Be brave enough to suck at something new!
Ivaylo Durmonski
The meaning of the quote
In April 2010, a 30-year-old commercial photographer named Dan McLaughlin quit his job in Portland, Oregon to become a professional golfer. He had never played a full round of golf, and he wanted to prove it’s never too late to start something new.
His coach started him with a putter and nothing else, because he wouldn’t let Dan move to a bigger club until he had mastered the smaller one. On his first day, Dan putted from 1 foot away from the hole for 4 hours in the cold. When a man at the course asked if he was a scratch player, Dan said he didn’t know what that meant.
More than a year later he still hadn’t played a single game. He told Bloomberg what he said when people asked what he did:
“I’ve been practicing for 15 months, but I’ve never played a game.”
Dan was brave enough to suck at golf every day in front of strangers. 4 years in, he shot under par. He never made it onto the PGA Tour and stopped before his goal of 10,000 hours, but a man who didn’t know basic golf words had become a better golfer than most people who grew up with the game.
Ivaylo Durmonski wrote the quote in his summary of the book Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. His point is that people like feeling good at what they do. Anything new means feeling bad at it for a while, so most people skip new things altogether.
He uses the example of a jazz player who plays the same songs the same way in the same pub for years. The musician gets plenty of practice and never improves, because he never plays anything he might mess up.
Every skill you have now started with you being bad at it. You wobbled on your first bike and sounded out your first words. Adults forget that part, and the older we get, the more we’d rather look competent than learn something.
Action steps
You don’t need to quit your job like Dan. You need one new skill and the nerve to be bad at it for a while.
- Pick the skill you avoid because you’d look silly.
Dancing at a wedding, drawing, speaking a new language or cooking for guests. The skill you keep meaning to try is usually the one you’re scared to be bad at. - Start smaller than feels serious.
Dan started 1 foot from the hole. Learn 1 song, write 1 paragraph or cook 1 dish. - Let someone watch you.
Get a coach, join a class or ask a friend to tell you what you’re doing wrong. - Count your tries instead of your wins.
Each clumsy attempt moves you forward. You can read why deep practice is not measured in hours and how a few focused attempts beat an afternoon of going through the motions.
The first bad attempt is the bravest one. After that, you’re just practicing.
About the author
Ivaylo Durmonski spent years trying to help people suck less. His old About page said his goal was to make busy readers less sucky by sharing the big ideas from best-selling books.
Durmonski lives in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and has run Durmonski.com since 2015. He calls himself a professional book summarizer and has spent more than $3,500 on books.
After reading more than 200 books and summarizing most of them, he decided reading alone wasn’t enough. So he built courses on self-discipline, habits and decision-making to move readers from reading about change to doing it.
Peak is built on Anders Ericsson’s research on deliberate practice, the same research that sent Dan McLaughlin to a cold putting green in Portland in 2010. In Durmonski’s summary of Peak, published in 2022, you can find this quote alongside his notes on how ordinary people become experts.
Resources
- Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Book)
- Peak by Anders Ericsson summary by Ivaylo Durmonski (Article)
- Introducing The Dan Plan (Article)
- How to Become Great at Just About Anything (Podcast)
- Deep practice is not measured (Article)
- Fail again fail better (Article)
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