Decades of Skill Acquisition Have Taught Me One Thing
It’s not ideal, but I can live with it
When you embark on a meaningful journey, you’ll have no way of knowing what’s on the road ahead.
Experience is the best teacher.
In my life, I’ve learned one important lesson from the meaningful endeavors.
The lesson
I’m talking about long-term endeavors here. Things that will require you to put in serious effort for years to come.
In my life, this has shown up through education, sports, and jiu-jitsu. In school, I spent ~20 years in the system and got my graduate degree while also working full-time. I played competitive sports for ~20 years of my life as well. I’ve become obsessed with jiu-jitsu over the past 3 years and will continue to learn it for decades.
When you start to learn a skill that will require years of time, energy, and effort, something becomes glaringly clear.
Not all days will be good days.
It’s an unfortunate reality. Many of us would hope that every day would be great. We’d wake up in the morning full of energy and things would just go our way.
That’s not the case. The days aren’t all good but they’re not all bad either.
The progress we make isn’t linear. In each of these endeavors, I’ve fallen into ruts. That happens. It’s not fun while you’re in them, but eventually you’ll get out.
Some days, it feels like I’m improving at an incredible rate. Other days, it feels like I’m regressing. It can be demoralizing if you let it get to you.
If you can zoom out and look at the bigger picture, try to notice the general upward trend in your abilities. That’s what matters. The day-to-day shifts in your perceived abilities matter less than the long-term trends.
I know that it’s hard to think about the bigger picture when you’re going through that present-day struggle. But it’s the best thing you can do for yourself.
If you don’t learn to zoom out and celebrate your small wins along the way, it’s far more likely that you’ll give up.
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but every day won’t be a great day. That’s life.
We can aim to have the best days we can, but there will be hard times.
When we accept this reality and learn that everything can’t be perfect, it takes some of the sting out of the bad days. We learn that they’re just part of life.
Our aim in life is no longer to have a perfect string of great days. We realize that the ups and the downs are what make life interesting and beautiful.
If all our days were good, would we even appreciate them?
Cherish the good days. Survive the bad days. And keep moving forward.
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