Want Get Good at Something? First Be Really Bad at it.

by Drew Holmes

Recently we were asked by a local middle school teacher to help with her upcoming outdoor concert. This was the one performance her kids would have this year (thanks COVID) and her vision was to live stream it so more families could share in their student’s achievement. The question posed to me was could we handle running the live stream? Of course I said yes.

One problem: I had never done a live stream before.

Fortunately, I have Ward and Braden on staff. They are both experts in sound reinforcement and Braden is experienced in video, so I figured the two-week time frame was plenty to learn enough to accomplish the task. As usual, I was jumping out of a plane hoping to find a parachute on the way down. Braden came up with a plan, we set up a test live stream rig in one of the lesson rooms at the store, and we went live. The sound echoed in places, the picture was distorted and pixilated, or sometimes frozen altogether.

In other words, it was not good enough for what we had promised to do. And we had four days left to figure this out.

Back in 2011, I got the crazy notion that I wanted to run a Tough Mudder endurance challenge. It is 12–13 miles with obstacles along the way including things like crawling under barbed wire, submerging into ice water, and running up a slick wall called “Everest”. I was recently divorced, at least 30 pounds overweight, and had not done anything even remotely that athletic since college a decade earlier. Bottom line: I had aspirations but lacked ability.

I formed a plan. In my mind running the distance was going to be the biggest challenge, so I signed up to run my first 5k. At the starting line of that race, I realized that, growing up in the US, I had no idea how far five kilometers actually was. The results of that race show that, of all the finishers, I was the last one to actually receive an official time. I effectively came in last place.

Undeterred I signed up for another 5k a couple of weeks later. Though I was laboring to keep my pace in the first mile, things felt better! Then I looked next to me to see a young lady effortlessly running backwards and taking pictures of what appeared to be her boyfriend. He was running easy and starting to pass me.

Then I noticed the prosthetic. I was getting my butt whipped in a road race by a one-legged man.

Later there was the 10k where I was so slow, they had started giving out the awards before I reached the finish line. But I did finish. Eventually I ran a half marathon in a reasonably respectable time. And then there was the 5k on my birthday where I ran my first sub 8-minute mile (I paid for it with increasing times in the remaining miles, but that is a different story).

Eventually I ran the Tough Mudder. And then another. And then three more after that. The final one I ran with my college friend Tye where we challenged ourselves to see how fast we could complete the course. Two hours and 55 minutes, as it turns out. To run a half marathon with obstacles.

The lesson I learned throughout all of this was that if I wanted to be good at something I first had to be bad at it. Like, really, really bad. The faster I failed and made productive mistakes, the faster I could learn how to improve. There is no losing, there is only winning or learning. This process applies to any learned skill, especially making music. We learn so much more from a performance gone wrong or a rehearsal that did not go as planned, than we ever do from perfection. Perfection is not the achievement, but rather the celebration of the achievement of having learned through failure.

As it turned out, the biggest problem we were having with the livestream test was with the Wi-Fi at the store. When we tried our slightly tweaked rig at the school the day before the performance everything that was giving us trouble worked smoothly. Because of the failures in the initial test, we learned how to troubleshoot the setup and had a successful livestream at the performance. Promise kept.

Whether learning to run road races or operate electronics, failure is the best teacher we could ever hope for. But in order to learn we must be open to receiving the lesson. Even if the lesson comes in the form of a man with one leg leaving you in his dust.