When’s the last time that you said, “I’d like to be good at [insert activity here],” but then never followed through with practicing that activity?
We’re all guilty of this. We want to get better at cooking or we want to pick up a new instrument or we want to learn a new language. We set goals for ourselves, spend time practicing, but ultimately lose interest over time and then never achieve the goal that we set out to accomplish.
I often think about the things that I am decently good at, like playing piano or guitar. I’m not a virtuoso by any means, but I’m decent enough. I think about how I got good at playing those instruments. In the early stages of playing guitar (i.e., the first few years), I never once said to myself, “I’d like to be good at guitar.”
Instead, I just played guitar a lot because I enjoyed playing guitar. It was that simple. I think that if I set out with the goal of wanting to be good at it, I never would’ve made it as far as I did.
I like to call this the Improvement Fallacy, which is the idea that by wanting to improve at something, you actually set yourself up for failure.
There’s no doubt that top performers like Michael Jordan or Yo-Yo Ma wanted to be the best they could be, which meant taking steps to improve their skill. But I almost guarantee it didn’t start that way. Instead, they started by falling in love with their respective craft.
In life, when we try too hard to be a certain way, it ends up having the opposite result. Think about people who struggle to fall asleep. They try so hard to fall asleep, that it creates an anxiety in their system that keeps them awake.
For myself personally, if I try too hard to think of a good topic for my daily writing, I immediately get writer’s block. It’s only until I let my mind relax and think about other things that an idea eventually comes to me.
We’d all be a lot better off if instead of wanting to be good at things, or trying hard to become something, we instead just focused on the things we enjoy naturally. When examining the things that we’re good at or not good at, we often live in a certain amount of denial.
It’s difficult to evaluate ourselves accurately. We either vastly overestimate our abilities, or we let Imposter Syndrome get the best of us and limit the faith we have in ourselves.
So what’s the antidote to the Improvement Fallacy?
To experiment, to try new things, and then to pay attention. If you try something once and like it, there’s a chance that if you try it a few more times, you may end up loving it. This is one of the more beautiful parts of life.
Don’t try to be good, just be good enough to try.
.png)
When’s the last time that you said, “I’d like to be good at [insert activity here],” but then never followed through with practicing that activity?
We’re all guilty of this. We want to get better at cooking or we want to pick up a new instrument or we want to learn a new language. We set goals for ourselves, spend time practicing, but ultimately lose interest over time and then never achieve the goal that we set out to accomplish.
I often think about the things that I am decently good at, like playing piano or guitar. I’m not a virtuoso by any means, but I’m decent enough. I think about how I got good at playing those instruments. In the early stages of playing guitar (i.e., the first few years), I never once said to myself, “I’d like to be good at guitar.”
Instead, I just played guitar a lot because I enjoyed playing guitar. It was that simple. I think that if I set out with the goal of wanting to be good at it, I never would’ve made it as far as I did.
I like to call this the Improvement Fallacy, which is the idea that by wanting to improve at something, you actually set yourself up for failure.
There’s no doubt that top performers like Michael Jordan or Yo-Yo Ma wanted to be the best they could be, which meant taking steps to improve their skill. But I almost guarantee it didn’t start that way. Instead, they started by falling in love with their respective craft.
In life, when we try too hard to be a certain way, it ends up having the opposite result. Think about people who struggle to fall asleep. They try so hard to fall asleep, that it creates an anxiety in their system that keeps them awake.
For myself personally, if I try too hard to think of a good topic for my daily writing, I immediately get writer’s block. It’s only until I let my mind relax and think about other things that an idea eventually comes to me.
We’d all be a lot better off if instead of wanting to be good at things, or trying hard to become something, we instead just focused on the things we enjoy naturally. When examining the things that we’re good at or not good at, we often live in a certain amount of denial.
It’s difficult to evaluate ourselves accurately. We either vastly overestimate our abilities, or we let Imposter Syndrome get the best of us and limit the faith we have in ourselves.
So what’s the antidote to the Improvement Fallacy?
To experiment, to try new things, and then to pay attention. If you try something once and like it, there’s a chance that if you try it a few more times, you may end up loving it. This is one of the more beautiful parts of life.
Don’t try to be good, just be good enough to try.
