Give yourself permission to be mediocre

Consider this the anti-pep talk I feel like I’ve needed my whole life.

It’s for the person who struggles to take action on their biggest, boldest ideas – the ambitious one who’s always “about to start,” who keeps everything perfect and untouched in their head because putting it out into the world means it might not live up to other people’s – or worse, their own – sky-high expectations.

Here’s the catch, though: “just do the thing, badly” is a lot easier said than done when you’ve built your whole identity around being good at things…

I have a love-hate relationship with blogging. Nothing I make ever quite reaches my own internal standard.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve “rebranded” – and I’m still never satisfied. I’ll fix a font. Decide the colours are wrong. Fix the colours. Hate the whole layout. Round and round we go, and that’s before I’ve written a single word!

And then, because I clearly enjoy suffering, I’ll look at what everyone else is doing and feel genuinely crushed by my own insignificance. I’ll publish a post to three likes and five unsubscribes, and some small, dramatic part of my brain will whisper: well, what’s the point of any of it, then?!

I know. Cue world’s smallest violin. But underneath the melodrama is a very real fear – that what I make might be painstakingly, forgettably mediocre.

Just typing that sentence made me wince.

There’s a particular kind of hell reserved for creative people with taste. You get so much joy from making things, and in the same breath, you cannot switch off the judgement while you’re doing it.

It’s like being handed a beautiful reference photo and a box of blunt crayons, and being told: match it exactly. You can see the gap the entire time you’re working – which is exactly what makes it unbearable.

Nobody tells you this part: taste and skill develop on completely different timelines. Your eye gets sharp long before your hand catches up.

So for a good long while, everything you make will look worse to you than what’s in your head – not because you’re failing, but because your taste has already sprinted ahead of your ability. That’s not a warning sign. That’s just what learning looks like from the inside.

That gap is hard to sit with, because we judge ourselves so harshly. We loathe being beginners. I feel this more keenly than most, I think, because I was the classic overachiever at school – good at almost everything (except maybe PE!).

And being naturally good at things teaches you a very particular, very dangerous lesson: that struggle is a red flag, not a normal part of the process.

So the first time you try something where the struggle doesn’t resolve itself quickly, where it just carries on, unglamorously, for months – it feels like proof that something is deeply, undeniably wrong.

Real life doesn’t care that you got good grades, or how many brilliant ideas are rattling around your head. It only cares about relentless execution – and that’s the one thing school never taught me, because I was never bad at anything for long enough to learn how to push through it.

Here’s the thing that stops me in my tracks whenever I really sit with it though: none of us were born afraid of being mediocre.

You learned to walk by falling down, over and over, in front of everyone – and nobody once suggested you wait until you could do it properly. You spoke in half-words and nonsense sentences for a couple of years, and people found it charming, not embarrassing.

You were hilariously, spectacularly bad at almost everything, for a long time, in full public view – and it never once occurred to you to feel ashamed or self-conscious, because the part of your brain that judges and criticises simply hadn’t switched on yet.

Thank god, honestly. If it had, you might never have bothered learning to walk or talk at all!

Somewhere along the way, we lose that. We stop being toddlers, doing things purely because we’re learning or they bring us joy – and we become pessimistic adults, constantly auditing the outcome.

So here’s the reframe I keep coming back to.

There are things you will simply be bad at before you get good at them.

I remember Ali Abdaal talking about this, and I found it so refreshing: your first ten to fifty attempts at any creative skill will probably suck, full stop. The only thing that matters is whether you can treat that as a stage to move through, rather than a verdict on who you are.

Nobody becomes a world-class athlete without the boring reps nobody else sees – the early mornings, the drills no one photographs. The reps aren’t a tax you pay before the real work begins. They are the real work – for far longer than anyone tells you.

Here’s the catch, though: our egos want attention, and greatness is what gets it. Which is exactly why the reps stage is so hard to stay in. Nobody notices you mid-rep. And to an ego that runs on being seen, that silence can feel unbearable.

But here’s what the ego can’t see from inside that discomfort: if nobody’s watching, nothing you do here counts against you either. You’re free!

Free to experiment, free to pivot, free to rebrand without it being an event. Free to be a messy, in-progress, figuring-it-out-in-public creative – instead of a rigid and inflexible Finished Product.

That’s not a consolation prize. That’s the actual advantage of obscurity. And most of us trade it away far too early, because it doesn’t feel like an advantage – it feels like proof of the exact thing we were afraid of.

There’s a saying that mastery takes 10,000 hours.

That number gets thrown around like a target, when really it should be read as a comfort: go ahead and be bad for a very long time. That’s the deal.

And anyway, who said any of us need to be world-class at anything in the first place? You can drain all the joy, creativity, and passion out of something remarkably easily – just by deciding it has to amount to something.

There’s a story in Anthony de Mello’s Awareness that captures this perfectly. A small village has a ragtag band that plays for the locals, and everyone loves it. Then a new conductor arrives with big ambitions, swaps out the weaker players for stronger ones, and soon the band is playing bigger venues and making headlines.

By every visible measure, it’s a triumph. But some of the older villagers feel sad – quietly missing the days when the band was mediocre at best and they all had fun anyway.

Nobody in the village recognised what had actually happened as a kind of cruelty, because it arrived dressed up as improvement.

That’s exactly what we do to ourselves whenever we put conditions on our own creativity. We hire our own conductor. We swap out the joyful, sloppy version of ourselves for a “better” one, call it growth, and don’t notice what’s gone missing until years later – when we catch ourselves longing for the version of us that used to do this thing with zero expectations, and love it anyway.

That’s the hidden cost of trying to monetise a passion, or letting drive take over completely.

The flow state goes missing – that feeling of doing something purely because you’d still do it even if nobody was watching, even if it never turned into anything.

I’m not saying drive or ambition are the enemy. But ambition with a white-knuckle grip on the outcome will strangle the very joy that made you want to start in the first place.

There’s a version of getting better that’s allowed to stay messy and fun the whole way through – where ambition and joy grow up side by side instead of one eventually swallowing the other. Most of us just forget that’s an option. But the toddler on the living room floor proves you can have both, at the same time, indefinitely.

So I know this might sound like strange advice, but give yourself permission to be mediocre.

Pick up the paintbrush and paint the wonky, lopsided bowl of fruit. Bake the dry batch of cookies. Publish the post that’ll get three likes and five unsubscribes.

Give yourself permission to take sloppy, unfinished, wobbly-one-footed action towards it – and then lavish yourself with praise for having done it at all, regardless of how it turned out. You don’t have to wait until you’re good at something to have a good time. That’s the whole trick nobody tells you.

And if it’s any consolation: in my experience, it’s rarely the polished stuff people actually connect with. It’s the wobble. The dry cookies, admitted to out loud. The post that says the uncertain thing plainly instead of dressing it up.

You’ll probably still be unfinished tomorrow, and the day after that. But what if “finished” was never really the point?

Take yourself too seriously, and you’ll miss out on so much of the joy in life that comes from doing the things you love, no matter how they turn out.

Sophie x