I Let Somebody Watch Me Be Bad At It

For a long stretch of my life I only did things in public that I was already good at.

That was not humility. That was armor.

When people are looking for a reason to write you off, being bad at something in front of them feels like handing them the pen. So you stay in the lane where you already know the answer. You speak on the subjects you have mastered. You show up to the thing you can win.

And you get smaller. Quietly. Year after year.

I noticed it this summer. Somebody asked me to try something I had never done, in front of people who had done it a hundred times, and my whole body said no. Not tired no. Not busy no. A flinch.

That flinch was the tell.

Here is what I have had to relearn.

There is a difference between being exposed and being seen.

Exposed is what happens when somebody takes a piece of your life, crops it, and holds it up to prove a thing about you that is not true. I know that one. I know it in a way I would not wish on anybody.

Seen is different. Seen is when you say out loud that you do not know how to do this yet, and then you do it badly, and the sky does not fall, and the person next to you says here, hold it like this.

For years I could not tell those two apart. Every fumble felt like evidence. Every awkward first attempt felt like something that could be screenshotted and used later.

So I stopped fumbling. Which means I stopped starting.

Scripture does not have many stories about people who were already qualified. Moses argued that he could not speak. Gideon was hiding in a winepress. Peter sank. The pattern is not that God picks the competent. The pattern is that He picks somebody, and the competence shows up later, in the middle of the thing, usually after a stretch of looking foolish.

I do not think I appreciated that until I had spent enough years being a man everybody had an opinion about.

So this is the practice now, and it is small.

Once in a while I do something I am openly bad at, on purpose, where somebody can see me.

Not a performance of humility. Not a post about how humble I am being. Just a real thing I am not good at yet, done in the open, with my mouth shut about how new I am to it.

It is uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with the task. The discomfort is not the skill. The discomfort is being a beginner in a body that learned beginners get eaten.

But something loosens every time.

I have a son now who is going to watch me his whole life. He is going to learn what a man does with failure by watching what I do with mine, long before he can tell me what he is learning. If the only version of me he ever sees is the version that already knows how, then the lesson he takes is that you should not try things you might lose.

That is a terrible thing to hand a boy.

So I would rather he catch me being bad at something. Rather he see me ask a question I probably should already know the answer to. Rather he watch me start over in front of him.

If you have been living the same way, and you know exactly what I am talking about, here is the whole assignment.

Pick one thing. Something small enough that nothing is riding on it. Do it in front of one person who is not going to use it against you.

Be bad at it out loud.

Then go do it again tomorrow.

That is it. That is the practice. It is not a breakthrough and it does not feel like one while it is happening. It just slowly gives you back the part of your life you fenced off.

I spent years protecting a reputation that was being written by other people anyway.

I would rather spend the next years actually learning something.