Cooking, writing, music, drawing, programming, singing, public speaking, debate, weightlifting, basketball, tennis, even video games — any skill worth learning takes years of diligent and deliberate practice to master. We’re talking about upwards of 300 practice sessions per years (i.e., days) and 2–3 hours of each session being counted as “sufficient.”
Growing in any kind of skill means striving for better, and in striving for better, we will inevitably confront the gap of not good enough.
Warning: You May Hate the Results, The Process, and Yourself
When it’s your 15th performance and you’re not doing well, it’s to be expected. Some moments you’ll have felt bright, even borderline brilliant. And then other times you’ll undergo the unexpected yet excruciating discovery of where you are weak, lacking, or deficient. Those blind spots or weak points are revealed to you and, if you care at all about doing well, it’s hard not to feel a painful mix of shame, disappointment, frustration, guilt, stress, or anxiety about failing again and letting others down when they needed you most.
This is especially tough when what you need to go from where you are to where you want or need to be cannot be gained in the safe realm of practice, but instead only in the arena where there are stakes and consequences. But if there’s any hope, it’s be found in consistently showing up with the best you can offer. That is where you can cultivate faith in the process, where you can’t see what’s around every single corner, but you keep on taking turns anyways.
Over time, both your best and your worst gets better. But it doesn’t get better unless you show up and strive for your best each and every practice and performance.
The Best and Worst Parts About Growth
The best part about skills that take 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master is that the process can largely be figured out, followed by putting in the hours with enough swings in the right direction. The worst part is that there is no other way to go from you 1st hour to your 10,000th hour except the 9,999 hours in between.
And even if you’ve been just minimally consistent, you know that not every hour will be better than the last and those imperfect hours are just as critical. Failure, fumbling, and feeling foolish are pre-requisites to success learned through failure, footing found by calibrating against fumbling, and whittling foolish assumptions down to wise discretion.
Closing the Gap of Not Good Enough
Trying to make the jump to overcome the gap of not good enough may lead to injury both physical and emotional. We will need time to recover, to rebuild our belief in ourselves, and to refortify our resolve. The path to overcoming the gap of not good enough will be painful, so it also helps to pack patience and compassion. And we may need to choose courage when confidence is in short supply.
But overcoming the gap as an inevitability can be simplified into a series of decisions. To show up. To feel the fear and see the failure, and yet leap anyways. To trip up and crash straight into the ground, and then push and pull yourself up to move on and try again and again.
And when you’ve finally closed the gap and accumulated your stripes and badges, you may just find yourself more proud of the scars and bruises earned along the way.
