Not Good.

If you think you’re good at something you just started... you’re wrong.

Somebody has to tell you.

Any time you enter a new arena, your entire job is to find out what you don’t know.

To run around the space wildly, savagely uncovering your blind spots. To ask dumb questions. To ask obvious questions. To ask not obvious questions. To question your instincts and reactions and understanding.

What you don’t know, if you’re new to something, is everything.

Short of actual prodigy (rare, rare, rare), you are not good at something new.

You’re bad at it.

You’re clumsy. You’re making mistakes. A lot of them.

And if you look good in your group, you’re in the wrong group.

I see this all of the time with writers.

They’ve lived in this teeny tiny circle of creative writing friends or maybe a degree program. 

They send me samples.

THAT SUCK.

I mean, awful.

I mean so awfully painfully awful.

And every so often I’m brave enough to say, “Do you want to get better at this?”

Because Tom Stanfill taught me that desire drives development. So I know that I can’t help them unless they want to grow.

The entire creative professional community is full of people in small agencies working with small clients who do small work. Some are content (the verb not the noun). Some are just totally ignorant of how much their abilities fall short of actual competence.

I put this up a while ago and I think it’s relevant here:

We all start out being unconscious of our incompetence.

With the right people coaching or teaching us, we’ll quickly become aware of how far we have yet to go.

We need a mirror or a video or some other reflection that explains to us, “oh, that’s um awful.”

Then the work can begin.

For the talky talky version — TikTok.