We All Start As Beginners
I started practicing Aikido years ago. When I walked onto the mat, I felt awkward and confused. I was horrible. Bad. Terrible. Nothing ended up in the right place. I couldn't fall, roll, turn, attack or keep my balance. My techniques resembled a bad stop motion film with strobe effects.
Hardly anything done in Aikido is what a normal person would choose as a first option. Do you know how much practice it takes to make stepping into a punch or kick feel like the right thing to do? Do you know how much confidence it takes to realize just when your attackers think they have you where they want you, they just gave you a great opportunity to introduce them to the Earth... very suddenly.
An internet business is much the same. Your first product is probably going to be horrible. Let's just be honest here. It will squeak and whine and you'll say too little in some parts and too much in others. Your first sales page will most likely be the same. Benefits instead of features? Not likely in a first draft! Your first posts will be weak and your first articles probably won't be all that and a bag of chips either. You'll struggle for traffic and sales will be dismal.
But it's important you do them AND you release them. What you're looking for at this time is feedback. It's similar to the time I was performing a technique (poorly) and my partner thought I should have been doing it better. So she (all 5' 90lbs of her) countered and introduced me to the mat, sharply. In an online business: Did the sales page convert? Where is the traffic coming from? How can I get more? Am I getting a lot of returns? What could I have done better? Each time did I survive and learn my lesson? Yes. Have I had similar lessons since then? Of course, both in Aikido and in my online business. Improvement is the key. Focus on getting better, not how terrible you are today.
Here's 3 reasons why being bad at something is good:
1. For the ideas. Any problems you have is an opportunity to create a product, blog post or article. Did you find an effective way to generate traffic? Create an e-book. Don't understand what FTP is? Create a blog post. Can't do something in WordPress? Build the plugin yourself and sell it on to others. My suggestion: WRITE DOWN YOUR PROBLEMS. Keep it in a journal or a simple txt document. Log everything and someday when you're stuck for ideas, open it up and viola, no more research needed!
2. You get better at it. Even the master was once a beginner. Leonardo Da Vinci started out drawing stick figures. But he drew those figures and then drew something more complex, until he was able to paint the Sistine Chapel. You don't get better my reading, you get better by practicing. My suggestion: Consider every action between now and whenever it is you consider yourself a master to be practice and for fun. If it's for fun, there's no pressure to do it well. Just do it better.
3. It's fun. Perhaps it's just me, but I find learning fun. I've learned you can't learn about things your already a master of, so if you're learning, you're going to be doing it badly. There isn't a single person who is good at everything. So make learning fun. My suggestion: Kids find most everything interesting. Adopt a child like attitude towards all the tasks you're faced with. When you learn something let out a big AHA! Then do a little dance.
So get out there and be horrible at something. If you keep at it, in a couple of months/years, you'll actually be good at it. That's how the masters got to be masters.
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Published March 13th, 2008
Filed in Business


