It's OK to be bad at things

This is one of my favorite mottos, one that I’m working very hard to live up to myself:

If you want to be good at something, you have to be OK with being bad at it for a while.

For as long as I can remember, I have had anxiety about being bad at things, and it has held me back. Do you struggle with failure? Do you want to know how to fix it? I might be able to help.

For me, fear of failure prevents me from starting, or from putting myself “out there.” For instance, the notion of learning in public terrifies me. But if you don’t start, you can never learn and grow, and thus you’ll never achieve proficiency, let alone mastery.

But in fact, if you hate being bad at stuff, that could be a very useful tool when framed properly. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, writes, “People who hate being bad at stuff are driven to improve.” But the caveat is that you have to keep at it.

If, like me, you nope out the moment you sense that you’ll fail, you won’t reap the benefits of the struggle, which is very often jumps in performance in Clear’s words.

The antidote to failure

There are three straightforward, foundational steps that you can follow to overcome any fear of failure and keep you moving toward your goals:

1. Realize that few people are instantly great at anything.

2. Focus on incremental improvements, and celebrate them.

3. Systematize and document your progress.

Let’s briefly go over these in turn.

The savant myth

While it may be true that a very small number of people are born with some innate capacity to excel in a specific area (chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer jumps to mind), the overwhelming majority of people are good at things because they practiced them.

There are things you will be naturally better at than others, and things you’re naturally less great at, but that’s just a starting point; the only path to mastery, for anyone, is practice.

The technologist and speaker Gary Bernhardt used the term “proficiency fatalism” to describe that feeling you have when you see someone do something really well and think “I can never be that good.”

That’s a lie that you’re telling yourself. Are you unwilling to put in the effort required to be that good? Because that’s a different problem.

More likely, it would take only a quarter as much effort to get to around half as good as the master (because you’ll see the most gains at the start of the journey), and maybe that’s good enough.

Take one step

At least 90% of the work is in starting. One step toward a faraway goal is infinitely more valuable—even if it fails—than taking no step at all.

The trick is to let go of the fear of failing at the overall thing and focus on making any small, incremental progress today, and celebrating that.

Once you break your work down and start taking small steps, keep in mind that failure is the best teacher and even your failures are invaluable if you choose to learn from them.

Build a system

Finally, to persist in taking those steps and failing and learning until you ultimately achieve your goal, you need some kind of system. This doesn’t have to be some overwrought, complex thing, either.

Mainly, you need to ensure that you’ll keep trying, track what works and what doesn’t, and celebrate your wins.

One pre-baked approach for finding your way along an uncertain path to a big goal is the “Improvement Kata”, but you might be fine with just a calendar and a notebook.

The key point is that you see your own progress, recognize yourself for each time you succeed even a little bit, and record all of this over time so that you can see the magnitude of your growth.

Problem solved?

I can’t guarantee that if you follow these steps, you’ll never experience any fear of failure. I certainly still do… All the time.

But I hope these are tools you can use to reframe that fear into something more productive, so that you can harness your anxiety and turn it into a force to push you just one step closer to your goals.

Because after all, every journey starts with a single step, and even if you fall down a lot, you’ll have learned more than someone who never moved from the starting line.

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