Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Poorly
It takes time in the valleys to reach the mountaintops
Show up. Sit down. Write.
Then do it again tomorrow.
And the day after. And consistently.
This is good advice, but no matter how many times I read it, it doesn’t take away the fact that I am also always scared at the thought of putting what is on my mind on the page.
When I heard those words, they gave me one more kick.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly”
Anything worth doing
Writing, for me, is one of those things worth doing.
The benefits cannot be overemphasized or emphasized enough.
There are days I walk around with so many thoughts and ideas bouncing around in my head that I wish I could just stop and write them down. But by the time, I go over them a number of times, they lose the force they came to me with.
Every day, as I read through the scintillating writing by several writers all over the place, my conclusion is the same: writing is worth doing.
And yet what I struggle with is the second part of this truth:
Is worth doing poorly
We all have to start —poorly.
Everyone who is doing it well started poorly—whatever it is they are doing that to them is worth doing.
There is a place for starting where we are and growing through practice and experience. That experience involves several embarrassing mistakes that we must give ourselves permission to make.
Steven Pinker says, “Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game.” In this case, he was referring to the craft of writing, but this is true of every other craft as well.
Writers acquire their technique by recognising, enjoying, and reverse-engineering examples of good writing. This in itself takes years to learn. And in that time, the outcomes will be mostly poor.
But you have to keep doing it because the little improvements that come with each repetition compound.
Your goal is to be better tomorrow at that skill than you are today.
If you want to be like or surpass even the most popular, highest-performing people in any category, you have to begin by doing everything they’re doing —more consistently.
Just as a Substack note I read last week said, every effort is stored, and although we may not be getting results at this very moment, they are coming.
There is a temptation to feel that we are not good enough and give up when we don’t see the results immediately. I know this because I’ve succumbed to it.
I began writing on Medium in October 2023 and stopped after my 13th article in February this year because I read several stories by writers that I respect and felt that my writing was not yet ready.
And the truth is: my writing is not good enough —not yet.
Now that I have accepted it, I can keep writing and keep getting better little by little.
While filtering out the noise
I recently heard Scott H. Young, the author of Get Better at Anything, say in podcast that practising for several hours does not necessarily make you better at it.
Hear him out.
What he meant was that practising a skill for several hours should include
feedback at various points and
adjustments based on the feedback received
Feedback shows you what you are doing wrong, and what changes you need to make to do it better. This is where the role of a coach is non-negotiable.
But there is some other kind of feedback which is mostly noise that you must train yourself to filter out such as:
sales figures
likes
follower counts
number of claps (on Medium)
random negative opinions from readers
Let me conclude with this thought:
“It takes time in the valleys to reach the mountaintops.”
And I suspect that the higher the mountain the longer that slow climb is going to be.