latest tinder match as your future wife even before knowing her full name, it’s essential to not to picturize yourself as a pro at something that you haven’t even started yet.
Plenty of people consider themselves as an entrepreneur even before knowing what the term equity or valuation means. A lot of people think they might make it big as an artist because their friends have loved their work. Plenty of people think they are going to be the next Warren Buffet even before investing a penny in the stock market.
The reason is simple. Whenever anything fascinating comes in our mind we tend to think of pursuing it and we imagine ourselves to be great at it soon without jumping into the technicalities of it.
The main problem is that we see the billionaires but we don’t focus on the times when they’ve lost millions of dollars to their investors. We see super successful people dealing with stock markets & making millions but we never know the stories of the millions they’ve lost at times. We admire the super hit works of the artists but we never think about the number of songs, paintings or videos they have which never actually came out.
So, it is essential for all of us to be ready to be bad at things that we want to do in life at the initial stage and improve from there. Let’s not run behind perfectionism and let’s be human about the learnings and possibilities within a certain time. Let’s not try to rush the process of being good at something by looking for shortcuts or overdoing things. It is essential to have a mindset that helps you accept yourself as a rookie at something while you are learning it because that only leads you to be a leader at it one day.
Key Takeaway
It’s great to expect big things from ourselves especially when we know our capabilities. But, it is essential to be patient and have a learner’s mindset before actually picturing ourselves to be a league leader in that. You are allowed to picture yourself as the next big thing in whatever you are passionate about but you also need to stay grounded and ready to beat the heat when the situation becomes more and more challenging during your learning phase.
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Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
