A fellow tutor I deeply admire* said something to me a few weeks ago that has since stuck: anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
It reminded me of some wise words my husband shared with me: 20 minutes of doing something is more valuable than 20 hours of thinking about doing something.
Imagining you must stick to a daily writing schedule or produce work of a certain standard stops you from writing as and when you can.
Predicting that you’ll struggle to communicate your thoughts or appear upset stops you from having the important conversation.
Waiting until you have the time to do your best ironically stops you from just doing.
So you took two coding lessons on your app, struggled and never came back to it. You could get annoyed at yourself and lament that it’s yet another example of you starting something, finding it hard or boring and not finishing it.
Or you could choose to realize that you took the time to try something completely new, which is beneficial for your brain.
You could use what you learnt in your next conversation (‘Learning a few HTML commands made me think about how as humans, we’ve been programmed to behave in a certain way’).
You might reflect on the fact that the few minutes you spent thinking about something novel stopped you from ruminating over the hard day you had at work.
You could decide that you will keep working on this new skill when you get the chance. Or maybe you won’t, and that’s all right too. But either way, having done it imperfectly is preferable to not having done it at all.
