Don't Be Afraid To Suck

When you’re first starting off as an artist, no matter what your medium is, you’ll often hear people tell you not to be afraid to suck. They’ll tell you that everyone sucks while they’re first starting out, and that your first several thousand hours don’t matter because everything you do will suck. They’ll tell you that it will be that way until you make it big — that everything will suck no matter what you do, that you need to expect for it to suck, and you need to expect for it to suck until it doesn’t.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear that, it’s like all of the hope gets drained from my chest. It makes me not want to work. It’s discouraging.

How do we learn if everything we do is supposed to be terrible until one day it magically isn’t?

The fear of all your work being terrible, at least until it isn’t, shouldn’t detain you. That fear needs to be used as fuel to propel you forward. It needs to become what inspires you.

If you use the anxiety toward sucking to teach you how to not suck, then your evolution will spark your success. You can’t evolve if your anxiety over what you lack doesn’t spark you to get better. When it comes to your work, your imperfections much strive you to perfect them, whether perfection is real or not. I always say to strive for perfection because nothing is perfect, but it ensures that you will constantly be trying to outdo yourself, and to do better than last time.

The harder you try to better your work, and continue to better your work, the more you will evolve. I’ve said this many times before, but there’s no glass ceiling on talent. There’s no glass ceiling on talent, and if you continue to believe your work will evolve, grow, and change for the better, then it will. The one time you begin to devolve is when you decide you know everything there is to know about what you do. Nobody can know everything, and nobody will ever know everything about what they do, and how to do it. Allow yourself to continue to grow, no matter how long you’ve been doing what you do. 

Fear of not having the qualities needed to create what you want to create is the one thing that will spark you to learn those qualities. So, no, it isn’t what you shouldn’t be afraid of sucking. In fact, you have to be afraid of sucking. You need to be afraid of sucking so your fear will spark you to fight to better yourself.

Don’t freeze.

Don’t flee.

Fight.

Your fear of not being enough needs to force you to fight to get better, rather than giving up. If you give up, you’ll never have your dream. Those who achieve are those who don’t give up, and rather learn from their mistakes. Mistakes are those imperfections in your work, and learning how to fix them will sharpen the tools needed to continue becoming someone of note in your field. You won’t become of worth if you don’t fight to become of worth.

Learning to turn your fear of sucking into fuel to become better at what you do is the first step of your journey into achieving your dream. The more fuel you have to become better at what you do, the closer you will come to doing just that. Finding those imperfections and learning how to either utilize them, or fix them, broadens your knowledge base for whatever you’re longing to do. This is how you turn you being terrible at what you do into you being the best at what you do.

Anxiety and fear are both tools. Use them to teach you what you’re afraid of, and how to conquer what you’re afraid of. They’re tools because they tell you that something is wrong, and, once you learn how to listen to them, they let you know what that thing is. The more you get used to listening to your anxieties and your fears, the more you can use them to fix the issue. We get those feelings for a reason. They’re there to tell us that there’s a problem. Learning how to use anxiety and fear are how you learn where those issues to fix exist. 

Anxiety and fear are both tools. Use them to teach you how to fight for what you need. The more you know where the imperfections in your work are, the more you can learn to fix them and stop them before you make the same mistakes. This is how self-evolution works, and rather than treating anxiety and fear like bad things, we can see them as the guides they are to fixing whatever is wrong.

These tools can teach you how to evolve, teach your work how to evolve, and teach you how to be the artist you want to be, no matter the medium. So, rather than not being afraid to suck, use your fears of sucking to teach you how to be the artist you want to be.