Am I a Beginner or Do I Just Suck?

Whenever we embark on a learning journey inevitably we’d always make mistakes or, in the casual parlance, “sucking”.

When we’re learning something, there’s so many things that we do not know yet and that gap of knowledge always leads to a mistake.

Given that it’s part of the learning process, the simplest thing to do is really just accept that we will mistakes and push through as much as we can (though note that I said “simple”, not “easy”). However, there is one dilemma of making mistakes that I don’t frequently see talk about when it comes to journey of self-improvement.

Specifically, how do we differentiate between constantly making mistakes as part of the learning process and constantly making mistakes because whatever it is that we are learning is not the right fit for us?

Making mistakes or sucking is always going to be a part of learning, but how many mistakes can we make before we can say that it’s enough?

How many hours that we have spent on delving into and training on a subject before deciding that it is not for us?

What makes this dilemma particularly hard to solve is that even the most hardcore veteran makes mistakes, stupid basic ones even. Sure, their wealth of experiences means that they can minimize instances of mistakes, but it can still happen.

I find the danger of this issue is that if we make the wrong call, it can mean losing out on career paths that may actually be good for us or being stuck too long for something that isn’t right for us.

This is one area in life where I wish life is like a video game. In certain video games, the character that we choose to play have a clearly defined boundary on what that character is good at. When what we can do best is something that you can see clearly, all we have to do is just maximizing our strength while only making marginal improvement on our weakness.

Still, we don’t live in the matrix (probably), so for now we are all stuck in a flesh and blood body forever wandering who we are and what we can do.