On Feeling Stupid and Trying New Things

And why it matters

This past year I have been committed to learning a new thing. It doesn’t really matter what it is but it was completely new to me, full of jargon and disciplines that I know nothing about. I’ve really gone all in and spend more than several hours on it every week.

I have someone teaching me who is very knowledgeable on this thing, great at teaching and very patient. He provides helpful feedback and encouragement and has not once made me feel like an idiot.

But this week, I felt that despite the effort I still knew virtually nothing. I made a mistake on something simple that I hadn’t encountered before but felt like I should have known about. And I saw a community post that made me realise that my knowledge on one particular aspect of the thing was not that sophisticated. I felt like an idiot.

It didn’t take me long to spiral from there and imagine that I wasn’t cut out for this. That maybe I didn’t have the natural inclination or aptitude for it and that I should give up.

The whole experience has made me realise that while learning is one of my top values and that I seek out new ideas every day, I’m often learning things that have tangible links to circles that I already know a lot about and feel very comfortable with.

I’m an academic. My job is entirely based on having deep, new and defensible knowledge in a field. Of knowing almost every paper that’s written in that field and then surmounting excruciatingly high and painful bars to contribute to the body of knowledge with my own new research findings.

Maybe I am not as committed to learning when it’s uncomfortable as I thought.

On the podcast, while we were debating the value of new year’s resolutions and goals, I told Matt that I was going to learn a new language this year. Either Spanish or French. I’m interested in both and for entirely different reasons.

And yet here we are in March and I have still not even decided which one I will choose. Today I thought maybe I would go deeper into a language I have already studied.

And then I stopped myself. Why did I do that? Because it’s easier and that I have already shown myself I can do it? Because I’m scared of failing?

Probably all of these. And to be fair we had a cyclone here last night for the first time in over 50 years, very little sleep, no power, and a pretty stressful week leading up to it. Perhaps I could be a little nicer to myself. I think many of us too often aren’t very nice to ourselves.

Self-belief in general and in learning matters a lot. I work with teams on the Gallup Strengths Finder often. It’s a fantastic, well-validated tool that helps uncover what you naturally do best to develop that into a strength. People who use their strengths daily are six times more engaged in their work.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to identify and build on my strengths. And I have actively avoided certain weaknesses that aren’t part of my job and that I also don’t like. Like maths. I have four degrees and yet I am terrible at maths. Not just a bit terrible, but actually embarrassingly, shockingly terrible. My brain does just not work that way.

But the thing involves maths and lots of things I have never encountered and that certainly aren’t strengths. I feel completely untethered. A year in and I am still trying to map the landscape, drowning in new concepts and feeling inept at most of them. I want to know everything at once even though I appreciate that this is completely ridiculous.

And in the middle of feeling all this, I have a lengthy new task to complete on the thing that I am not even sure I will be able to do.

It would be easy to give up.

But I love the thing. I really want to be good at it. And that is going to involve me getting better at maths. And it seems, better at being willing to be vulnerable and look stupid (often). Of not being able to pick some things up as quickly as I would like.

And taking a deep breath and accepting that this is ok.

It’s easy to convince ourselves we are committed to trying new things, to learning and to expanding our thinking when in reality we are just meandering into an overlapping circle that’s pretty similar to the one we hang out in all the time.

It‘s a lot more difficult to cast yourself out into the wilderness sans map and compass and hope that you will end up where you want to be. If you are flailing in uncertainty and inadequacy about something you really want to go after - that job, project, business idea, anything really - just keep going.

Despite my week and impending terror about my upcoming task, I can say that it is so worth doing. I’ll keep you posted.

Libby x