Heeeey Brother!
I really enjoyed your advice about giving advice. As a matter of fact, am I allowed to just say that the best advice I've ever received is your advice on giving advice?
No? Okay.
So I thought a lot about how to answer this question. I thought about people who have given me good advice at times when I was struggling. I thought about advice I've gotten from friends, teachers, and family members. I ultimately settled on advice that I've heard from a few different sources, phrased a few different ways. It's advice that I'm still trying to implement in my life today.
The first step to being really good at something is being really bad at something.
It makes sense. Wayne Gretzky wasn't born great at hockey. As a matter of fact I bet he fell on his face the first time he went out on the ice. I bet the first time Eric Clapton picked up a guitar it sounded like a cat dying. Now, I'm not saying we all have the ability to be as good as Wayne Gretzky if we practice hockey enough, but there was a time in his life when he was as bad at hockey as me. He was probably 3 years old, but still, the point stands.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I remember the first time I handed in a paper in an English class. I got a C+. Being that I had been a lazy high school student, it took me a little bit to realize this was not something to be proud of. It was a three page paper and I specifically remember thinking "How am I going to talk about something for three pages?". By the end of my English degree I would wonder how you could say anything important in just 3 pages. I was not great at writing when I started. It was only through writing lots of papers and getting lots of feedback that I managed to improve. Similarly, when I first moved out of mom and dad's place, I was terrible at most household things. I had two specialties: scrambled eggs, and grilled cheese sandwiches. I was terrible at cooking, but I'd never been forced to improve. Moving out and having a wife who didn't want to cook every single meal for me forced me to improve.
There are other things I can look at and think "maybe I wasn't great at that when I started". For example, I can see very easily how much my teaching has improved over the last three years. I'm better at relating to my students, managing their behaviour, assessing their work, and being flexible to their needs. Same thing with being a husband and a father. As much as the Mrs would tell you that I've always been amazing, it's pretty clear that I've had my shortcomings, and I'm constantly working on them.
As I've realized this, I've also had less time to improve on things outside of being a teacher, husband, and father, since those things take up so much of my time. This really puts a lot of things in perspective for me. For example, when I was a teenager I really wished I could be in a band, but I couldn't play any instruments. I wasn't willing to be terrible at guitar, so I'd never be good at it. Now, while I still think it would be cool to be in a band, I can see that you can't just be good at everything and have to prioritize things. Bands are cool, but music isn't a priority to me. I have no shame about not being able to play guitar, or dominate at hockey, because I don't have a lot of time to invest in those things. So the little time I do have to invest in hobbies, I'd like to put into things I'm passionate about, like writing.
I want to keep improving, that's why I keep branching out and finding new forms of writing. I'd love to branch out even more. I'd love to write fiction, but the thing is... I'm kind of bad at it right now, and there's only one way to get better. By being terrible. So I'm going to try to write anyway, and I'm going to share that writing, even if it's terrible. Because that's how you get to be not terrible.
Is there anything you'd like to be terrible at for a while?
No comments:
Post a Comment