Being Bad at Something Has Become Weirdly Embarrassing

A six-year-old draws a terrible horse and immediately shows it to everyone.

Four legs coming from approximately the same part of the body. Head shaped like a potato. Tail attached with enormous confidence to somewhere anatomically questionable.

“LOOK!”

They’re delighted.

An adult takes one pottery class, produces a slightly ugly bowl and says:

“Yeah. I don’t think pottery is really my thing.”

Interesting.

You tried it once, Claire.

Perhaps the pottery community shouldn’t write you off just yet.

Adults have a beginner problem

Children are constantly terrible at things.

Walking. Writing. Swimming. Football. Drawing.

Nobody finds this surprising.

We expect them to improve by repeatedly doing things badly.

Then we become adults and apparently the arrangement changes.

We try tennis twice and discover we’re “not sporty.”

We download a language app, struggle for three weeks and decide we’re “bad at languages.”

We attempt to paint something, compare it with someone who has painted for fourteen years, and quietly put the brushes away.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, being bad at something stopped feeling like a stage.

It started feeling like evidence.

The internet hasn’t helped

Want to learn guitar?

Wonderful.

Open Instagram and watch a twelve-year-old play something physically impossible.

Want to start running?

Here’s someone casually doing 10K before you’ve found your other trainer.

Cooking?

A man with perfect lighting has just made fresh pasta from flour produced by wheat his grandmother personally encouraged.

We’re constantly exposed to people after the boring part.

The thousands of repetitions are invisible.

We meet the skill when it’s already impressive.

Then our own Day One feels unusually pathetic.

It isn’t.

It’s just Day One with excellent Wi-Fi.

Being a beginner also used to be more private

This might matter more than we realise.

You could learn something badly without documenting it.

Your first attempt disappeared.

Now almost everything has an imagined audience.

You don’t just start running.

Part of your brain is already imagining the Strava activity.

You don’t just paint.

You wonder whether the painting is good enough to post.

You don’t just cook dinner.

You notice it doesn’t look like the photograph.

Performance has quietly entered hobbies that were never supposed to have spectators.

Perhaps that’s why people say:

“I’d love to try that, but I’d be terrible.”

Yes.

That’s generally how trying works.

I think we need more ugly bowls

Things made badly.

Songs played too slowly.

Runs nobody uploads.

Awful first drafts.

Gardens that refuse to cooperate.

Languages spoken with embarrassing grammar.

Hobbies that never become side businesses.

Things we enjoy despite having absolutely no talent for them.

Especially those.

Because becoming good isn’t actually the only reason to do something.

Sometimes being mediocre at something for twenty years sounds like an excellent use of a life.

So make the ugly bowl.

Keep it.

Put your keys in it.

And if somebody points out that it’s slightly wonky, tell them confidently:

“Yes. It’s an early piece.”

Much classier.