Being bad at things, and the willingness to start anyways.

Summer of 1992. I was twelve. A friend and I hauled my Dad's old board down to Garden City Beach on the South Carolina coast - a 1975 Wave Riding Vehicle single fin, which if you don't know boards means it was long, heavy, and about as forgiving as a church pew. It took two of us to carry it. The waves were awful. We were so bad.

Four hours later, wrecked and sunburned, one of us said something I've never let go of: if it's this fun and we're this bad, imagine if we were even kind of good.

That's been the method ever since, and I'm forty-seven now, so I feel okay calling it a method.

The list

Everything I've ever gotten good at, I've been bad at first. Not a little bad. Embarrassingly, publicly bad.

Design, which I came to in my twenties, anxious, from a rental car counter and a coffee shop I managed in Charleston. My dad told me "if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got - go for it," so I went to Portfolio Center and was the worst in the room for a solid year. Flash and ActionScript, which Mason Poe taught me and which I was truly terrible at, and which is now a language nobody speaks. Piano, which I picked up in my mid-thirties, badly, and can now play badly with feeling. Gardening, which some years I feel like I've got nailed down, and some years I feel like I'm just starting.

And now all of this - local models, agents...(gestures broadly at everything). Re-learning Javascript in my 40's, learning Python, TypeScript...and the pace of things keeps moving faster and faster.

Jake the Dog had it right

There's a line from Adventure Time I quote more than any philosopher: "Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something." It's a cartoon. Talking dog. Completely correct.

I think the reason it lands is that it gives you permission to be in the bad part on purpose. Not tolerate it. Choose it. Most folks I know who are stuck aren't stuck for lack of talent. They're stuck because they've arranged their lives so they never have to be visibly bad at anything, and it works, and it's a slow way to go.

The part that changed

Here's what's different at forty-seven versus twelve: I know what the bad part feels like from the inside now, and I know it ends. At twelve I didn't know if I'd ever stand up on that board for more than a few seconds. I just knew it was fun to try. Now, when I open a terminal and something I built last week is broken in a way I don't understand, there's a small quiet voice going oh good, this part. Not because I like it. Because I've been here, and I know what's on the other side, and the way there is the same as it ever was. Show up, stay curious, be okay with looking dumb, be nice to people.

That's not a secret recipe. There isn't one. Anybody selling you one in a newsletter is selling you a newsletter.

Just begin

If you're reading this and there's a thing - a language, an instrument, a board, a model you want to run on a machine you don't own yet - just begin. Start anywhere. Literally anywhere. You're not too old. People aren't watching you as closely as you think. Be cool with being bad.

Imagine if you were even kind of good.

What are you bad at right now? On purpose, I mean. I want to hear it 🙏