I hope you never reach a point in life where you stop being willing to start from scratch. I know how good it feels to be capable, to know what you’re doing and feel confident in your abilities. But there is still so much you haven’t experienced, and I’d hate for you to miss out on something you might love simply because you weren’t willing to be bad at it for a while.
Think of something you’ve been meaning to learn. Maybe you’ve even looked at classes or watched a few videos, enough to imagine yourself being good at it. Now imagine the first lesson, when you still have to ask where to stand and what to do. That part is harder to get excited about. Yet those awkward first weeks can be some of the most satisfying you’ll ever spend learning. For most of childhood, we experienced them constantly. Somewhere along the way, something that once felt perfectly normal became something we would rather avoid.
Childhood is mostly spent being bad at things. A child cannot read, then reads slowly with a finger under each word, then one day reads without thinking about it. When a child first learns to read, nobody expects them to be fluent. Struggling is part of the process, and there’s nothing embarrassing about needing time to learn.
Something changes when we get older. We become good at a handful of things, usually our work and whatever we spent our younger years doing. Over time, those abilities become part of how we see ourselves. Being a beginner then feels strangely personal. We struggle with something simple and start wondering what it says about us. So we stay where we know we’re competent. The things we do well get a little more refined every year, while the range of things we’re willing to be bad at gets smaller.
We rarely describe it that way. We say we have no ear for languages or that we’re too old to start. Sometimes these reasons are perfectly fair. But sometimes we just don’t want to look foolish, especially in front of ourselves. We imagine other people noticing our mistakes, even though most are too occupied with their own lives to pay much attention. And when nobody else is watching, we’re still there to judge ourselves. One awkward lesson becomes evidence that we lack talent. After a while, “I’m just not that kind of person” begins to sound like a fact.
I wonder how many things you’ve wanted to try but eventually talked yourself out of. Maybe you’ve forgotten about some of them by now. I think that’s the unfortunate part of all this. We can convince ourselves that something isn’t for us without ever discovering whether we would have enjoyed it.
At the beginning, progress is rarely hard to see. In the first few weeks of swimming, you might go from struggling to coordinate your breathing to reaching the other end of the pool without stopping. Someone who has been swimming for fifteen years might work for months on a tiny improvement in their stroke. As a beginner, you get to watch effort turn into ability almost from one week to the next. That does something for your confidence, because you begin to trust your own capacity to learn. I’ve written more about this in Earn Your Confidence Through Evidence.
Even the difficult lessons can be more productive than they feel. The psychologist Robert Bjork studied how certain kinds of effortful practice can improve long-term learning, even when performance feels worse in the moment. He called these “desirable difficulties.” Of course, not every struggle is useful, but how well you perform during a particular lesson doesn’t always tell you how much you’re learning. Sometimes you leave feeling that you accomplished very little, only to discover a week later that something you struggled with has become easier.
There’s also a freedom in having no reputation to protect. Nobody expects a beginner to know what they’re doing. You’re allowed to ask the obvious question and get things wrong in front of people. You can try something simply because it interests you, without worrying about whether you’ll ever become particularly good at it. Of course, that freedom only arrives once you stop demanding so much of yourself. We often give beginners all the patience in the world, provided we’re not the beginner.
I wish we’d let ourselves enjoy that freedom a little more often.
Being new also makes things interesting again. Think of arriving in a city you’ve never visited. You notice the color of the doors and the way people greet each other in shops. The people who have lived there for years walk past all of it without looking. Something similar happens when you’ve practiced a skill long enough. More and more of it becomes automatic, and you gradually stop paying attention to things that once fascinated you. Starting something new brings back that feeling of discovering things for the first time, which I explored in How to Become Interested in Anything.
But the beginning never lasts very long. Eventually, the big improvements become smaller, the novelty wears off, and what once demanded your full attention becomes routine. You can spend years getting better at something, but you’ll never again experience those exact first weeks. The things that frustrate you now may eventually become so easy that you barely remember struggling with them.
We usually think of that as something to look forward to, and of course it is. Becoming good at something is satisfying in its own way. Still, I wonder whether we’re sometimes too eager to get there. We spend the first few weeks wishing we were already competent, even though we’ll have years to enjoy that competence if we keep going. The beginning is much shorter, and we may only recognize how special it was once it’s gone.
If we only pursue things we’re already good at, our lives gradually narrow around the abilities we happen to have. We may become extremely capable within that small territory, while entire experiences remain unknown to us because we were unwilling to feel incompetent for a little while. How many people reach old age having never tried something they might have loved, simply because they decided long ago that they weren’t the kind of person who could do it?
Epictetus told his students that if they wanted to make progress, they had to be content to be thought foolish. He was speaking about philosophy, but I think his advice reaches much further. Anyone who wants to keep learning has to make peace with being inexperienced. Otherwise, the desire to appear competent eventually becomes a limit on what we’re willing to attempt.
So if there’s something you’ve been wanting to try, give yourself the chance. You don’t have to be gifted at it, and you don’t have to turn it into something serious. You might discover that it isn’t for you after all, and that’s perfectly fine. But you might also discover something that makes your life a little more interesting, something you’ll be grateful you found for years to come.
And if you do, I hope you enjoy being a beginner while you can.
Stay stoic,
SW
Thanks for reading this far , I genuinely appreciate it.
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Continue reading:
The Stoic Answer to Anxiety
Epictetus opened his lecture on anxiety with a question that still sounds a little odd.
Yepp
And being a failure for first time being a beginner is more awesome
For that first lesson, it may help to ask the teacher beforehand whether the class assumes any experience; “beginner” can mean quite different things in different rooms.