{"id":6332,"date":"2016-01-26T07:30:47","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T14:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=6332"},"modified":"2018-03-29T13:12:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T20:12:02","slug":"okay-with-being-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/26\/okay-with-being-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"At What Age is it No Longer Okay to Be Bad at Something?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m grateful for having started this blog when I was quite young. I started writing when I was 17, in early 2006. That was nearly ten years ago.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not grateful because it\u2019s better being a younger writer. If anything, it\u2019s probably harder. You don\u2019t have the life experiences or accomplishments to draw upon. There\u2019s a greater insecurity in your own ideas, which tends to express itself in either complete self deprecation or overconfidence to compensate.<\/p>\n

No, the reason I am grateful I started so young is simply because when you\u2019re young it\u2019s okay to be bad at something and keep doing it.<\/p>\n

Being a Bad Entrepreneur<\/h2>\n

It took me seven years from the point I started working on online business in general, to the stage when I could earn enough to live on. Five of those years only on this blog.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, spending five years to turn a blog into a full-time operation isn\u2019t so bad. Very few blogs ever earn enough money for their owners to write for a living, so I\u2019m definitely one of the lucky ones.<\/p>\n

But it didn\u2019t feel this way at the time. I remember in 2009 Chris Guillebeau released his guide, 279 Days to Overnight Success<\/a>, detailing his path to building an online business over nearly a year of intense effort. The title was supposed to mock the attitude of many new entrepreneurs who expect instant riches, but I kept thinking, \u201cWell, I\u2019ve been at this for over 1800 days and I have little to show for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being younger, however, it was a lot easier to keep working on it, in spite of the apparent lack of success. The reason was simple: I was a broke student. I didn\u2019t have any income, so even if the website could bring in several hundred dollars a month, that made a big difference in my life.<\/p>\n

Even my goals were much more modest. My benchmark for success during those seven years of effort was to earn $20,000 in a year. This was a lot more money than I had been earning in school, so it felt almost luxurious. But I can\u2019t imagine that benchmark would have satisfied me if I had already been working for years, earning a few multiples of that amount.<\/p>\n

As a point in case, a blogging friend of mine quit, just as his blog was growing in popularity. The reason? Not enough money. He was a six-figure developer, so the idea of earning pocket change from writing a blog wasn\u2019t compelling to him.<\/p>\n

At What Age Did You Stop Drawing?<\/h2>\n

The relative opportunity cost of being young and broke, versus mature and more financially stable is part of the reason it\u2019s harder to be bad at things when you\u2019re older, but it\u2019s not the whole story. The disinclination to try anything you\u2019re bad at extends into non-monetary realms as well.<\/p>\n

Most people I know, at some point in their childhood, used to like to draw. I know very few adults who enjoy drawing now. Why?<\/p>\n

The easy answer (and I believe the wrong one) is that adults don\u2019t have time. Adults are busy with important things, so there simply isn\u2019t time in the day to pick up a pencil and produce a quick sketch of something.<\/p>\n

This may be true, but that would only explain that adults don\u2019t draw, not why they don\u2019t seem to enjoy drawing very much.<\/p>\n

I suspect the real reason is this: when you draw as a kid, it\u2019s okay to be terrible at it. Children are objectively terrible at drawing. They have poor motor coordination, no technique and a distorted sense of proportion. But people still encourage them to draw because they\u2019re kids, and it\u2019s okay to be bad at drawing when you\u2019re a kid.<\/p>\n

When you become an adult, now you\u2019re supposed to be good at things. It\u2019s no longer okay to produce terrible drawings. Unless you were one of the rare people who actually got good at drawing in your teens, you\u2019re now expected to give it up for the rest of your life.<\/p>\n

Why Does Being Bad Stop Being Okay?<\/h2>\n

Some people, perhaps the more artistically inclined, are likely to point out that this is nonsense, that anyone can learn to draw at any age, and you shouldn\u2019t feel this way, etc. But my guess is that for every person reading this, there is some pursuit in their life they won\u2019t try because they\u2019re too bad at it. Maybe yours isn\u2019t drawing, but basketball, singing or math.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to point to the absurdity of other people who are not good at things shying away from things you\u2019re good at. It\u2019s a lot harder to embrace something you\u2019re too old to be bad at yourself.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m more interested in trying to understand why this seems to happen. Why does it stop being acceptable to be bad at things? If we know that, we might have some clues as to how to avoid it.<\/p>\n

