wooby

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wooby
@wooby

yknow they really were hitting on something with the "sucking at something is the first step to being kinda good at something". i really hate to hand it to em there but you really do just gotta do it huh


JesTheRed
@JesTheRed

You really do just gotta do the thing. That doesn’t make doing the thing easy.
side eyes book of Pokemon scribbles I haven’t touched in months


estrogen-and-spite
@estrogen-and-spite

I hate it that it's true but...but doing the thing is the only way to get good at the thing.


wooby
@wooby

this advice has been repeated to me dozens of times in my life. i never liked it, because it made me feel like people were saying that struggling at something was fruitless, that you won't make anything good (until some unspecified, unknown point in the future). it made me feel like there was no point in trying! that everything i made would be Bad and Ugly and Gross, etc etc.. i changed my outlook on that recently when i realized a few things:

  • you can always redo older work, so you don't have to get perfect the first time
  • nobody has to see or hear or experience your work at all until you're comfortable with it
  • (arguably the most important,) if it is destined to be bad at the start, then lean into it being bad! expect it to be bad. you can only end up surprising yourself.

personally, my perfectionism melted away when i came to these conclusions. i was able to pick up a pencil and make an honest attempt to draw with it, without having a panic attack, for the first time in years. i'm still hiking up that mountain, it'll still take me a long while to get confident enough to show anything off to anyone, for sure. but i couldn't have started that journey without taking the first few steps, and neither can you.

you can do the things you want to do. write something. draw something. play some music, cook a meal, code a function... just do something about it. yes, your words will be amateur. your lines will be imprecise, your notes might be sharp, your rice could be crunchy, your code may not be pretty. all of these things do not mean you have failed. your goal was nothing. your expectations should be on the floor, and just by trying you'll have leapt over the bar. you can always learn the hard stuff later, but at the beginning? there is (probably) no harm in just attempting.

and yes, it does still sting a little bit to not be great at something. even if you expect failure, it doesn't always feel nice to fail. but every time you work on it, yeah, it's a little step along the way towards being good at something.


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