#publicly and defiantly sucking at things since the early 2000s

[swimmer963]

Growth mindset or whatever

So there’s a trait I seem to have, best encapsulated by an anecdote: 

I currently sing in a choir with a bunch of my friends. I do this even though I am by no stretch of the imagination a particularly talented singer. Not the point. I love singing, it’s good for my mood and wellbeing, it gives me an endorphin high and makes me feel warm fuzzies for the people I’m singing with. 

Recently, there was an invite for a small-group extra rehearsal, where there was some expectation that you might be the only one on your part. I eagerly volunteered myself even though I *know* from past experience that the last time I did this (I was in a church choir and had to hold a part alone during one sunday service due to an unexpected failure of all the other sopranos to show up), it did not go well and I was basically told to leave the choir by the new director. Singing is great and I wasn’t about to turn down an extra opportunity to sing. 

I also volunteered myself to sing alto, even though I *know* I have a harder time getting my notes if they’re not the highest note in a chord - how am I ever going to improve at this if I don’t practice when I have the chance? 

I ended up having one friend join me on alto, and we showed up early to practice just our part together, and were starting to get it mostly-down while it was just us. Then the rest of the group showed up, and we tried to do a sing-through, and I very quickly had my face shoved in the fact that my sense of relative pitch is *shit* and I was approximately guessing my notes. We went off to do sectionals and practice just with the soprano singer, and I *still* couldn’t get it – my brain was refusing to give me any feedback except ‘???’ about whether I was singing the right note. 

I was feeling stuck, frustrated and self-conscious and humiliated, not knowing how to make progress...and then my friend suggested I sing with my pitch-detection app open (which I’d done while practicing stuff alone but hadn’t pulled out in a group rehearsal before). And suddenly I sang it through 80% correct on the first go, because I had all the *other* skills involved (reading music, quickly self-correcting to match the right note), I just needed a feedback loop to replace “person next to me confidently singing the right note.” No one can stop me from using a pitch app all the time! Maybe it’s cheating but cheating is just strategy! 

It was an exhilarating experience and I am 100% going back next time. 

---

Growth mindset is a common phrase in my social circles. I also hear people talk a lot about perfectionism and social anxiety, and the damage done to children when they are praised for inherent traits like intelligence, incorporate "good at X” into their self-image, and end up demoralized and too afraid of failure to try hard things. 

I won’t claim to have none of this problem, but it’s specific to a couple of areas, and I think it’s more of the form “negative updates would hurt a lot” than “I’m afraid to try hard things.” My response to fears like “what if I’m just not smart enough to X?” is a combination of “[shrug] I know I don’t have the raw talent to be a Nobel-prize-winning mathematician, tell me something new” and “well, no one thought I had enough innate musical talent at 11 to learn how to sing, and I sure showed them.” 

Maybe part of this is that for just about everything I’ve done, it’s not important to be the “best”, just to show up and do it at all. I was a nurse, and I didn’t need to be the *best* nurse in order for hospitals and travel agencies to fight over employing me. I’ve done ops work, despite all the skills I’m missing and all the weaknesses I’m trying to compensate for, like sucking at data-entry-type attention to detail. Sometimes I fucked up in embarrassing ways, but I was still an extra person being helpful, in a place where that was desperately needed, and that was enough to get *so much* social validation and reward. 

I do have, I think, a pretty good sense of whether my strengths and weaknesses lie on “innate” traits – where I can improve with relatively little effort. Wrapping my head around abstract systems is easy for me, relative to your average human (if not relative to my current social group). Learning fine motor tasks is not. Just means I needed to proactively hunt down every single opportunity to practice putting in IVs. I eventually did become pretty good, or at least had a reputation for it – maybe just because “jumping on any chance to practice” becomes a *habit* and I was the first to raise my hand if someone needed an IV on a “hard stick”. I was also goddamned stubborn, and would take ages to set up and carefully hunt for that one good vein, and try the max number of allowed sticks even if I didn’t expect to get it [EDIT: if the patient was okay with it, the max number is usually 2 and even very good nurses often can’t get an IV in 2 tries, and I think 80% of my IV prowess came from measures like heat packs and careful positioning that took longer to set up but made it nicer for the patient. Also, I ended up willing to try even when I didn’t expect to get it because like 25-50% of the time I *would* get it.]

(The more relevant question I ask myself for “can I realistically be excellent at X” is whether I will practice it obsessively enough. I could definitely learn programming, I just don’t enjoy it enough to end up getting good – not the way I enjoy writing, where it’s more “good luck stopping me”.) 

There are definitely areas where, looking at the balance of my innate talent, I would decide not to compete – not to show up at all. I’m calibrated enough to know where I’m not wanted, and where getting it perfectly is high-stakes enough that I shouldn’t risk it. I’ve sometimes “decided not to compete” in cases I don’t endorse on reflection, like having intellectual opinions and models of the world – my friends are smarter than me! They have *better* opinions and models!

I also pay attention at all to the social dynamics around this – the places where eagerly volunteering yourself will be taken as a claim that you “think you’re so good”, and you’ll get social punishment if you turn out to be mediocre. (I think there’s a way of navigating this where you make it clear that you *know* you suck, and are sort of earnest and puppydog about it, so no one reads it as you making a status claim.) 

If it was something I wanted badly enough, I suspect I would poke my nose in anyway. I have. I doubt the actually-good singers in the choir I joined at age 14 were very pleased by my showing up and singing the wrong notes next to them. 

Still, they let me get away with it. There are a *lot* of areas where the world has let me get away with trying new things and sucking at them; the only thing actually stopping me is embarrassment and self-consciousness, and man do I feel those sometimes, but I don’t endorse letting it get in my way. I can *act* shameless, even if I don’t always feel that way on the inside. 

(I’m aware that I may just be *lucky* to have had this experience, to have repeatedly found myself in groups that didn’t mock and shun me for having the audacity to make a claim that I could do X. Lucky that I have good enough social perception to play it right, and not look like I think I’m better than them. Lucky that I *do* have enough innate ability in enough areas that my practice usually pays off. Lucky that I’ve landed on things that were *fun* to practice obsessively. Idk.) 

This got really long and I’m not sure what my point is. Maybe just that this feels really core to who I am, and to the extent that I am good at some things as an adult, it’s because I’ve done this over and over and over again. And I wish everyone could feel that way deep down? I wish the world was such that no one was ever punished for loving something they weren’t talented at. 

(Also, if you see me doing a thing badly in public: trust me, I know I suck. I’m doing it anyway.)