Sucking sucks. It has become a rare experience for me to truly suck at something, and even worse, suck at something important. I mean not like I suck at lifting, where I do most things pretty right and definitely are at the level of conscious competence, yet still, just by having the wrong set of parents for the sport, only getting sub mediocre results.

I mean to suck at the level of unconscious incompetence. To be the bottom feeder, where really everyone else is far better than you. Not knowing what you do, and worse, the looming prospect that you might never know what you are doing there and possibly never improve at all. It is a terrible experience.

But also an interesting one, because most of our experiences where we truly sucked at something are usually at an age, where we have no conscious process of skill building, so we only experience the horror, without really being able to take something away from it. As we move through life, usually we tend to gravitate to things for which we have at least some modicum of talent, or we enter formalized programs, where there is some expectation management.

It is a real possibility to keep on sucking

The scary part is that it is a real possibility that you will be bad at something forever. We see it every day. In gyms. Car drivers. In offices. Teachers. People in general seem to be bad at things, to the extend that it is almost trivial to become p95 good.

However, why should you be in the 95% percentile? The odds are against you.

Games and sports build important meta skills

Sucking at something important sucks harder than sucking at something unimportant. Games and sports have many uses, and one is to provide an environment in which it is emotionally and physically safe to be bad at things. Also hopefully you find something at which you actually improve, so you can build confidence, for when the situation arises where you are bad at something important.

As a teacher, you must give hope

I was lucky in the sense that, for most of my school life, I was only bad at things my primary caregivers couldn't care less about, like art or sports. In school, I was just bad at those. People told me so. My first day at school I was told by my teacher that my artwork is bad and used it as an example how not to draw things. But they never told me how to draw things.

In sports it was only in eleventh grade that finally a teacher showed me how to improve at things and I think this is what people call empowering experiences.

To this day this makes me angry, not because of the injustice that incurred, but because I know that this is why most children who are bad at math, stay bad at math. Some idiot teacher tells them early on that they are bad in math, but never shows them a way forward. Or even gives them the hope of improving some day.

All progress then is always seen through the lens of lagging behind and being worse than everyone else.

Incidentally, these teachers are the proof that you can keep sucking at something important forever.

It is emotional painful to suck at things

It can feel devastating to be bad at something. Even in video games, getting wiped can ruin your day. Every powerlifting meet someone cries because they fucked up an attempt. To be fair, often deservingly so.

Which is why most people who are bad at things try to avoid situations, where their incompetence could become visible to themselves. The societal consensus has also become one, where it is not okay to make people feel bad about themselves, so more and more things are structured in a way where incompetence is inconsequential. Work places are free of judgment. In online games you usually have player pools large enough to match up with similarly unskilled individuals.

At least we have a good cope for "everyone is better than me": The people who are worse than you don't even show up in situations, in which this could become apparent.

Repetition is required

Some of the dread comes from the experience that you do not even know what is going on. It takes time for your brain to conceptualize a situation, movement, game, what have you.

Depending on the task, your aptitude and already existing skills, this process takes more or less time. As a complete motor moron with no athletic background, I need hundreds of repetitions before I even know where I am in a foreign movement. However, after a few years of lifting, even things like new strongman implements click after as little as a dozen repetitions. In mathematics, we spend years to remodel our brain before we even really begin to math. While I don't believe in the 10k hour rule, conscious practice is important. But for conscious practice to happen, you have to swim through the sea of "I have no fucking clue what is going on here" and this can feel like drowning.

Good company goes a long way

The most annoying thing for me is that almost nobody has a metagame in re skill acquisition.

It is rare that you pick up a new hobby and then have people who have a clear concept of how long it takes for you to even being able to digest advice or that can give you some estimate on how long it takes until things stop feeling like shit.

So usually the next best thing is finding people who try to improve themselves, are somewhat optimistic and somewhat nice. Nothing is worse than telling a noob that they suck, without contextualising it. Even truisms like "everyone starts small" go a long way, if they are being told by people who have been through the process.

It takes time to build the mental structures and routines on which you then can actually improve, and nothing will sabotage your progress like people who don't even have a subsonscious understanding of this.

I suspect there is some luck involved finding good company, but there is also a selection bias, at least among people who want to improve on their own and not only because their trainer or boss told them to do so.

Skill acquisition is beautiful

Few things are as rewarding and fun as learning new skills. Overcoming the dreadful zone of completely sucking and slowly developing a feeling for what you are doing. Getting better and forming mental structures, to the point where you can evauluate your metagame. Game genres like high tech boomer shooters or soullikes partially get their appeal just from learning a new game, new mechanics, discovering new tech.

And this is the most dreadful prospect, far worse than to suck forever: To run out of things to learn. To be stuck in an environment, in which you can not ascend to the next level.