Going from Bad to Great

To get to being great at something, you have to get through being bad at it.

The hardest part of this is the being bad at it part. I have a general tendency to think I’m good or great at anything I can think of.

Well, that’s part of your mind tricking you - when was the last time you remember being bad at anything?

Like really bad.

If you only ever remember bad things, you will not do anything because you will always think you fail.

Once you do something enough, you will be OK - and that’s the key:

You must want to keep doing things you’re bad at to be OK at it.

The doing something and still not getting OK results is the toughest part.

What do you do?

You have to really want to improve at the thing you’re bad at. If you don’t want to improve, you will just do something else - there’s numerous things to do in life and you can solve thing you’re bad at without doing it yourself.

What is the motivation for you to drag yourself through the bad part in order to get to being OK at it??

Cooking

For me, I was bad at cooking. Really, really bad. So bad that I would not eat the food I made.

When I was about seven years old, I burned Super Mario Mac ‘n Cheese and I tried to get my siblings to eat it instead. My sister haunted me with that story for so long.

I gave up cooking because everytime I thought of cooking, my sister brought up that Super Mario Mac ‘n Cheese incident…

Next Attempt: Cook Books!

When I had a chance to learn - I used cookbooks. I tried out recipes and well, they didn’t come out great. One, the cookbooks didn’t have pictures and two, cookbooks use cooking terms to a cook, not to a novice. I understood the “English” - I didn’t understand the specific step the term wanted.

I gave up cooking because my wife was a better cook than me and we can go out to eat whenever we want and for anything she couldn’t make.

See the pattern? I tried cooking, the result was so bad, I avoided cooking and outsourced the solution. It’s easy not to do the thing you’re bad at - there are ample options available!

Eventually, I improved my cooking, how?

Fateful Thanksgiving

It was our first Thanksgiving in America and I wanted to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, except we didn’t have family and my wife didn’t know how to cook a Thanksgiving meal.

I solved this using a tried and true technique: have Thanksgiving at a restaurant!

Let’s just say, that Thanksgiving meal tasted OK, was way too much money, and we had ZERO leftovers.

Part of me just couldn’t handle having a Thanksgiving meal that didn’t taste like Thanksgiving, involve a food comma, or have leftovers for a week.

Turn Around

That’s when I tapped into new resources to learn to cook. I ended up watching Food Network and associated cooking terms with what happened on screen.

I suddenly stopped having bad results and became OK. My wife liked what I cooked.

I kept watching more food cooking shows on TV, practiced, ate the result (literally) and understood where to improve.

This period of being bad was rough - yet, I avoided being bad in different ways.

Bad to OK

When I started to look at different ways to improve, that’s when I went from bad to OK.

From there, I kept improving, where I got good at things, then tried something different (because we got sick of eating the same thing) and I would go from being bad to OK again. This time, the bad period was shorter because I found a resource that worked to improve (i.e. I was bad at pizza, so I watched at pizza cooking show.)

GREAT-ful Thanksgiving

When it was the next Thanksgiving time, I tuned into the Thanksgiving shows and combined all the skills I gained. I cooked and presented a full Thanksgiving meal to my wife and friends. They loved it and took leftovers home - we ate for a week.

Since then, I kept cooking more, every Thanksgiving I wanted to top my previous one. Having more friends over, improving recipes, trying out new things, keeping classics, splitting up cooking over the week, etc.

Looking Back

I don’t remember how bad I was at cooking, just one or two attempts. Cooking was not part of my core need - I could outsource cooking so I didn’t have to feel bad.

Yet, that’s held me back from cooking for so long.

Do I remember those bad memories? Very little! What I do remember: all those Thanksgivings I made and those awesome memories from them. Your mind protects you by remembering things you’re good at, not the things you’re bad at!

Conclusion

If you’re bad at something now and want to improve? Ask yourself:

How much do I want to get better at this??

Being bad is only temporary until you get OK at it, you will need to really want to go through being bad because your mind will protect itself from feeling bad.

So, how badly do you want it?