The Value of Doing Something You Absolutely, Positively Suck At.
By: Douglas Thomas
Tags: Failure, Japanese, Language, Learning

Shinjuku Gyoen, December 2018

I have recently undertaken a journey doing something I suck at.

I don’t mean something challenging or rewarding that takes time to learn. I am not talking about learning by failing or finding edges by pushing limits.

I am doing something that no matter how much I work at or how hard I try, I end up doing worse than I thought was possible.

And it is a recurring problem.

My folly? Learning Japanese.

To make matters worse, I am doing it surrounded by super smart, young, and energetic undergraduates. Their brains are still forming. Their minds are sharp and plastic and they learn fast. Many of them already speak languages close to Japanese (Chinese and Korean) and all of them are very, very good students.

By contrast, my 52 year old brain is mostly just angry with me. There are days I can actually feel my brain trying to re-wire itself and I can feel it fighting back.

And it is winning.

I want to learn Japanese very, very much. But I am just flat out not that good at it.

Part of the reason it is confusing is that I absolutely love language. I have a Ph.D. in Communication and specialized in Rhetorical Theory and Criticism in graduate school. I love speaking in public and I love writing. I love words. (I am less enamored of grammar, but I’ll save that for another post.)

I also have been teaching that University for more than 30 years. I like classes and classrooms. I feel at home there. So it is doubly troubling to feel so out of sync when I show up each day to learn Japanese.

School, learning, language, words. It is what I do. Professionally.

So being reduced, on a regular basis, to an inarticulate, stumbling speaker with the vocabulary of 4 year old, the penchant for mispronunciation has been something of a body blow.

But it has also been extremely edifying and rewarding in some other ways.

Having this experience has been a master course in humility. To be bad at something gives you a different perspective. It has made me reflect on everything from my own perfectionism to what it feels like to wallow in the discomfort of being one of the students who dreads being called on when they are feeling lost.

Doing something I am bad at has taught me how to reassess what counts as my own metric for success. What does it look like to voluntarily engage in something you suck at?

For me, it has made me embrace some other motivations. Fun, pleasure, joy. These are all things that are really hard to embrace when you flat out suck. But I am come to learn that getting discouraged comes from the using the wrong metric. It is a framing problem. If I can’t change how much I suck, maybe I can change how I feel about the things I am doing.

So I had to ask myself, if I am not good that this, and possibly may never be good at this, why am I doing it?

(For many people the reason is “because I have to.” That isn’t the case for me and that is an entirely different situation)

The answer for me is to return to the pleasure of learning, for its own sake, not for a goal, for a grade, or for any other reason than in order to explore something new.

The goal I have set for myself is simple. Every day, I want to know more Japanese than I did the day before. That is an easy, achievable, and measurable metric that doesn’t rely on mastery or traditional notions of success and doesn’t require me to compare myself to anyone other than myself.

Most important, it makes me happy.

It helps me to understand my students who may be struggling with concepts or ideas that they can’t wrap their heads around. I understand, what it means to learn to create a metric to make something you suck at interesting to you. How to find a way to feel good about learning, even in the face of intense discomfort.

Today I had an oral exam. I stumbled through it, even though the rehearsals in my mind (and in the shower) all went perfectly. But I got to spend 10 minutes speaking Japanese and I was better at it today than I was yesterday.

I like speaking Japanese, even when I stumble and make mistakes, and I am sure I was better today than I was yesterday or last week or last year. That lets me focus on the joy, the fun, and the pleasure of doing it, without worrying too much about how well I did compared to anyone else.

So whatever it is you are pursuing, you will end up knowing more today than you did yesterday, but you will also gain some empathy for those who may be struggling with the things that you are good at.

While it feels uncomfortable to be bad at something, it also feels incredibly powerful to re-imagine that space as something positive, fun, and joyful. Having the experience yourself, also makes it easier to accept, allow, and even encourage others to do the same when they end up in your group or on your team.

One of the things I always tell my students is “Don’t just do what you love, learn to love what you do.”

So now it is time to take my own advice.

I used to say “I love Japanese, but I am bad at it.”

Now I say, with a smile, “I love Japanese and I am bad at it.”

I encourage everyone to fall in love with something they suck at. The rewards can be amazing, both for yourself and for everyone you will work with down the line.