Worth doing Badly

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly”. 

This is true because you start by doing something badly until you know how to do it. If bad is measured compared to people who are already doing it. If learning is not recognised as a necessary part of the process. 

We are better at that when we are kids, because most kids don’t receive a salary. Our judging system is different. Marks are a communication tool, just like money... except they usually aren’t constrained by supply and demand. 

With a functional education system, there is capacity for lots of students to do well. If well is judged by knowledge. 

As soon as education is judged by money and jobs, then nice disappears. 

Not enough jobs that require the skills you have? Not enough jobs paying more than you spend? Not enough jobs in the type of work you want to be doing? Cold, hard, reality. 

As a child, someone (normally your parents) holds space for you to be bad. Gradually, we stop holding space for each other. As an adult with responsibility, you need to get the balance between focusing on things supply/demand tell you to do, and holding space for yourself to be bad. 

One of the things that sucks about being an adult is we stop doing a lot of things we love, because we filter what we do, not only by what we are good at, but what we are best (relatively) at. We cut off parallel sources of joy.

Little Rugby Players

Big Man Holding Space

Big Kids

We live in a controlled hallucination. As things are repeated, patterns start making sense. We ignore almost everything, but gradually the stuff that means something to us sticks. It sticks as we add, meaning. Which makes unlearning as important, if not more important, than learning. When new information comes in that challenges embodied knowledge. The kind of stuff that requires proper, messy, patient, unpacking. Impacting your own hallucination requires constantly reevaluating your path. With breaks. Unpacking can be draining, so you need capacity to do the work. I call the “adult view” taking another look at what and how you were thinking when you were younger, and being your own mentor. Mentorship works in both directions. We have this idea that adults are higher up the chain, but we are all just big kids. By listening, questioning, and articulating their framework of thinking, the mentor will be refining and developing the story of their own path. Their own way of seeing. Being a good mentor to yourself will help you see more clearly. Listening to younger versions of yourself will help you make better decisions now. 

 

Happy 26th Birthday South Africa

I have always been an earnest chap with a chip on my shoulder about being taken seriously.  Easy to tease. Easy to provoke. By age 26, I had my first professional qualification and thought this gave my adulthood some spine. I moved cities from where I had studied in Cape Town to the heart of South Africa's Engine room Johannesburg. I cut my hair and swapped my eccentric tops for a proper work uniform. Peacocks get seen but often dismissed. I rented a flat on my own and started playing properly at adulthood. The change of city, and change of community, just started to poke my bubble. To look up and to look out. A stable income just starting to provide a foundation to move beyond the question of "What do you want to do?". I was doing it. What was the next question? The deeper question? Happy 26th Birthday South Africa. What is the deeper question?

 

Boat Repair

All advice is autobiographical. Like we are coaching a younger version of ourselves having gained some insight into the chaos. Like our world, is the world. I regularly review my story, and my reading of it changes. I call this the “Adult View”. Adult not always meaning wiser. Sometimes a bit more cynical. I have several chips on my shoulders. I am insistent on ownership because I have put my future in the hands of others, and had decisions made which I both disagreed with and was powerless to do anything about. The make-up of the teams I believed in changed to the point where the word team is rather abstract. Like the story of a boat that gets repaired until none of the constituent parts are the same as the original boat. I know I am like that boat. I am not the younger version of myself, neither physically (our bodies regenerate) nor mentally (the world I see now is not the world I saw then). The best we can do is build endurance and resilience, and be creative. Rather than wisdom, age brings the awareness that no one knows.

Calm before the Storm