You start something new because it piqued your interest. Then, very quickly, you start to wonder if it makes sense to keep going.
The first attempt doesn’t turn out the way you imagined. The second is a little better. As you try to fix what isn’t working yet, it’s easy to miss the moment when the work itself interests you more than you expected.
Or maybe you just wanted to give it a try.
You were curious about how an instrument you’d never held in your hands sounded. You wanted to draw something, learn a new language, or fix something on your own that you’d previously had to ask someone else to do. There was something simple about that initial interest. You didn’t need proof yet that you’d become good at it. It was enough to see if you could learn.
Then we set a deadline for that attempt.
We decide how fast we should improve. After each attempt, we ask whether we’re already good enough to justify the time we’ve invested. That first spark is then burdened with the job of producing results as soon as possible.
But what did we really expect from the first few attempts?
Imagine you’re learning to play a few notes that you love to hear. Your fingers are still finding their way; you pause and go back to the beginning. Then, one day, you manage to string together a small part of the melody. It’s not much, but you want to play it again. In that repetition, there’s already something that makes you glad you started.
That small fragment might keep you going long enough to find the next one.
You don’t have to find a calling in everything you start. Some pursuits won’t suit us, some will be only a passing interest, and others will fall by the wayside because we lack the time. That’s all right. But it’s worth pausing to distinguish between quitting because we’ve lost interest and walking away simply because we are not yet good at it.
In the latter case, we may not have even gotten to know what we started. Our first attempts were spent testing our own abilities. We didn’t notice that a single question kept us engaged longer than we expected, that we wanted to try again, or that we were delighted when we finally understood a small part of it.
These moments can easily go unnoticed if we’re only waiting for the big result.
Practice, of course, isn’t always pleasant. Sometimes we’ll repeat the same thing over and over and still not succeed. Sometimes we’ll grow tired or frustrated that something which seems simple to others demands so much attention. Yet between the first attempt and the moment we master something, there are many small discoveries that might make us want to return.
One day we grasp a piece of guidance that once felt baffling. We spot a mistake we’d been making for weeks without realizing it. We ask a better question because now we know what we don’t understand. On the surface, this may not look like a clear-cut success. It tells us that we’ve made progress.
It helps when we notice that something felt a little smoother today. Not every session has to show visible progress. Sometimes we simply hear the difference more clearly, discover a movement that suits us better, or see why the last attempt failed.
Sometimes simply asking someone who knows can open a new angle on what we’re learning. We try something different, check what’s changed, and return to the detail that interests us. Time is spent exploring, rather than just waiting to get it right.
I think about how many things people abandon after their first encounter with their own clumsiness. The notebook stays on the shelf. The instrument stays in the corner. The course registration form lingers among the messages we never returned to. Each of those beginnings could have led to something great, or it could have led to a few hours of satisfaction. We didn’t get the chance for either if we immediately concluded that we had to be better.
I wish we’d allow ourselves more often to take the time to see where a particular interest might lead us. So that we can learn because we want to understand, without needing to define the outcome right from the start.
Maybe one day we’ll look back and see how much we’ve learned. Or maybe we’ll simply enjoy the next attempt, now that we no longer expect everything to work out on the first try.
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