being crap in public

[metaphortunate]

Quick note to my friend who was talking about not wanting to do stuff in public while one is still bad at it. Check out this Jim Hines post. That is a post that he made precisely because he made an earlier post and people said "hey, your recs are missing all this stuff they should have!" and because of that he was able to do better! Just like that. Being crap at things in public is the fastest way to be less crap at them. We have to give ourselves permission to suck.

Comments

[ithiliana]

*yay*

Yes!

It's impossible to learn stuff without failing, understanding what went wrong, and learning how to fix it (I think this may apply to everything in the world, but we 'forget' the 'failed' attempts when we're babies--i.e. learning to walk, learning to talk, etc., and don't remember how hard those were.

This drives me buggy with students because I build in actual grade credit for revision on papers (30-40% sometimes), give feedback on early drafts, and then get a shitload of negative commentary about how I insulted them -- even though early drafts often get fairly high grades because criteria are low, and revision is expected.

And that's not even in public (only a student and I know!), and what does that mean for their future life both in work and personal areas?

[metaphortunate]

And it is a lot easier to figure that stuff out when people TELL you! And give feedback!

But it is hard as shit to take feedback sometimes, I still have trouble.

[amaebi]

Jim Hines seems to be a staggeringly nice person.

Since I'm [late-budding] a Christian pastor, I've been cheerfully telling people for several years that I think that daring to suck in public and private is part of the point of why Jesus suggested his students become like children.

[metaphortunate]

That makes a lot of sense.