You know what I love? Doing things I’m only OK at doing. Below average even. It’s really the best.
If you’re the sort of person who likes to be the absolute best at what you do, which is often a trademark quality in freelancers and entrepreneurs of all kinds, you know the incremental improvement game: hours and hours and hours of every day are spent focused on polishing, refining, developing, researching and practicing the same skill/product/business you’ve been polishing, refining, developing, researching and practicing for the past bazillion days. It’s exhausting. Of course it’s rewarding and fulfilling and blah-blah whatever too, but today, we’re acknowledging that it’s also exhausting. Come on, A-typers, you can admit it.
Sometimes, you’ve just got to devote some time to doing something you do not care that you don’t do well. That’s why I, with an insane amount of glee, hemmed a pair of jeans today. A couple of years ago, a planted a kick-ass garden. Once, I stained a piece of furniture. Another time, I got super into making homemade hummus. I stopped after I actually got pretty good at it. That’s no fun. Amateurism is a bit of a hobby of mine.
There is something very freeing about just doing something creative and interesting, but only once or twice. The end result is feeling satisfied with simply completing something, having figured it out and pulled it off. Perfecting it is not my problem. I spend enough time trying to perfect other things.
What I’m trying to say is I hemmed my pants today, very imperfectly, and it was very satisfying. I highly recommend it. Or anything else you’re not so great at doing.
Natalie Burg 