We all need to SUCK at something

Many years ago, I tried to master something I absolutely sucked at — dancing. And I mean sucked. I wasn’t secretly talented. I wasn’t one of those annoying people who says, “I’m terrible at this,” and then somehow crushes it on the second try. I was legitimately bad. I felt awkward, uncomfortable, and acutely aware that I had no idea what I was doing.

Part of me wanted to stop because, at this point in my life, I’m used to doing certain things pretty well. I know how to communicate. I know business. I know grooming, style, fitness, and creating content. I’ve spent decades developing skills and building confidence in different areas of my life. And suddenly, I felt like an absolute beginner (aka dork). It was humbling. But it was also one of the best feelings I’d experienced in a long time.

Here’s what I realized: everybody needs something they’re bad at.

We spend so much of our lives trying to become competent that eventually we can accidentally build a life where we rarely feel incompetent anymore. We gravitate toward the things we know, we repeat the activities we’re good at, and we surround ourselves with situations where we understand the rules. And without realizing it, our competence can become a cage. Being good at things feels comfortable, but growth doesn’t always happen in comfort. Sometimes the fastest way to discover a new part of yourself is to walk directly into a situation where you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

Think about when you were a kid. You were terrible at practically everything. You couldn’t walk. You couldn’t read. You couldn’t ride a bike. You couldn’t throw a ball, tie your shoes, cook, drive, work, date, or navigate life. But you didn’t interpret your inability as evidence that something was wrong with you. You just kept trying. Somewhere along the way, however, adults start to feel embarrassed about being beginners. We start believing we’re supposed to know what we’re doing. And the more successful or accomplished we become, the more threatening incompetence can feel because we’ve built an identity around being capable.

That’s exactly why I think you need to go looking for something you’re bad at. Maybe you already know what it is. Maybe it’s dancing, painting, cooking, golf, public speaking, learning another language, playing an instrument, or fixing something around your house. Maybe you’ve avoided it for years while telling yourself, “I’m just not a _____ person.” Pay attention to that sentence. Sometimes “I’m not that kind of person” is a legitimate preference. But sometimes it’s fear wearing a clever little disguise. What we’re really saying is, “I don’t want to experience being bad at this.”

If nothing immediately comes to mind, start looking for situations you routinely avoid because you’re worried you’ll look stupid. Ask yourself: What would I love to know how to do if nobody could watch me learning it? That question can expose some interesting things. Think about what impresses you when you see somebody else doing it, think about skills you’ve secretly wished you possessed, and think about something you tried once, failed miserably at, and never attempted again. You can also ask the people closest to you, “What’s something you think I would enjoy learning that I’ve never tried?” You’re not looking for another achievement to add to your résumé. You’re looking for unfamiliar territory.

Once you identify it, I want you to do something incredibly important: give yourself permission to suck. Don’t immediately turn the activity into another performance metric, don’t decide you need to become amazing at it in six months, and don’t buy all the equipment, create a spreadsheet, measure your progress, and turn your beginner experience into another job. Just suck, laugh at yourself, miss the ball, play the wrong note, burn the meal, say the word incorrectly, and fall down and get back up. There is something incredibly freeing about doing something without needing to prove you’re exceptional at it.

Being bad at something also teaches humility in a way success never can. When you’ve become accomplished in your career or another area of life, it’s easy to forget what uncertainty feels like. Then suddenly you’re standing next to somebody half your age who can do effortlessly what you can barely figure out. That experience is healthy. It reminds you that everybody you meet knows something you don’t. Everybody has abilities you don’t possess. Your success in one area does not make you universally superior, and your failure in another does not make you inferior. We’re all complicated combinations of strengths, weaknesses, experience, ignorance, talent, and potential.

Another benefit, I think, is even more powerful: you start changing your relationship with failure. When failure becomes something you voluntarily experience in small, relatively safe ways, it loses some of its power over you. You realize embarrassment doesn’t kill you. Looking stupid doesn’t kill you. Somebody being better than you doesn’t diminish you. You try something, screw it up, learn something, and try again. Eventually, your brain starts to understand that failure isn’t necessarily an emergency. It’s information.

And that lesson travels. You may have started by learning tennis, painting, salsa dancing, woodworking, or whatever random thing you decided to try, but the confidence you develop doesn’t stay there. The next time you encounter uncertainty in your career, you’re a little more comfortable figuring things out. The next time life changes unexpectedly, you have evidence that you can adapt. The next time you fail, you’re less likely to interpret that failure as a statement about who you are. You begin trusting your ability to learn instead of depending entirely on what you already know. That is an incredibly powerful form of confidence.

Being bad at something can also expose the stories you’ve been telling yourself about yourself. “I’m not creative.” “I’m not athletic.” “I’m terrible with technology.” “I can’t speak in front of people.” “I’m too old to learn that.” Be careful with these declarations because identities can become self-fulfilling. If you tell yourself for twenty years that you’re terrible at something, you probably won’t spend much time developing it. Then your lack of ability becomes evidence that the original story was true. Sometimes the only way to break that cycle is to say, “Maybe I’m not bad at this. Maybe I’m simply untrained.”

Now, you may discover that you genuinely are terrible at whatever you chose—and you may never become particularly good. That’s okay too. Not every weakness needs to become a strength. This isn’t about fixing every deficiency or optimizing yourself into some superhuman version of you. There is tremendous value in learning where your limitations are. Self-awareness means knowing what you’re great at, what you can improve, what takes more effort from you than from somebody else, and what simply isn’t worth pursuing. Sometimes discovering that you’re bad at something helps you appreciate your strengths even more.

But if you enjoy the process, stay with it long enough to see improvement. That part is magical. There is a moment when something you literally could not do starts becoming something you can sort of do. Then one day you realize you’re not terrible anymore. Maybe you’re still not good, but you’re better. And that little bit of progress reconnects you with something adults desperately need: the satisfaction of becoming. We spend so much time focused on being—being successful, being accomplished, being respected, being knowledgeable—that we forget how exciting it feels to be becoming something new.

This matters even more as we get older. Life can become incredibly repetitive if we allow it with the same responsibilities, same conversations, same restaurants, same workouts, same skills, same people, and same routes. We say we want time to slow down, but then we create lives filled with familiar experiences that barely require our attention. New experiences wake you up. Being a beginner forces you to pay attention because you can’t operate on autopilot. You notice things, ask questions, and become curious again. And curiosity, in my opinion, is one of the things that keeps a person psychologically young.

So once you figure out what you’re bad at, don’t hide from it. Investigate it. Decide whether it’s something you want to develop, something you simply want to experience, or something that reveals a larger weakness worth understanding. Then create opportunities to practice being uncomfortable. Take the lesson, join the class, ask somebody to teach you, and try the thing you’ve avoided. And most importantly, separate your performance from your identity. You are not stupid because you don’t know something. You are not incapable because somebody else learns faster. You’re simply standing at the beginning of a process that somebody else started before you.

At the end of the day, I don’t think the goal of life is to construct a perfectly controlled existence where you’re good at everything you do. I think part of living an incredible life is continuing to discover who you are—and you cannot fully discover yourself if you only operate inside the boundaries of what you already know you can do. Find something you’re bad at. Let yourself struggle, laugh, and learn. You may eventually become great at it, or you may remain spectacularly mediocre. Either outcome is fine because the real accomplishment isn’t mastering the activity. The real accomplishment is becoming the kind of person who is still willing to be a beginner.