Are you ready to suck?

Because if you want to become a proficient learner—to jump into something new and gain knowledge and skills quickly—you'll have to learn to love the suck.

This is my personal process on how to get better at anything.

Step One: Buckle Up and Embrace the Suck

It feels awful to start anything you’re not good at yet. Always. Every time.

The first step is a change in mindset. Get comfortable with the fact that the process is going to suck, and the things you make are also going to suck (at first).

Even though this learning process will be extremely uncomfortable, that discomfort is all right. In fact, it’s necessary. It’s a byproduct of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and ramming full-force against the bounds of your abilities.

If it’s not an uncomfortable, stressful, painful process, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.

Step Two: Just Do the Thing

This is for all the perfectionists in the audience (myself included). The best way to get better at something is to just do the thing you want to do. No excuses, no procrastinating.

Remember that the goal here isn’t to make one good thing, it’s simply to get better. And if we get better, little by little, one day we’ll find that we’re actually happy with the things we’re making.

At this point, done is better than perfect. Heck, done is even better than good. We just gotta get moving.

Step Three: Rinse and Repeat

Okay, so far we’ve made something that we’re not happy with and probably totally sucks. Great. What now?

Before we shelve it and move on, let's exploit a not-so-secret hack to help us improve quicker: getting feedback. Don't worry—you don’t have to put out your crappy project to the world at this point, but at least show some friends.

Let them tell you it’s good, because they’re your friends and they’re nice. Then ask them for actual feedback, things you could do better next time. At first, there will be a lot of things you want to improve, and it’ll seem overwhelming.

That's okay! Decide what the most important thing to improve is. In other words, what will give you the biggest leap forward if you just improve that one thing?

This is important: just focus on getting one thing better the next time. Then another thing the time after that. The hardest part is resisting the urge to keep editing and revising this iteration.

Make something, put it out there, get some feedback for the next time, and move on. Make the next one better.

Practice Makes Progress

Remember that this isn’t a recipe for being good at something. We’re only talking about improving.

I can’t promise that you’ll get really good at whatever you apply yourself to. I wish I could. Natural talent is a real thing, and different people are going to progress at different rates and, ultimately, to different skill levels.

However, stack up enough iterations of small improvements and your chances of becoming really good at something will greatly improve. This framework will enable you to be a world-class learner. You'll be able to reliably and efficiently improving at literally anything, regardless of your starting skill level or capacity.

Here it is, simply put:

  • Embrace the suck
  • Just make something
  • Share it with the world
  • Improve a little each time

In the words of Jake the Dog: Sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.