How Screwing Up Your Hobbies Can Make You a Better Person (Seriously)

I don’t use Pinterest. Not because I don’t like it, but because it’s a serious rabbit hole. There are so many things I could make.

2016 has been the year of the pickle. I’ve pickled everything. My favorite right now is pickled red onion with turmeric, which, if you haven’t tried it yet, is the most amazing thing you could ever put on a sandwich. If you’re in Wisconsin I can totally hook you up.

In the process of identifying the perfect pickle, though, I have screwed up so many times. I’ve broken jars, I’ve spilled vinegar everywhere, I’ve accidentally pickled rotten vegetables; the works. If you can think of a mistake, I’ve probably made it.

But that’s the fun part.

Make Things For Yourself, Not Just Your Audience

If I tried to make every meal instagram-perfect, I’d go insane. I’m a messy cook. My kitchen is a nightmare. Fancy-looking food is totally beyond my reach beyond this one shot I’m inordinately proud of:

That’s one remarkable food shot in over eleven years of cooking. One! It’s a good thing I’m cooking for my stomach instead of my eyes.

My point here is that there’s nothing wrong about doing things you aren’t good at. If you only did the things you’ve already mastered, life would be boring.

I seriously recommend picking up a hobby you’re not good at. Something that’s totally outside your current skill set. Something small, but kinda crazy. Why?

Because you’ll get used to making mistakes.

You don’t need to make big things, you don’t need to make good things, but as long as you’re making something, you’re in a position to learn and to grow through failure. Don’t worry about being judged. Don’t worry about not measuring up. You can get as much out of your whatever as I do my horribly burnt spaghetti squash casserole (with sriracha garnish).

I promise.

Learning From Small Mistakes

My latest kitchen project has been chili oil.

Turns out you can make pepper spray in your microwave.

If I’d been making that chili oil to impress an audience or to feed visiting family members, I’d have died of embarrassment. Every window was open. Every fan was on high. I was gag-coughing into a wet rag, weakly waving a towel around (as if that would do anything), praying that my downstairs neighbor didn’t have any preexisting respiratory issues. And that was just to survive it. Could you imagine adding in-laws on top of that?

Yeah… It’s a good thing I’m a hermit.

We need to get comfortable with failure. We fail a lot in life, but we let those failures stop us from trying again all too often. People treat “successful” as a binary state. If they fail at one thing they fail at everything, and back to the couch and Netflix they go. It’s a horrible mentality that produces unhappy people, and most of the self-help world isn’t helping it.

Every post you see promises life-changing results. Follow this simple 382 step program, become a productivity ninja, and never feel the burning shame of overcooking a turkey again, all for the low price of $182 per month. That’s bullshit.

If you want to improve your life, make things. Make small things. Screw it up, make some small mistakes, learn from those, and keep learning. Try bigger things, make bigger mistakes, and keep learning. Experiment, screw things up, make things. You don’t always know what will help you make a breakthrough or improve your habits; that’s why you need to experiment.

What I’ve Learned From Small Mistakes

I’m really bad with measuring things and timing things in the kitchen. I have just enough of a natural rhythm that I think I can get away with not using timers and measuring cups. It works out, oh, 60% of the time.

The other 40% of the time I accidentally gas my apartment, forget the salt, and overcook the stew. Or, worse yet, I’ll improve a recipe without knowing what I changed. My partner Jana has an entire notebook dedicated to writing down all of the things that tasted too good to leave to chance, in which she’s captured about 20% of my accidental victories.

The lesson here is that I should write things down, take the time to take my time, and be more critical in my creative processes. All things that I do do in the professional sphere.

The secondary lesson, of course, it is that by paying closer attention to what I do for fun, I can improve the ways I work and relax. I like winning. I like improving. But I also like blowing off some steam and creating new, and accidental, things. I wouldn’t get to do that if I didn’t cook to relax.

I’ve learned that my skills as a professional writer don’t translate perfectly to longform fiction. I’ve learned that my front squat is weak as hell. I’ve learned that cookie dough is a dangerous thing to keep in the fridge when you work from home. I’ve learned that I can’t pick up a fork lift, even if I pull sumo.

And from those mistakes, I’ve learned the benefit of practice. The benefit of doing things I don’t like to stay healthy. The benefit of removing temptation to reduce stress. The benefit of not deadlifting forklifts. I could hate my failures, or I could use them to improve myself. I choose self-improvement.

Why These Failures

Fucking up at work sucks. It’s your livelihood. Fucking up your job can lead to not having one.

And that’s why people are cautious about what they do for a living.

That’s why they work jobs they hate.

It keeps them safe.

I’m not telling you to risk your career. But I do want you to take risks. I want you to put yourself in a position where you can become familiar with failure and learn from it.

A familiarity with failure helps you overcome it. A familiarity with failure helps you recognize and overcome risk. A familiarity with failure will help you handle bad situations when your livelihood really is at risk.

A familiarity with failure will make you more comfortable in your own skin.

And that’s something we all want, isn’t it?

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