As the choppy water loomed in front of me with the rocks glistening in golden light, I took one look at my $20 SHEIN romper, not meant to jump into a deep lake with no protective equipment on me. I took a deep breath and I was jolted back to the first time I’d learnt how to swim. Generally a petrified kid, I stepped into the temperature controlled pool at a swimming club in the sweltering Indian heat step by step. Motivated by a desire to complete my milestone of doing 1 lap uninterrupted and the reward of a milkshake after, I slowly learnt how to swim, never having jumped in. As I jumped into the freezing cold waters of Lake Tahoe and swam to the island where the rest of my group were climbing up a tiny mound of rocks to enjoy the view, only adrenaline pushed me forward. I did that tiny rocky hike and sitting up on that mini hill looking at the water, suddenly calm, before me all I could think about was “Wow I really sucked at that.”
Now I’m no stranger to sucking at things. My first Physics midterm in college taught me that this would be the beginning of being the dumbest person in most rooms. While I first grappled with those feelings, stripping me of my carefully cultivated identity built over 18 years, by the time I was a senior I felt liberated at having to accept being disastrous at a new concept and slowly forcing my brain to exercise and get better at said concept. That drove me to the career I’m in now, where the premise of my role is to get vague problems I don’t understand anything about and then slowly unspool the yarn and knit something useful out of it.
Growing up in a tiny land locked city with little to none outdoorsy activities around me, my “sport” was basketball which I put in such disastrous minimal effort into that I can guarantee that a 6th grader can destroy me in a 1v1. Fortunate enough to move to California, I decided that I was going to be an outdoorsy person and would try to soak in as much of California as much as possible. However, the path to learning something new in your adulthood is long and winded and slowed down by the weight of adult steps.
For some of us, baby steps are padded with the lack of opportunities and privilege that gives some others a natural edge while learning something new. For some of us, our mind is our prison refusing to consistently invite failure and reproach. For some of us, it’s inertia that seeps out of the realm of physics into our lives stopping us from expanding our horizons. Not only do we need to make peace with taking baby steps, we need to internalize that everyone’s baby steps look different. Some people leapfrog into an easy 2 mile run on their first run whilst others pant their way through half a mile.
The difference with taking baby steps in adulthood is that you may never get to a place of excellence at anything. I may never hit the perfect backhand slice in tennis, I may never artfully ski down a black diamond, I may never complete a sub 3:30 marathon, I may never play a Rachmanioff perfectly. But I will slowly get the ball over the net, I will make it down a bunny slope, I will run a 5K and I have to strum a T-Swift song on my guitar. Taking baby steps is essential because that’s how move forward. Because if you don’t take baby steps into a temperature controlled pool with goggles on, you’ll never make it through an icy lake. As self-effacing as we can be with every year of adulthood, I now look back at my terrible attempts at swimming in a lake as a badge of honor.
Now I know these thoughts aren’t unique or revolutionary by any means. Karen Rinaldi has written a whole book on
(that’s now climbed to the top of my to-read list) where she talks about the utter humility that sucking at something requires and why that’s essential. Where I differ from common knowledge is where most people place the burden of accepting humility and being terrible at something as you take your baby steps, I say tell the whole world about it. Tell your friends about your baby steps, learn from those who can do things better than you, and keep the people who are going to be your partners in crime close. No child learns to walk without knowing that with their parents around they have some safety net but as adults we seem to place all the burden on ourselves while learning something new, which makes these steps seem heavier than they need to be. I can confirm it makes jumping into deep lakes a lot more enjoyable.
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Baby Steps and Deep Lakes