What to Do if You Don’t Have What it Takes

Maybe you’ve been thinking about trying some new thing, but you’re afraid you don’t possess the necessary knowledge, experience, or skills.  Well, I have some good news and some bad news.  Let’s begin with the bad.

The bad news is this.  If you’re thinking about doing some new thing well, there’s a real good chance you don’t have the right stuff, and to make matters worse, you don’t even know what the right stuff is.

But here’s the good news.  There’s a simple way to find out what you lack and what you need to do to get it. Ready? Here it is. Do it anyway.

That’s right.  You just do it anyway, even if you’re thoroughly inept.

Are you lacking the necessary knowledge?  Well, you won’t know what you don’t know until you dig in, and how can you expect yourself to obtain the knowledge you don’t even know you need.  You have to do the thing you wish to do in order to discover the obstacles. Once you come to them, you can do something about them.  Once you know what you don’t know that you need to know, you can do what it takes to learn.

Are you short on experience?  If you don’t begin, you’ll be just as short tomorrow and probably a little bit longer on regret.   Try that new thing today.  Fifteen minutes of trying will add fifteen minutes to your level of experience.

Don’t have the skills?  Neither did anyone else until they tried.  Skills come with practice, and doing the thing you want to do is the best practice I can think of.

This is probably at least the fifteenth blog or website I’ve tried to create.  Although it’s still a work in progress, it’s leaps and bounds ahead of my earlier attempts.  But without those earlier attempts, this site would not exist.  It’s a product of the knowledge, experience, and skills I obtained while fumbling my way through the others.

So, if you don’t have what it takes, start anyway.  It’s the only way to get what you need.

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Tagged as: Adventures in Being Human