Daring to suck

I learned from one Merlin Mann today that in order to do great things, you have to be prepared to suck. If there’s one thing that I still have not yet mastered, is coping with sucking. I know I do indeed suck at a great many things. I’m an associate editor for a major technology news site, and yet I make grammatical mistakes all the time. I’m a grammar snob, sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t falter at the language. I also get called out by hate mail and various other “negative” messages that reinforce my feeling that I’m a fraud.

Little did I know that many people feel this way, including the respected Mr. Mann. He said that most successful people –Mr. Coulton and Mr. Hodgman included — go through a period of self doubt. It’s only human. And not only do you have to be prepared to suck, that you have to realize that you WILL suck. For a very long time. This is the sort of thing I’ve yet to come to grips with as I flounder around trying to find a creative outlet I can really sink my teeth into.

Allow me this digression: I write for a living. I’ve always wanted to write for a living. But I never figured out what exactly I should write about, which is why I went into journalism. Wide variety of topics, and you get to pick and choose your field. Perfect. So I went into technology journalism because that’s something that I do feel passionate about. But I’m passionate about technology in the larger sense of things; in the way it brings harmony to people’s lives, in the way it makes the world smaller, in the way it shapes our understanding of human nature and the world. I do like playing around with gadgets and writing about them in product reviews, but it’s not the only thing I want to do.

But technology is only one tiny facet of my life. I have a strong interest in fiction, in humor, in photography, in crafts, in cycling, and more. In the past year, I’ve taken steps to get better at these things — I’ve been reading more books for leisure, I’ve experimented more with taking photos, I’ve enrolled myself in a variety of craft and cycling classes, etc. It’s almost as if I’m dying to get as far away from the computer as possible during my off hours (Which, by the way, is why I’ve stopped playing a lot of computer games).

So, stepping out of the digression, I want to force myself to be creative. In any way at all that I can be creative. Writing a short story, knitting a self-designed poncho, taking interesting photos, improving my drawing skills, etc. A 9-to-5 job is no excuse for not giving some bit of your time to yourself.

One of my first steps in doing this is redesigning this stale and sad website. For I am sick of it. Guess I’ll have to relearn CSS all over again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.