A feeling that I often get about my projects and ambitions, is that I don’t have what it takes to be able to complete them in a way that would feel satisfying, that would reflect how I see them in my mind. For example, even though I love playing musical instruments, I have a hard time creating new music, because I know that I’m not good at it. Most of my previous attempts at composition have failed at some point, so I have barely completed any song by myself. I used an artistic activity as example, but it can apply to anything that needs skills.
For me, what it does, is that it prevents me from practicing my art, or practicing whatever activity or hobby that I’m interested in. Because I think that I will not be satisfied by the result. The effect of this is that I waste previous time that I could have used to perfect my art, which would slowly but surely make me better at it, making it more and more satisfying.
Normally, I would talk about tricks that I found that can help, but it seems to me that in this case, it is more of a journey in accepting our inability, and the impossibility, of achieving perfection. It doesn’t mean that we have to accept mediocrity either, but rather accept that doing our best on something is better than doing nothing at all. We have to start appreciating the process as much as the result.
Nonetheless, there are still a few things that we can do to smooth out the process. But it will require clear goals, and discipline. Knowing our goals is important, because it is what will guide us toward choosing the appropriate methods to reach them. If we want to get better at something, we have to take it seriously, and this means that we have to discipline ourselves to practice it effectively, because just doodling around will get us nowhere (or get us there really slowly). We have to define the methods that will make us improve. Again, this depends on what goals we have set, becoming a professional musician would require a wider array of skills than playing in an 80’s rock music cover band.
Setting a structure is important to create an environment where measurable progress will happen. We still have to keep the fun in though, so practicing scales for 3 hours each days may be good for memorization, but it will throw the fun out of the window quite quickly. So while defining a clear structure is important, it must be done in a way that will make it realistically feasible, or else we won’t last long enough to see positive results.
And it doesn’t take long to see improvements, especially if we are beginners, and seeing improvement will give us some motivation to go further. We just have to make sure that we don’t only rely on motivation to achieve stuff because it doesn’t last, discipline is the key to progress.