The Beginner’s Struggle

The perceived need of innate talent as the precondition to be great is deceptive. Exceptional ability is necessary. But innate potential is not innate ability.

The inspiring myth of the infallible genius who naturally enters flow and easily creates generational output is misleading. These words are a rethoric tool that comes from biographers. They have nothing to do with work and all to do with veneration.

Great people don’t really know how they did great things. In fact nobody knows what they’re doing, the adult in the room is a myth. They invent a rationalized reason after the fact.

Credentials are the formalization of veneration. Which allows people to actualize in the ideal and become idols. Society speculates and invents all kinds of myths around them. It has a dose of cultishness to it.

This creates the idealization of how things should be and feel. It is actually more of a mandatory prescription rather than an ideal. The lack of which turns these requirements in prohibition.

Great work is not spontaneous and smooth. In fact it’s quite hard for everyone. But this shouldn’t be discouraging. we all start somewhere. The only consolation is that beginnings are sexy, in hindsight.

One has to work backwards. Demistify and destigmatize great work. Distrust the pedestal. Remove imposed conditions. You can just do things. Great people are just people in the end. Great work is approachable.

If you don’t distance yourself the difference between you and them may feel unfair. Because it is. Comparison with idealizations is like judging early work as finished work. Recognition progresses faster than generation. Because developing your eye for what is right and wrong is easier than developing technical abilities.

You should compare vision and reality to see the gap. and reality will be far from what you have in mind. early versions will suck. Early work will be embarassingly disappointing. But it is the worst you will ever be at it. As you get better, you’ll bridge the gap.

You don’t know what things will work so you should be humble and open minded. But you shouldn’t be scared of doing something lame. That fear comes from a wrong interpretation of risk and sacrifice. Not taking the risk of doing something lame sacrifices what you might gain, not the current status.

Conforming to that interpretation may take a form equally dangerous as not trying. Performing openness, taking on work that looks obviously promising. So you never take the risk of being wrong or stupid.

Keeping that farce up leads to over-abstraction and over-complicating things. Focusing on sophisticated tooling rather than the substance itself. Ostentating a kind of superiority over what is perceived as accessible. To not look like a noob.

But this shouldn’t make you pessimistic. You need a bit of ignorance and the slight overconfidence it breeds. It allows you to be irrational enough to take on unproven paths that may be promising. And to keep going even when what you do is not up to par.

Personally verifying paths is a good way to improve and find things to become great at. Which can often mean acting in spite of common wisdom. People generally know what the mistakes are. But some mistakes can’t be learned from others or from history.

This is not just how you learn that some common wisdom is not just common but also sensical. But also how you discover costly secrets. Information that is hard to get because it’s not publicly avaiable.

That information will improve you work and future versions, this is how you get better. Getting over the beginner’s struggle means using it to your advantage. So just start and keep going!