Let it be bad.

I have been known to be… shall we say ‘unnecessarily hard on myself’. It’s something I struggle with constantly, but I’m working on it. Maybe you can relate? My husband shared this with me the other day and it really resonated with me.

When working on my first draft of “A Songbird’s Tale” I would text Dustin and lament over how terrible what I had just written was and how I wanted to go back and fix it. (Which I was not allowed to do. No editing until draft one was 100% finished.) Over and over Dustin told me “Let it be bad. Don’t worry about it, just keep writing.”

I’ll say it again for those in the back: Let it be bad.

I’ve been sitting with this lately. It’s a vital first step on any path or project, creative or not. Want to learn rock climbing? You’re probably going to be climbing 5.7 and 5.8s for a bit. Want to get better at drawing? Your art is not going to be the Mona Lisa right off the bat. You want to write a book? Your first draft is going to suck.

You have to let it be bad because EVERYONE starts out bad. Even the super talented people. Pretty much everyone who is great at anything got there because they worked their ass off, not because they’re “sooo talented”. And even if they got there on sheer talent alone, I can almost guarantee you that those super talented people think that the first things they did are bad, even if they’re better than someone else’s first attempt by comparison. Having said that, another key take away I hope you get from from this post: “Don’t play the comparison game.” Just don’t. No one wins. And it only makes you miserable. (But that’s another post for another time.)

If you want to get better, you have to let it be bad. The trick is to not give up and to keep going. Push through feeling like your work is terrible and keep going. Did I mention you have to keep going? The only way you’ll ever get better is to do the darn thing. Do it over and over and over. And hopefully you’re doing the thing (whatever your thing is) because you love it and it brings you some sense of purpose and satisfaction, which will continue to grow and deepen as your skills improve.

As you get better and better, “bad” will change. Your bad a year from now will look different than your bad today. You’ll have less days where you feel ‘bad’ about your work. Spoiler alert: even the pros still have days where they feel like everything they do is shit. Can’t hit the ball, can’t seem to capture this person’s expression in my drawing, can’t seem to get the words on paper, can’t seem to make this lift even though I used this weight to warm up with last week. Ups and downs are part of life.

But unless you let go of feeling like you have to get it 100% right, immediately, on the first try; unless you just let it be bad and keep going, wherever you are in your journey, you’ll never get any better.

This is as much a reminder for myself as it is for you dear readers.

Till next time, go do your thing, and don’t forget, it’s ok to let it be bad. <3 - Tiff