Why You're Supposed to Suck the First Time You Try Anything

Kill the ego. Embrace the suck. Trust the process.

The first time I tried Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, my high school friend tapped me out so easily it was laughable. All those kung fu movies I'd watched did absolutely nothing to prepare me for the reality of grappling with someone who knew what they were doing. My ego was crushed. Repeatedly.

But I kept showing up.

Months of submissions and years of learning how to learn followed. It wasn't until new people came to the gym that I realized how far I'd come. After a year of consistent practice and countless defeats, I won gold at NAGA, competing in both my division and the adults division.

What if I had quit after that first humiliating session?

The Myth of Natural Talent

We've been sold a destructive fantasy—the chosen one narrative. The genius who picks up a guitar and plays perfectly. The prodigy who writes masterpieces on their first attempt. The natural athlete who dominates without breaking a sweat.

It's all bullshit.

Yet we measure ourselves against these fictional standards. We expect to be exceptional from the start. When reality hits and we're predictably terrible, we take it as evidence that we don't belong. That we lack some essential quality. That we should quit.

As Carol Dweck reminds us: "We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don't like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary."

The truth? Everyone sucks at first. Everyone.

The Psychological Reality of Being a Beginner

In middle school, I worked up the courage to ask a girl out. She laughed, thinking I was joking. She was a close friend, which made the rejection even more devastating. My palms would get sweaty just thinking about talking to girls. It took years to develop the confidence to just talk to women.

The beginner phase is psychologically brutal because:

1. You lack reference experiences: Your brain has no evidence you can succeed
2. The gap feels insurmountable: The distance between where you are and where you want to be seems impossible to cross
3. Your identity is threatened: Failing challenges your self-concept

The Hidden Power of Sucking

The first essay I wrote in elementary school, my assignment was to describe what I did over the weekend. I submitted a bullet-point list:

1. I woke up
2. I ate food
3. I watched TV

My teacher called my mom to the office and lectured us both. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for someone wanting to be a writer.

But here's what most people miss about being terrible at something:

Sucking is the necessary first step toward mastery.

As Stephen McCranie explains: "The master has failed more times than the beginner has tried."

When playing chess with my stepdad, I lost game after game. But I kept playing until I finally won. When I first played lacrosse, I was so bad the coach nicknamed me "flea" and only let me attack whoever had the ball. Years later, I became team captain.

The first few times I cut my own hair, I ended up completely bald out of necessity. Now I give myself decent haircuts whenever I want.

The Growth Mindset Revolution

Psychologist Carol Dweck identified two fundamental mindsets that determine how we respond to challenges. With a fixed mindset, failure defines you. With a growth mindset, "failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn't define you. It's a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from."

This perspective shift changes everything.

It means:

• You're not expected to be good at first
• Struggle is evidence of growth, not incompetence
• Effort creates ability, not the other way around

Dweck elaborates: "In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you're not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn't need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented."

Killing the Male Ego (It's Harder Than It Sounds)

As a young man, there's always this underlying tone of competition. The need to measure up, to be better, to prove yourself. We're social animals playing status games with clear winners and losers.

But here's the revelation that changed everything for me: When you're playing the status game, there can only be winners and losers.

What if there's a better game?

Removing my ego was incredibly difficult, especially as a guy, but it unlocked rapid growth. I had to adopt a new mindset:

• I'm just here to learn
• I don't need to know everything
• Not knowing doesn't make me less of a person
• We're not in competition

When you recognize your progress in learning, as Benjamin Bloom observed, "profound changes happen in your view of self and the outer world. You start believing that you can adequately cope with problems, develop higher motivation for learning, and experience a better mental state due to less feeling of frustration."

With this approach, I found that people became more passionate about teaching me. The best teachers—those with no ego themselves—were willing to guide rather than mock me because they remembered being novices too.

The Practical Path to Embracing the Suck

I've developed a framework for embracing the beginner phase that's served me well across disciplines:

1. Set realistic expectations: You should be bad at first. Plan for it.
2. Document your starting point: Take photos, videos, or notes. You'll want this reference later.
3. Find communities of beginners: Surround yourself with others in the same phase.
4. Seek teachers with patience: Not everyone can teach beginners well.
5. Focus on showing up: Consistency trumps intensity, especially at first.
6. Celebrate tiny improvements: Progress is rarely linear or obvious.

The Identity Shift That Changes Everything

The ultimate secret to persisting through the awkward, frustrating beginner phase is a profound identity shift.

Stop identifying as someone who needs to be good at things to be worthy of respect. Start identifying as someone who loves learning, who embraces challenge, who gets excited by improvement.

Or as Carol Dweck puts it: "Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?"

This shift transforms how you approach everything:

• Rejection becomes data, not judgment
• Failure becomes feedback, not finality
• Practice becomes opportunity, not punishment

The Beginning Is Supposed to Suck—That's the Point

Get used to sucking at whatever you're doing the first time. Embrace it. And understand that getting from "okay" to "consistently okay" takes practice and time to get to "good."

The discomfort you feel as a beginner isn't a sign you're on the wrong path—it's evidence you're exactly where you need to be.

As Benjamin Barber observed: "I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures... I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners."

So which will you be?

The next time you try something new and feel that crushing inadequacy, smile. You're right on schedule.

You're supposed to suck.

For now.

What's something you initially sucked at but kept going with anyway? Share your story in the comments below.