Why You Must Be Willing to Suck at Something Before You Can Be Good

Are you missing out because you’ve forgotten how to be new at something?

After all, how hard can it be—to be new at something? Unless you’re avoiding that something.

You won’t want to brush this one off because if you’re like most of us, there’s a very good chance you are missing out on something simply because you can’t reconcile the thought of being a beginner. 

Being a beginner is for rookies, right?

But let’s start with this. Ask most any kiddo you meet if they care about being a beginner. Kids seem to embrace learning just about anything new. Why have we adults jettisoned this mindset from our grown-up brains?

If we were to break this down and walk through it together, we might acknowledge the reality that no one starts at the top of anything. But…

We just can’t stand the thought of starting at the bottom. Can we?

It doesn’t matter if we’re tackling scrapbooking or mountain climbing. 

And there’s a reason for it. One of my favorite thought leaders is Seth Godin. It’s hard to put Seth in a box. He teaches and writes about marketing, human behavior, learning, business, life… what have you.

He says we’ve forgotten how to be new at things. 

Read that line again. We-have-forgotten-how-to-be-new.

We are simply afraid to suck at anything. And as a result, we don’t even try. Even when it’s something we know we would enjoy. Even when it’s something we’ve always wanted to do.

I’m raising this because I found myself doing this very thing without even realizing it. And it shut down my writing for LifeUntucked® for a lot longer than I had intended. You may have noticed (I hope you did), that LifeUntucked^® has been absent from the interwebs. I was on a sabbatical of sorts.

I didn’t plan for it. Circumstances dictated it.

Many of you know that Lanette and I just embarked on a move across the country that has been in the making for almost fifteen years. (Longer than that if you count the years, we considered other places. We’ve moved from Reston, Virginia to The City Different—Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We’re lovin’ every moment, but let me tell you…

Moving is not for the faint of heart.

I planned to keep writing during the whole move thing from getting the house on the market, purging the excess, packing up, and moving into the new place. Just think of the lessons and misadventures I could share. My plan was to chronicle the whole enchilada. I was expecting blogging nirvana.

The thing is, I kept mis-underestimating (I love that word—Thank You, W!) how big the job of moving after almost twenty-two years in the same house. At every milestone, I was saying, “Now the heavy lifting is over.”

Where did I ever get that idea?

I was soooo wrong about the entire process beginning with how much crap this one human owned (me). I was feeling like space aliens were beaming more stuff into our closets faster than I could dispose of it all.

Plus, when you shift your brain-gears to work on matters like downsizing, painting, patching, repairing, upgrading, disconnecting, and the like, all of those duties take a real toll on the creative flow. Those kinds of tasks absolutely kill any residual creative juices one may have.

I’m here to tell you this—decision fatigue is a real thing.

True confessions aside, I feel the need to shift attention away from my missteps for a moment. May I ask you this…

What are you missing out on because you’re afraid to be new?

Don’t sweep this one under the rug. And don’t be afraid to let yourself answer this question. I know, it’s a biggie.

Let’s unpack it a bit. Seems I’ve been doing a lot of that recently. And I’m not afraid to admit I’m not great at unpacking by the way (see what I did there?) Skilled or not, I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

Be brave enough to suck at something new”

— unknown

Now, what does all this have to do with not being able to write a blog post, you’re asking? My best guess is this—I had set the bar too high for myself. In case you’re keeping tabs, I hadn’t written a post in several months. So, I felt like I had to come out swinging for the fence with my first post after my, um, sabbatical.

In the back of my mind, I had decided that my first post had to be a really good one. But apparently, my confidence had bumped the reset button and fell somewhere back around the rookie-level.

It’s how our lizard brains work.

That little green gecko-looking critter that resides at the base of our brains is always there trying to protect us. This time he was telling me, “Hey Jeff, your first post back had better not suck. You wouldn’t want to embarrass yourself!”

Let’s wrap this up by asking the question another way—

Do you have trouble letting yourself be new? When was the last time you gave yourself permission to be new… to suck at something until you’ve acquired the skills to do it well?

Go ahead, suck at something. I know you can.

Don’t hold back trying that new whatever. You won’t suck for long and you’ll have a lot more fun while you’re getting good at it than attaching your bum to that Lazyboy and binging on Netflix.

Be untucked.

p.s. I’m not even going to ask you what you thought about this post. And you know what, although I’m hoping you’ve read this far, found some value, and got a chuckle or two… it’s okay if it didn’t work out this time. There will be more to come.

Copyright © 2021 Jeff Meister – All Rights Reserved