Take a gander at Merlin Mann’s truly excellent post on Courageous Sucking.
He’s riffs for a while on this idea that “dedication to the process can’t help but make you a better (whatever)” [emphasis mine]. For him, it’s photography, and the moment that inspired his post revolved around a shoe:
First, I got a couple eye-level photos of the optimistic little shoe that turned out about as badly as most eye-level shots of the ground do. But, on review [always review the first few shots and zoom way in], I thought the color looked cool on the dark street, so I got on one knee to take another. Yeah, better. But, it still looked like a lame overhead snapshot that was way too dark and noisy. So, I did something that surprised me.
I laid on the sidewalk. All the way down. On my gut on 50° of western San Francisco concrete.
For him, this is a turning point. He’s a beginning photographer, and he’s taking pictures of a show. Certainly not going to win any awards here. But what he does do is this: he stops worrying about what other people will think. The people that passed by him that night certainly thought he was nuts. And any of his “expert photographer” friends might have told him that there simply wasn’t a good shot to be had of that shoe. And in the sense of making expert photography that tells a story and captures a moment, they’d probably be right.
But the point isn’t the photo. It’s the “dedication to the process”. For him, at his skill level and with his goals, that was the best possible session of photography he could take at that moment. By most accounts Merlin Mann probably sucks at photography. But he’s courageous in his suckage, which practically guarantees he won’t suck forever.
It’s high time you and I started sucking at something. What is it you want to suck at?