On Playing Badly

There's a version of musical improvement that feels like progress — the version where you learn a new chord, play it cleanly a few times, and feel satisfied. I've spent a lot of time in that version.

The more honest version is slower. You play something that almost works. You play it again. It still almost works. You play it a third time and it's somehow worse. This goes on for a while.

I kept playing through graduate school not because I was getting noticeably better, but because I kept finding things worth being bad at. Jazz theory, fingerpicking, playing along with records — all of these lived in the "almost works" zone for long enough that I had to decide whether the discomfort was worth the eventual something.

It was. Not because I became good at any of it — I'm still somewhere in the middle — but because staying in the discomfort of not-quite teaches you something that competence doesn't. You learn to be okay with the sound of your own uncertainty.

I think this transfers. The engineers I find most interesting aren't the ones who've mastered a stack. They're the ones who are visibly comfortable with not knowing something yet — who say "I haven't worked with this" without apology and figure it out in front of you.

Staying bad at something on purpose is a skill. It's harder than it sounds.