The Art of Sucking at Something

2020 is a year many people are trying very hard to forget. It’s the year a heartbreaking pandemic brought the world to a standstill.

But fear not: your average Instagram and/or LinkedIn influencer found multiple ways for you to stay productive during a time where your life had been turned upside down and you only saw your loved ones’ faces as squares on Zoom, such as: learn a new language, pick up a new skill, bake a cake and an endless list of tasks that just numbed your exhausted brain and distracted you from the inevitable conclusion that this pandemic sucked.

So in this article, I am not going to tell you how to make every single minute of your day a productive one. I am not going to preach that improving constantly on existing skills or picking up new ones is your life’s purpose. I will sing the praises of the art of sucking at something.

I want to talk to you about letting go of the expectation of being good at an activity and just letting your brain derive pleasure from the simple process of getting through it. Let your body give into it without expectations, social or personal. And turn off that annoying pop-up message in the brain that says: you’re really bad at this, you must get better, everyone’s judging you etc.

As a perennially uncoordinated human with a fear of anything that requires moving to a beat, some semblance of a good form and being around other humans, you can understand the reason why I kept cancelling that BodyCombat class booking. Until I decided to give my brain a good…