Mar 11
1
Getting Better at Being Terrible
For a long time, I’ve prided myself on the things I’m good at.
Growing up, I regarded myself as a skilled tennis player, a good student, and — later in my youth — a decent actor. School aside, “good” — it turned out — was entirely relative. Truthfully, I mostly played tennis against people as or less capable than I, so I didn’t lose often. In fact, one of my clearest tennis memories is losing my first ever tournament match to a kid two years older than me, eight inches taller, and clearly stronger and more skilled. I cried. Not when I got home, as I walked defeated to shake his hand mid-court. I didn’t handle losing well.
As an actor, even in a high school that placed significant attention on its theatre program, males were in the minority. So, of course, I got some decent roles and even a little recognition. At university, again, there were lots of great male roles and few men to compete against. So I didn’t lose out on many auditions. Fast forward to my brief career as a professional actor, where the talent pool grew and the bar was raised. After early success getting a couple of voice gigs, a commercial, and a bit part on series TV, I struggled to consistently earn roles. Not really used to such challenges, I didn’t push hard enough to get better and become successful. Quickly, my time as a professional actor fizzled.
I now realize I was missing a key skill: I needed to be better at failing.
In truth, sucking at stuff makes up most of the time we spend on the path to getting good at anything. And now that I’m a new dad, I want to make sure that I’m ready to instill this notion in my daughter. The more you avoid failure, the fewer things you allow yourself to get good at. It’s okay to be bad for a while. More than okay. It’s imperative.
So my new resolution is to be willing to be terrible. I’ll try to write some awful blog posts, some poorly conceived screenplay pages, some badly structured code, and maybe even record some half-baked podcasts. I need to be willing to let these things be awful, or I’ll never get good at any of them. And above all these, I’ll need to be ready to make some parenting mistakes, too. Because there’s no other way to get good at that job, either.
