In the work I do, I often find myself blocked, unable to do what I set out to do. There’s resistance. Consciously, I know I should just push through. But something keeps me from doing so.
There are many reasons for this, most of which tie back to fear. It can show up as perfectionism, overthinking, self-doubt, obsessive comparisons to others, and more. I’ve found one approach that seems to break through all of this, almost like magic.
It’s the mindset of practice.
The truth is, you’re not born a master of any skill. To improve your work and make better things, you need to get better at making them. Mastery.
There’s a reality that’s both good and bad: to master anything, you need to put in around 10,000 hours. The good news is that talent doesn’t really matter as much as we think. If you spend 10,000 hours practicing a skill, it’s inevitable that you’ll master it—this is how your brain is designed. The bad news is that 10,000 hours is a lot of time. And most of us expect results after the first few hours. Those expectations aren’t just unrealistic, they also stand in the way of sticking to our work.
What tends to happen is we start a new project and feel excited; we work on it for a few days or weeks. Then, once the initial enthusiasm fades, we stop. We set the project aside. We let what we could be die.
This problem stems from one simple mistake: we’re not approaching the work from a mindset of practice. If we were, the results wouldn’t matter so much. Doing things in the mindset of practice allows us to learn, to just ship the thing, and not worry about the approval of others, or its success, or its quality. We’re simply doing it to get better. And who can judge us for that?
But when we stay in a mindset of comparison, we get in our own way. We would be better off if we approached everything as practice: building a business, writing a book, making videos, creating music. Whatever it is, we’re just practicing to get better. After 10,000 hours, then we can start judging our work. But before that, it’s just practice.
Today, we live in a world where your work might take off well before you’ve spent 10,000 hours honing your craft. But it won’t take off after just a week or two. Knowing that it will take 10,000 hours gives us patience to keep doing the thing without piling on artificial pressure.
Whatever it is you want to do, don’t let perfectionism (fear) get in the way. Don’t let it be the reason you stop working on the project you set out to do. Instead, fully embrace the reality that all of this is just practice. Your aim is not perfection, but progress. That’s what will carry you to great distances.