After my recent post where I dug into hidden difficulties, I feel like it’s important to share the other side of the story. If you really want to do something, you can do it^[1].

It’s easy to look around – especially on social media – and see people making complex and difficult tasks look simple and effortless. It’s also easy to judge your own learning processes, struggles, and failures, against the final edited results of people who have been learning and practicing for years – and to feel disheartened by the comparison.

Please do not fall into this trap – everyone makes mistakes. Take a look at this outtake from my recent video on being a PM at Microsoft:

The final video ended up including around 20 minutes of “talking head” footage, but I had closer to 40 minutes of raw footage before I edited out all most of the mistakes and false starts.

It’s not just me. One of my data community heroes, Power BI MVP Ida Bergum, recently shared a similar example:

If you’re ever feeling like an impostor^[2], like there’s no way your efforts could ever measure up to all the “experts” you see online, don’t give up. You can do it.

Every successful example that you see online or at a conference or on a bookstore shelf has gone through the same journey. They may be further down the path – that’s usually the easy thing to see. They also had a different starting point and they probably have a different destination in mind as well, even if it’s close to your goals.

Even if you see someone and think “I wish I…” it’s important to remember that they struggled along the way as well. Odds are they struggled in different ways or in different places, but no one’s journey is free of bumps and detours – even if people usually prefer to share the highlights from the easy parts.

One of my favorite quotes on this subject is from a cartoon alien-dog-thing, and you can find it all over Pinterest:

It never feels great to suck at something you want to not suck at, but everyone sucks at the beginning. Most people just don’t like to admit it – at least not until they’ve moved past the “sorta good” phase.

One overlooked benefit of being earlier on your learning journey is that you can still remember what it was like to suck at something, and what was valuable to you then. If you’ve been doing something every day for 20 years, odds are you may not remember what it was like to just be starting off. But if you are becoming sorta good at something, you have a perspective that you can share with everyone out there who sucks at that thing, and would really like to be sorta good.

Anyway… I didn’t quite figure out how to get the narrative for this post into written form. The story was there in my head, but didn’t want to take shape once I started typing. But I won’t let that stop me, because it doesn’t need to be perfect to be good, and useful.^[3]

^[1] I’ve included the “if you really want” qualifier deliberately. Motivation and desire are critical for success, because it’s that want that will push you to keep getting back up after you fall down, and will keep you looking for more resources and opportunities to learn and improve.

^[2] I still remember the day I first read this blog post by Scott Hanselman. My friend Cheryl had shared it on Facebook, with a comment about how she had thought “it was just me.” I’d known and admired Cheryl for years, and had no idea she felt this way, because I’d only ever seen her kicking butt. This is just another example of why it’s important to talk about mental health.

^[3] I swear I didn’t plan this ending, but once it presented itself you’re darned right I was going to run with it.