How I Am Rediscovering the Joy of Learning New Skills As a Mediocre
How can you be so sure that you will fail?
The one question that I think haunts everyone’s dream, pulls them ten steps back and sends a surge of fear deep within their bones is — ‘What if I fail?’
There are many quotes, books, speeches, and articles on how to deal with failure and how you shouldn’t let one failure stop you.
But my honest reaction to all that is….blah!!
What Is Failure?
A word founded by humans to cage themselves deep inside the dark walls of self-doubt and self-pity.
A word that’s given meaning by someone who was too egoistic to see how others are living a different life than him and he is so great because he has this and that and those who don’t do what he does or what he has are all failures.
Take a moment, sit back, and question yourself ‘When did you learn this word? Where did it come from?’ It didn’t come from you. Remember, you were, like what, 5 and trying to build a spaceship, or how you were saying to your friends that one day you will become a doctor and save the entire world?
You see, failure didn’t exist then. But now it does. It exists in each section of your life. Just when you want to start doing something new, just when an idea speaks to you, just when a dream wakes up and thrills your entire body, this b*tch word crawls back to life and makes you question, ‘What if I fail?’
What do you mean when you say what if I fail?
Oh honey, you and I never even sat down to think consciously that ‘What if I fail’ is merely an end result that is different than what it should have been as per the glamorous picture we painted in our minds.
Isn’t it?
We somehow forgot that the joy is in doing the work. The joy is in giving your dreams a chance. The joy is in letting your desires speak to you. The joy is in being mediocre knowing that you are becoming a tiny percent good at what you didn’t even understand a week back.
But no! No. You want to be the best at what you have just thought about. Why?
Because this f*cked up system subconsciously made us believe that ‘If you are not good at what you do then it’s not worth doing. If you cannot be the best at what you think of doing then there is no use of being mediocre.’
And that is why most people either never give their dreams a chance or give up a week or perhaps a month later, thinking, ‘Well, I am not good at this.’
Of course, you are not good at this. How can you be good at something you have never done?
And guess what?
You know all of this already. I am just beating around the bush because you know very well that everyone is mediocre once, and gradually you can improve if you do the same thing over and over again. Perhaps, you repeat the same line in the face of your fear of failure.
I am no different. I used to be like this as well. Always pushing my dreams back to where they came from, sliding my desires away because, well, I was afraid of my mediocrity. I didn’t want to fail and realize how very average I was. Just thinking about failing used to shiver my confidence level.
But in the past few years, my behavior has changed. My approach towards learning new skills has shifted from the pedestal of ‘What if I fail?’ to ‘What great things I will get to experience and learn and how fun it will be.’
How did it happen, you may ask?
1. The Realization; Nothing Matters More Than Fun:
Here is a simple fact you might have missed:
YOU WILL DIE.
And you will die in such a way that in just a few days 90% of the people you know will get busy with their lives so much so that they will never, even for once, think about you as long as they are alive. The remaining 5% will surely miss you for some time and then life will kick them, hunt them down and they will be busy overthinking about the consequences of their actions or regretting something they could have done.
The other 5% will keep you in their hearts for a long time. But gradually, they will lock that space, and only occasionally, will you be remembered.
And look here you are. Sitting in your room, or perhaps lying on your bed, scrolling yet another article that can teach you how you can learn new things, which you already know you want to but you are not because you are afraid you will fail and the invisible people in your mind will judge you for being average.
The reality is, and trust me, it doesn’t matter how many more articles and books and podcasts are there on this subject of failing and learning new things backed by data, research, and science, the ground truth is, that nothing matters.
There is no other way, no other truth greater than the realization — nothing matters. No one matters. Everything you are afraid of today will evaporate into thin air after a few days, weeks, or months and just like that, with an empty cup of tea, you will be sitting while a movie of ‘What could have happened if I had learned swimming’ playing in your mind. People around you might think you are taking a break or you are just a deep thinker but only you will know the regret of not allowing yourself the joy of being a raw clay — who could have been molded into any shape if you had given yourself the chance.
To give you an example, I always wanted to learn Yoga. But sometimes, I didn’t give this desire a chance because, I thought Yoga is best done in the morning and since I cannot be up so early, I will learn some other time. While the other times, I thought, ‘But I can never bend like this. It’s too tough. In no world, however much, I practice, I can become so good at this pose.’
And then there were times when just by thinking about the vastness of Yoga, so many videos, where to start, whether I am doing it right or not, I never really started.
Three weeks back when I was on my bed about to go to sleep, I thought, ‘What if I wake up tomorrow, massage coconut oil to my body as I was prescribed by my dermatologist three years back, and then do yoga just for 20 minutes followed by 5 minutes of meditation and then take a bath and sit down to write.’
The idea thrilled me but when I woke up, I was like ‘Ughh, it’s so early, I can also watch the new season of Emily In Paris.’
It was tough to drag my body to the Yoga mat when it was so easy, comfortable, and a daily routine to just sit and scroll social media. However, when I got on the Yoga mat and started following the steps of the first video I found on YouTube, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed being mediocre so much that I felt like I was a child again who didn’t have to win or rush. I can be here, do it, and enjoy the process.
