In order to be terrible at something, you’d have to actually try.
Most of the things you do every day are things that (by now) you’re effortlessly decent at. If you drive a car, you’re probably not crashing into things every day by now. Whatever your job is, you probably perform it at least competently. Any hobbies you have, you’ve likely held onto because you’ve enjoyed the process of gaining some skill at them.
So if I told you that today’s challenge was to go be really, really bad at something, you’d have to put some real effort in. You’d basically have two options:
- Take something you already do and deliberately do it poorly. Since you already do most of your normal things competently, it would take a decent amount of effort, concentration and strategy to do it really really badly.
- Find a new thing you don’t already do well and just do it. You’ll probably be terrible because you’ve never done it before.
Well look, don’t do the first one. Don’t crash your car or tank your job. But that second one – that’s great! If you set out to go be terrible at something, then you’ll pick up a new thing and you’ll have succeeded at your goal. Which is better than what happens to most people: they set a daily goal of “Don’t Be Terrible At Anything” and they succeed… by never doing anything new.
The Opportunity Machine 