Here’s a daunting idea: Anything that you try to do well, you will first be very bad at it.
And you will be very bad at it for a long time.
Depending on your outlook, this can be either encouraging or deflating.
If you recognize that everyone will be very bad at something long before they are any good, this can reassure you that you’re allowed to suck. It’s expected, even.
Those who are good at anything were once beginners. They persisted long enough to become average and then, eventually, decent. Then, way down the line, finally they became good.
Before someone turns even semi-professional at something, they likely spend a long, long time sucking. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that every phenom has put in a minimum of 10,000 hours.
Consider Michael Jordan. Tiger Woods. Beyonce. Any household name who commands a skill set was very bad at it for a long stretch of time. Anything worth mastering involves a willingness to suck, as well as an eye on the long game.
Mastery, no matter the discipline, takes effort. Even moderate skill takes effort. Gladwell noted that it took roughly 10 years to become a chess grandmaster, or about 10,000 hours. The same goes for elite violinists, who approach mastery around age 20 (after about a decade of serious practice).
“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything,” wrote neurologist Daniel Levitin, which Gladwell highlighted in his book.
The lesson? Before you do anything well, you’re going to have to suck for a long time.
What’s more, even after a long stretch of being below average, there’s no guarantee of returns. A breakthrough isn’t a sure thing even after years and years of diligence.
But, in my eyes, that time is going to pass either way. Breakthrough or not, you might as well work to suck a little less at something. Passion helps — and so does some grit and hustle. Stack all this on top of discipline and routine? That’s a potent combination and a surer path to mastery than you could buy.
It’s those who are willing to endure the struggle and the suck who have the best chance at making a success out of something. Those who can endure the fears, doubts, onlookers, and eventually make it all habitual.
I’m nowhere near a master of anything, but I’ve been writing everyday for five years now. For a long time, my writing sucked. My blog articles garnered zero views. It wasn’t until nearly 18 months after I launched my blog that I started to gain some traction, and even then it was modest.
But I didn’t let anything deter me.
Today my blog is still modest, though, nearly 200 articles later, viewership has grown twelve times over.
But (as Jeff Bezos would say) this is still Day 1 for my blog, as well as my growth as a writer. In telling myself I’ve done nothing, I’m reminding myself that I have to be willing to suck for a lot longer.
It isn’t about notching my 200th blog post, or even 2,000th. The willingness to keep plugging away with marginal progress, to continue with an uphill mindset — that’s where achievement can begin to develop.
Acknowledging mediocrity and continuing on anyway is what builds the mindset required to be a pro.
The sentiment is the same as when people say “nothing happens overnight” or “Rome wasn’t built in day.” These are true statements, but often people underestimate the extent of time within each platitude. Here’s an idea I remind myself of often:
Don’t be disappointed in the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t put in.
Once I came to terms with the notion that it’s okay to suck at something, I sucked a little less because it freed me from hesitancy. The only thing left to do was (and still is) take action.
If you give yourself permission to suck, fail, and perform poorly, then you put yourself on the path to something greater.
Cheers to that.
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