How to enjoy sucking at things
This week’s question comes to us from Ross Floate:
You know when you start a new thing and you get to a point where you are now good enough at that thing to know you still suck at it? How do you push through the valley of suck?
You don’t. You set up camp.
Here is an objective truth: All children absolutely suck at drawing. They have no idea how arms connect to torsos, or how heads connect to necks, or even how car wheels connect to an axle. They have no concept of foreshortening, three-point perspective, and they cannot draw a dog to save their lives. They can’t even draw the sun right. It’s a fucking circle, man. And other than Rob Liefeld, no one is worse at drawing feet than children. Children cannot draw for shit. And yet… they do not care. Which is what makes their drawings amazing.
Here is a second objective truth: all children draw. It’s part of our genetic encoding. We make marks. We tell stories. A child will show you a batshit insane page of crayon vomit and make up an amazing story to go with it. And eventually those marks turn into people, and trees, and the family car — all horribly drawn, of course — and they become a story about the time we went to visit Uncle Paul in prison.
Here’s where it gets sad: at some point most children will stop drawing. Sometimes because one of the other children actually gets really good at it and starts drawing Spider-Man, which makes the rest of the children feel inadequate, or, more often than not, because an adult intervenes in a way that makes the child feel self-conscious. (They’re doing this because someone did it to them, by the way.) So children stop drawing. This sucks.
Then we spend our lives trying to learn new things and hoping someone else doesn’t tell us that we suck. Which someone most-likely will because being very good at things is very hard.
Here is a third objective truth: you will suck at most things. Which doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t enjoy them. You probably won’t be able to do things that you suck at in a professional capacity (unless you work at Boeing), but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t enjoy them, or attempt to not suck at them.
Everyone starting something new sucks at it on day one. At some point, like you said, you will get good enough at it to understand that you still suck. The other word for that is learning. On day one you have no idea how much you suck. By day fifteen you’re starting to figure it out, which means you’re building a map in your head. You’re beginning to learn what you don’t know. There’s going to be a lot of stuff you don’t know. Most of your time is going to be spent in that valley. Don’t push through it. Set up camp. Every day is an opportunity to fill in a little bit more of that map, as well as discover that the map is even bigger than you thought. Again, learning.
The people who race through the valley become the type of people who tell children they can’t draw. The people who map out the valley, and enjoy their time in the valley, and help out the other people in the valley? They become the type of people who pin those drawings on the fridge.
BTW, I was the asshole who could draw Spider-man. (I traced it.)
☮️ RIP Steve Silberman. He was a good, kind, decent man.
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