Some poses I could do so well. Some I couldn’t. But oh my heavens! Did I have fun being on the mat? Hell, I did. It’s been three weeks and I am still in love with being mediocre.
Not just that, I now watch Yoga reels and see the beginner poses to practice before mastering a complicated pose. In my whole day whenever I get time or I find myself just sitting, I get up and up against the wall, I try new poses. Most of the time, I fall down. I bend in a completely new direction. But guess what? More than it hurts, it just thrills me. I find myself laughing like a child who is in the mud, playing like he is in the presence of God, and never even for once, my mind go to the pain or the ‘see, I am not good at this.’
I am not even going to talk about the progress of the past three weeks because truth be told, I don’t feel the fun in progress, I felt the fun in falling and getting up. I felt fun being on the mat in the morning and just following the simple steps. I felt fun when I thought about a certain pose as I was cleaning my bathroom.
All of this because the very first day, I realized, nothing matters. No one and nothing matters as much as your desire to learn or do something new. They might have told us that our purpose is to climb the corporate ladder, dominate an industry, or become the youngest billionaire in the world. But the purpose of our lives is to honor our souls. It is to respect the desire of our hearts. It is to listen to yourself and do what ignites your soul instead of ignoring it.
This has been my mantra for the past three years. Of course, even I forget to embrace this truth at times. Our default setting and beliefs are too strong to overcome at once. But at least, I try to never disrespect my desire by being ignorant rude, or judgemental.
It’s my mantra in life:
Nothing matters except fun.
If something, even for a fleeting second, makes you dance from deep within, please give it a chance. Do it with all your heart. Pour your energy into falling and getting up and laughing instead of polluting your energy with negativity towards your own desires.
Please know, write it somewhere if you must, your life’s purpose is to have fun. Your duty is to allow yourself to be mediocre and gradually learn, fall, laugh, enjoy and just be in the moment.
2. Your Idea of Worth vs FUN:
Do you know where most things go wrong in our lives?
We start to evaluate our worth based on anything new we do.
It’s not your fault. It’s the fault of our education system. They shifted our focus from enjoying subjects to scoring the best grades to prove that we were the 1st ones.
Now years after school, here we are again. We think if we are not becoming good at what we are learning then there is something wrong with us. It shows we are stupid. It reflects we can never be able to do it.
Combine it with self-doubts and you get people who never give themselves a chance to be bad at anything. In their minds, they already played a movie where they tried to do something but they failed so they never tried because they knew ‘I cannot do it.’
It’s sad and almost heartbreaking that ‘You don’t even allow yourself to do something new because you think your worth depends on how fast you can learn something.’
And since you already have this self-limiting belief that you are a slow learner you never start. In fact, you feel bad for being bad at something you never tried.
Take a second and see if you do this or not.
But if you subtract your idea of SELF-WORTH from your excitement of learning a new skill, all that will remain is excitement. When you employ that excitement in your actions, do you know what you get?
You get FUN.
No one knows this better than me. I have been the most mediocre student in my family and friends. I thought I was good for nothing. I had a belief that I could not learn new things easily. And that’s why I stopped myself from playing Basketball in school and American football in college. Even when a new team was formed of all the students who wanted to learn American football but knew nothing about it. I simply stood back and watched because I thought everyone would learn but me.
I wish I had learned. I wish I didn’t have such a negative perspective about my potential. I wish I hadn’t created this movie in my mind where big boys and popular girls were laughing at me as I couldn’t play. I wish I wasn’t embarrassed about being bad at something I never tried but so wanted to.
But what’s gone is water under the bridge.
You and I still have time. We are young with souls and desires as wild as a lion. So why don't we go after what we want? Why don’t we give ourselves the chance to suck and laugh at our attempts, sleep well knowing we tried and tomorrow we will try again with today’s wisdom?
PS: When I say young, I mean, as long as you are alive, you have time to be young. Young is not limited to age. Young is a mindset.
And in case, you fail, even after trying for as long as you could, guess what? It won’t be the worst thing. Because you will have the memory of the good days when you performed well. You will have the joy tickling your stomach. You will have the assurance and confidence. And perhaps, you will gain the wisdom that ‘you don’t have to be the best at everything you do. You are allowed to suck at most things. You can do it even if you are average at it.’
Maybe you don’t have to wear the perfect crocheted sweater. Maybe the thought of your own creation wrapped around you will be more than warm enough. Maybe you don’t have to be a 6 km runner with sweat dripping all over your face. Maybe 2 km is enough to thrill your body. Maybe you don’t have to be J.K. Rowling or Stephen King to be a writer. Maybe writing your own experience is enough.
Maybe, the whole point is not to find your worth in what you do but rather to lose yourself in the joy of your mediocrity.
Conclusion:
If I could write about everything I wish I had tried, you would get bored of counting. I was young and still caged behind the limiting belief that I picked up from the world.
But my God! If I could list everything I learned on my own with a lot of time and never for once stopping to judge myself on my mediocrity then you might want to take me on a date and talk all about it.
The thing is, it is fun and thrilling, exciting and absolutely divine to do what fills your lungs with joy. And you already what is your next source of joy. You just have to allow yourself to do it.
I hope this article can help you in some way to give your dreams and desires a chance.
I have talked more about the fear of learning new things in my book, ‘The Magic of Creative Living.’ You will love it.
