“Quit what you suck at”.
The argument goes, if you suck at something and you don’t enjoy it, then quit it. The problem is, sucking at something isn’t fun. Even if you aspire to be the greatest artist of all time, and thoroughly enjoy the intricacies of the field, you’re going to hate sucking at creating art and you’re going to suck at it for a long time.
What keeps us going is not this intrinsic joy that we get from even trying, it’s pure stubbornness, it’s the idea that it will eventually pay off. The idea that you’re going to enjoy this time trivializes what it takes to truly master or even just become profficient at something.
Brad Feld, who’s quote is mentioned above, usually backs it up with something like, “if you are doing something poorly AND you don’t enjoy it, then you probably suck at it. If you are doing it poorly, but it’s important to you, or you want to get better at it, or it fascinates you – keep trying”. Unfortunately that’s much wordier and harder to get across than “quit what you suck at”, and it’s damaging.
I believe we should be encouraging people to push through ruts. I believe that when someone isn’t sure if something matters enough to them to put up with doing it poorly for a while, we shouldn’t be pushing them towards quiting, we should be encouraging them to try harder, work longer, be better.
We should be encouraging others to be more stubborn.
