As any person trying to develop into a well rounded individual, I have a couple of hobbies that I try to spend my free time on. This blog, my piano, and recently I was reminded of how much I like the art of magic so I decided to add that into the mix. There is always one problem you run into when you attempt to pick up a new skill or hobby, particularly one where the learning curve is big like a new instrument, and that problem is that you are going to be quite bad at it for what will most likely be a long time. You have to go through what I call The Suck.
No one catches me now
The first time I picked up the piano as a hobby and gave it a good effort I was making decent strides at it and doing things that seemed nearly impossible to me in just a few weeks time… But I was still playing Old Macdonald at the end of the day, two handed or not. I want to play Mozart and Bach damnit! I want to improvise jazz! I want to be able to sit down, have someone request a song, and be able to play it. And I want it NOW!
The same thing happened when I picked up magic again. Sure there are plenty of tricks you can do that dont take that much time to master, but if you want to do the real cool stuff, the stuff that people just cannot possible fathom… Well, it turns out thats like, really hard. Whoulda’ thunk it? I was investing hours upon hours on single sleights of hand, and still wasn’t great at them. I think almost everyone at my job knows how to do the 2 Card Monte now because they caught me at some stage in the trick. I used to suck at it, but not any more. No one catches me now.
Here’s To The Suck
The hardest part to come to terms with about The Suck is that its going to take a while, and it probably wont even be all that much fun. Hell, it might even be aggravating and downright frustrating at times, but as the old saying goes, anything worth doing isnt going to be easy. People who I admire in various fields all typically have one thing in common, and thats the sheer amount of time they have been doing it, which can typically be measured in YEARS, and not weeks or months. And chances are they sucked at it back when they started too.
Stumbling upon this realization has actually changed the way I look at the concept of The Amature, which is really just a person working their way through The Suck of their chosen skill. I now have much more sympathy for them, whereas before I might have been totally jaded and not have given a second thought to someone who was not so good at something, I now appreciate that they are grinding it out and working their way through this vital, inescapable growth phase. When a budding magician shows me a trick and is all thumbs I dont roll my eyes, rather I admire their tenacity to work through The Suck in the hopes of someday blowing someone out of the water with a mind bending illusion.
Here’s to working hard. Here’s to accomplishment. Heres to that one moment of happiness that makes all the agony worth while. Here’s to The Suck.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Old Macdonald to go practice.
How about you guys, what do you currently suck at or have in the past that you grinded through and now consider yourself to be good at?