Hypothesis #1: Focus on Your Strengths<\/h3>\n

A common suggestion is to focus on the things your good at. This makes good economic sense. Since rewards often go disproportionately to the more skilled and specialized, it pays to invest yourself in becoming really good at only a few things.<\/p>\n

This seems to explain my friend\u2019s abandonment of blogging. He was too good at programming to justify spending a lot of time writing a blog which had low potential value for him. Yet, it was a good opportunity for me, since I had no comparable skills with which I could reap higher economic rewards.<\/p>\n

While this explains some career choices people make, it hardly seems to explain drawing. Most people who do enjoy drawing, don\u2019t make money from it. Even if they do, few artists I know claim that drawing was something they picked as a good specialization for financial rewards.<\/p>\n

Therefore, this notion has pretty limited explanatory power outside of career specialization.<\/p>\n

Hypothesis #2: Relative Enjoyment Returns to Ability<\/h3>\n

Another possibility could be that people enjoy skills they are better at. Since the distribution of natural talents is uneven within each of us, some people are going to be naturally better at, and enjoy more, exercising certain skills.<\/p>\n

The difference between natural talents in children may be minor, so the enjoyment differential is similarly minor and you\u2019re likely to try out tons of different skills. As you mature, you gravitate towards things you had more aptitude in, which causes you to practice and improve, which causes you to enjoy them even more. The positive feedback results in a strong specialization in your leisure pursuits.<\/p>\n

This has a ring of truth to it, but I suspect it is also false. My evidence is that it\u2019s hard to find any adult that enjoys his or her leisure time as much as a child enjoys making a terrible drawing. Kids seem to have more fun at many skills, even the ones they\u2019re bad at.<\/p>\n

This theory might explain why people like some pursuits more than others, but it doesn\u2019t explain why we seem to increasingly dislike things we\u2019re not good at as we age.<\/p>\n

Hypothesis #3: Skilled Leisure Pursuits are Signals<\/h3>\n

The Hansonian critique<\/a>, I suspect, would be that most people pursue skills in their leisure time as a way of subconsciously showing off. If you\u2019re not good enough to impress people, what\u2019s the point?<\/p>\n

Kids enjoy many pursuits, simply because they\u2019re given heavy praise for work that wouldn\u2019t meet scrutiny if an adult produced it. Also because, to the extent that kids also compete for signaling purposes, the relative benchmark is lower and specialization hasn\u2019t occurred to a large enough extent yet.<\/p>\n

This one strikes me as being closest to the truth, but like the last one, it simply suggests that people ought to focus on skills they\u2019re good at. It doesn\u2019t explain the strong fears and aversions many people have to things they\u2019re bad or mediocre at. Why might looking at a blank canvas actually provoke anxiety in an adult, when it wouldn\u2019t in a child?<\/p>\n

Learning to Be Okay at Being Mediocre at Something<\/h2>\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s possible, in a single article, to overcome the enormous cultural conditioning of avoiding things we\u2019re bad at. I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s even possible for myself, let alone you, the reader.<\/p>\n

But I do think we can put pressure on the margins of this problem. Maybe instead of trying out something you\u2019re confident you\u2019ll be dismal at, and which fills you with feelings of shame and embarrassment just thinking about it, maybe try out something you\u2019re mediocre at right now, but suspect you might become good at with practice.<\/p>\n

The best starting points I think are activities you used to enjoy when you were younger, but dropped off when they stopped meeting the adult standards of acceptability. You may have to push through some frustration or embarrassment in the beginning, but I suspect the real enjoyment of those pursuits is far closer to the surface than you imagine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m grateful for having started this blog when I was quite young. I started writing when I was 17, in early 2006. That was nearly ten years ago. I\u2019m not grateful because it\u2019s better being a younger writer. If anything, it\u2019s probably harder. You don\u2019t have the life experiences or accomplishments to draw upon. There\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[682],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6332","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-nc-learning","7":"entry"},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAt What Age is it No Longer Okay to Be Bad at Something? - Scott H Young<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/26\/okay-with-being-bad\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"At What Age is it No Longer Okay to Be Bad at Something? - Scott H Young\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I\u2019m grateful for having started this blog when I was quite young. 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