Nobody Knows How to Be a Beginner Anymore.

Everyone sucks at first and the people who get good are just the ones who were willing to suck for long enough. That's it. That's the secret. It's not talent. It's tolerance for being bad.

the beginning is supposed to feel impossible. You're supposed to be bad. That's not a sign you're failing. That's a sign you're learning. We've been so conditioned to expect instant gratification, instant results, instant transformation, that anything that requires patience feels like punishment.

we've lost the ability to be kind to ourselves during the learning process.

Being a beginner used to be a neutral state and a starting point. Now it feels like failure.

We're losing curiosity. We're losing experimentation. We're losing the willingness to try things just because they seem interesting, with no goal, no optimization, no need to be good. We're losing the joy of learning for its own sake.

we're replacing it with: perfection or nothing. Expert or don't even try. Immediately competent or you're wasting everyone's time.

If you need to hear this: you're allowed to be bad at things. You're allowed to start from zero. You're allowed to suck for a long time. You're allowed to learn slowly. You're allowed to be worse than the people around you. You're allowed to make ugly art and play wrong notes and write bad sentences and fall off the skateboard and burn the food and totally bomb the first attempt.

Embarrassment is the cost of entry. If you aren't willing to look like a foolish beginner, you'll never become a graceful master. — Ed Latimore