What if I’m not any good?

Nobody likes seagulls, but I can confidently tell you that they do not care about the opinions of others. (Image by alessandra barbieri)

How do you know whether your struggle to find success is due to the normal challenges inherent in any endeavor or because you’re not any good?

It’s a question I hear a lot. And it’s based on the assumption that somewhere, an objective assessment of your work can be made.

What would you do differently if you could know for sure?

If there were some objective assessment that your work stinks, would you quit?

On the other hand, if you could see the future and know for sure that you were ultimately going to succeed, would you keep going?

The thing is, there is no objective truth here, and there is no finish line. You can keep improving as long as you have the resources to do so.

Being good isn’t enough anyway. There is no guarantee that your work will be successful. For one thing, it will depend on how you define success, since there’s no objective measure of that, either.

If you’re doing something you want to do, you can continue regardless of other people’s judgments. And even if you are defining success in terms of pleasing a group of people you seek to serve, you can keep tinkering until you find something that appeals to them.

Either way, you have no responsibility to quit due to mediocrity. It is your choice whether to choose to keep making what you’re making or to choose something different.

You can’t have the certainty of knowing that if you hang in there, eventually you’ll find someone who will love it. But you get to control how long you persist and how much effort you put in. And you get to decide how many people need to like it for you to be satisfied.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with soliciting other people’s support and feedback so that you can get better at your craft and get closer to the kinds of results you’re looking for. Not all of us are able to learn through the examples of others. We don’t always notice the things that aren’t working on our own. We may need to be explicitly taught, and that’s okay.

Carol Dweck, in her book Mindset, wrote that a fixed mindset is one in which we believe that our skills and talents are permanent, whereas a growth mindset acknowledges that we can grow and change and improve.

When we just want proof that we’re good, it lets us off the hook. We can embrace a fixed mindset and we never have to do the work of getting better. Even being bad is a relief because it means that we can stop trying.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Our progress is up to us. We can feel free to check a given failure off of our list and move on, but that is a choice, not an inevitability. There is no safe place to hide from our own potential.

There are so many things I’ve given up on because I wasn’t willing to put the work in. There are other areas in which I’ve stayed the course because it mattered enough to me to persist. Neither choice is morally correct, and neither holds a predictable reward.

If your work brings you joy and has meaning, that can be enough to justify doing it, no matter your skill level. But you don’t have to. It’s up to you.