The beautiful art of “being bad” at something
a love letter to failing

This blown kiss to falling through applies to academic and professional contexts just as much as it does to life.
Educational psychology research has been preaching the value of a “growth mindset” for years. But what is that?
It`s a cenceptual perspective through which challenges and failures are viewed as opportunities for personal growth. This mindset, believing abilities can be developed through dedication, fun, bite-sized struggles and effort, fosters resilience and a love for learning.

Many of us are raised with an expectation of punishment for failure, which can significantly impact our career choices, interpersonal relationship dynamics, self-trust, ability to satisfy our self-realisation needs and overall willingness to take risks. Is it really difficult to teach an old dog new tricks? Or is it that the older we get, the more times we've been denied our treat for almost getting something right, making us uncomfortable with things outside of our already developed skillsets?
What if we consciously practiced having fun with "being bad at something"?

I like to imagine something entirely made up by me to visualise the process, which I call the 60-30-10-formular.
60% of learning something new is “being bad at something”, 30% is being curious enough to stick with it and the last 10% are just as hard as the previous 60% - mastery.
Or, to say it with a yellow, magical cartoon dog`s words:

“Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.”
― Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)

Now, don't take that as an opportunity to fall into the apathy of intimidation of the process, but feel invited to rather lighten up whenever things don't go as planned, since this is the best indicator that you're doing everything right.

Made a mistake? Doesn't work? Don't know? So proud of you, keep going.
That's exactly what growing looks like.

MoorLyn
14.02.`24