Being Bad at Something Is Good

Difficulty is your doorway 🚪

I'm sitting on my couch today, in the middle of figuring out my next career step. It’s not always comfortable—scrolling job boards, reworking my resume, preparing for interviews—but it’s where I am. And in between the mental churn, I stumbled across a video by Ali Abdaal that sparked something.

He shared a heuristic for random creation—just generating ideas without judgment. One of his offhand prompts reminded me of something I’ve come to believe through both coaching others and pursuing my own health goals:

Being bad at something is good.

It’s not just inevitable—it’s essential.

Growth always starts with being bad at something. Here are just a few places I’ve seen that truth show up:

• Freezing during a presentation, voice shaking—then learning to breathe and find your words.

• Gasping through the first half-mile of a run and wondering how anyone could ever enjoy this.

• Miscommunicating in a relationship and discovering that the only way to grow love is to practice it.

• Flailing through swim lessons, gulping water, and getting nowhere fast—until the strokes start to click.

• Staring blankly at a lesson or sounding ridiculous in your first attempts at a new language.

• Losing your patience with your kid and realizing it’s you who needs the reset.

• Falling out of yoga poses over and over before learning how to engage your core and trust your breath.

• Bombing a job interview or flubbing a new leadership role—and realizing failing forward is the path.

• Rereading the same paragraph in school before it finally makes sense, and the story pulls you in.

• Struggling through those first pushups and feeling weak, until the strength quietly starts to build.

But over and over, it’s proven true: the “bad” part is where the transformation begins. Discomfort is the tax you pay for growth.

Photo by Joshua Sortino on Unsplash

There’s a reason people lean on mottos like embrace the suck, this too shall pass, or the only way out is through. But for me, this is less a motto and more a mindset. Not quite the Buddhist idea that life is suffering, but close. It’s an acknowledgment that resistance, mistakes, and pain aren’t detours on the journey—they are the path. The challenging moments aren’t walls—they’re doorways.

Whatever you’re after—clarity, freedom, peace, or a stronger, healthier version of yourself—it’s probably hiding behind the part you don’t want to do.

So I’m writing this as a reminder to myself—and maybe to you—that being in the messy middle is not a sign you're lost. It’s a sign you’re moving.

What doorway of difficulty are you facing right now that you’ve been treating like a wall?

If something hard is on your plate and you want support, feel free to reply or DM. Always happy to share what’s helped me or just hold space if that’s what you need.