Part Four: Beginner is best
“It's better to start as a fool and learn from your mistakes than to fake being a genius and ignore your errors.”
James Clear
February 2022
The fourth and final part… for now.
Malcolm Gladwell said it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. It takes zero hours to be a beginner. By that metric, I am an expert at being me, eating, sleeping, and I'm a beginner at pretty much everything else. That is really very exciting. Even if you don’t like learning, if you shy away from the idea of doing new things, or don’t have a curious bone in your body (you’re lying if you say this by the way), you too should be very excited about being a beginner.
A friend and I decided we wanted to get into pole fitness, we got a recommendation, and we are now waiting for the next lot of beginner sessions to begin. When she sent me the text from the instructor, the words BEGINNER CLASSES stood out like they were in neon, and I instantly felt electrified in my typically overexcited manner. The thought of turning up to do something where there are no expectations of me is so freeing. The thought of being given a space to consistently fail, with no repercussions whilst developing a new skill is thrilling. (I’m sure my parents are deeply glad I get my thrills from this and not narcotics or high-risk activity.)
Another friend of mine went this morning to a crochet class at the local village craft café. She said that the relief she felt when she woke up knowing that she was going somewhere to be a beginner was immense.
How liberating to be given express permission to not know anything?!
When we apply for things in life it is because we have some relevant qualifications or experience... in other words, we aren’t total beginners.
I think it is imperative that we all get to experience being beginners, often and regularly. It is crucial to have spaces and places where we can experience what it’s like to have no expectations placed on our lovely shoulders.
As my girl crush Elizabeth Day says, “learning how to fail, actually means learning how to succeed better”. We should all be learning how to fail at something new all the time because in doing so we are becoming more interesting and more successful people.
I just broke down my day into individual tasks and found that nearly all of them had an expectation set by either someone else, by myself, or by my perceived expectations of society. Even the most mundane parts of my life.
Walking from my flat to the station, for example. I expect myself to leave the house to catch the right train, my boss expects me to turn up on time, and the public will expect me to walk ‘normally’ and nicely across Waterloo Bridge carefully dodging everyone in a rush going the other way.
To have no expectations of that walk would look like this: I would just get from one side of the bridge to the other (or not!) in any way I felt like (probably skipping, or dancing), I could take as long as I wanted to, and I could randomly and loudly sing the best lines from whatever TSwift song I was listening to. If I was so inclined, I might just sit down in the middle of the pavement, get out a book, and admire the view. Now, I could do all these things, but I’d risk losing my job and I might catch the attention of the police. So even those 15 minutes have expectations on them.
As I was saying, it is so important to have spaces and places where we can experience what it’s like to have no expectations of us. Places and spaces where we can be intuitively ourselves, where we can fail a thousand times and there are no consequences of any negative significance.
One of the greatest joys and gifts in life is to find people who you can be completely, imperfectly, and intuitively yourself around. Those relationships develop with persistence, love, and patience, because sufficient time needs to have passed for you to have both experienced, and trusted each other with, your biggest failures, daily mistakes, and beginner status at most things in life.
In my limited experience, it takes trust, kindness, toppling pedestals, and a lot of bad dancing before you can feel 100% comfortable in your unqualified, ‘good enough’, beginner self with another human (who is also unqualified, good enough, and a total beginner) and what a lovely little pair you will make when you get there.
Leave the fear of failure, expectations, and past bitterness and hurt at the door and enjoy the freedom that comes from doing things badly. Bonus points if you have a good old giggle at the same time.