Jack of all trades, master of none
Why it’s better to be good than great 🙏
I did ballet for years when I was young. I loved it, I thought it was so fun to dress up like a munchkin and do a little dance in The Wizard of Oz, or be a mop in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I dreamed of being Clara in The Nutcracker when I was big girl, or the Sugar Plum Fairy in her big tutu. But then they start making you do exams, and you can’t be Clara until you’ve passed all your exams. Twelve year old Alice did not like the exams, I had to be so precise with my feet and posture, and my teacher would always yell at me for sticking my pinkies out weirdly. So I quit my dream of being Clara and put away my ballet shoes.
I like to imagine this is what I looked like ☝️
And picked up piano instead. Now that was fun. If you hit the right keys you get to make music! If you hit them in the right order you get even better music! I used to have so much fun sitting at our out of tune upright piano at home and plunking out weird chords and melodies (and annoying everyone else in the house probably). I didn’t practice over and over until I could play songs perfectly, I just played them close enough to correctly until I got bored and wanted to do something else instead. And then - and this may come as a shock to you - my teacher made me take exams. So I gave up my dream of being Alicia Keys and quit piano lessons too.
Definitely an accurate representation of my piano skills
Are you picking up on a pattern? For a while I thought it was just that Mumma did raise a quitter, but after extensive therapy (unrelated) and a fair amount of introspection - I think I’ve stumbled upon the answer:
Being good is fun.
Being great is stressful.
There’s so much pressure involved in being great! We’ve somehow evolved into this society where we have to be 💯 all the time. We’re expected to excel in all aspects of our life: the 9-to-5 becomes “oh I’ll arrive half an hour early to get some extra work done and whoops I stayed an hour late to finish a few things up”; we’re expected to monetise our hobbies (more on that later but… don’t. Just have fun); even our social media escapism has to be so perfectly curated and you have to have the most aesthetic feed. It’s no wonder we can’t keep up!
If you’re starting to feel like you’re treading deeper and deeper water, here are a couple of things you can keep in mind:
1. Be present
I feel very passionately about this - so much so that I wrote a whole article on being present. Step one is slow the F down and stop trying to be superhuman! Sit back for a second and enjoy life, sit with that sunshine on your face, cook yourself something really yummy to eat and just savour it. Slowing down for a minute means you can focus on the task at hand, and being present means you can actually focus and not think about all the internal and external pressures to succeed at the task.
2. Remember the ‘why’
Hey quick question - why are you doing this thing in the first place? Let’s say social sport. Are you playing Monday night netball in the hopes that you’ll one day become the best netballer in the world? Probably not. I’m guessing you signed up for a social comp so that you could get back in the game after a few years off, and you wanted to have some fun running around and make a few friends. Do any of these goals require you to be amazing at this sport? Absolutely not!
3. Does it even matter if you’re the best?
This very much feeds into the above and remembering your ‘why’. If you’re doing something for a hobby, does it really matter if you’re the best player on the team, or the best dancer in your class? This is about reframing - you are allowed to just do things for fun. Things still have value if they’re “just” a hobby. Think about how much more you’ll enjoy yourself if you can participate for fun only, rather than trying to show off for the rest of your team.
4. The ‘good enough’ mindset
The good enough mindset isn’t pessimistic like “oh I guess I’m good enough at that”. It’s a beautiful, eye opening perspective that good is enough. And ‘enough’ isn’t a bad thing - it’s just the end of a sentence. Good enough is being capable at a thing to a level where you are comfortable - you don’t have to be any better than anyone else and you don’t have to keep trying to reach goals to be more and more capable. You can just be.
5. The incidental side effect that means you’ll get better anyway
Yeeeah the good/bad news is that even if you’re not training 6 days a week at max capacity, you’ll still improve by doing the thing regularly. But the point is, it doesn’t matter. Your goal can be just to play sport for a bit of fun and a run around, and if you get fitter and more skilled at the game, that’s an awesome bonus!
So if that water that you’re treading starts feeling suspiciously deep and murky, try to take a second to realign yourself with the horizon, and swim back to shore. Have I lost myself in this metaphor now? Maybe. But the point remains: give yourself a break. You’re not superhuman, and you don’t need to be. Good is good enough 💙
