I need to be competent the way some people need to be liked.
I can build a business in my sleep. I can't sit through a beginner guitar lesson without wanting to throw the thing out the window.
I bought a guitar in Lisbon about four months ago. A buddy I surf with plays, and he made it look easy. Sat on the beach after a session, played some song I didn't recognize, and it sounded like he'd been doing it his whole life. He told me he'd been playing two years and still sucked.
He didn't look like he sucked. He looked like a guy who didn't care whether he sucked.
I took it home. Watched a tutorial. Couldn't get my fingers to do the thing. Not even close. My hand cramped up and the chords sounded like furniture falling down stairs. I sat there for twenty minutes feeling like an idiot.
Twenty minutes of being bad at something should not feel like an existential crisis. But it did.
I quit after a week.
Before that it was Portuguese. Signed up for a class in Porto. Walked in, sat down with eight other people, and the teacher started with basics. Pronunciation. Simple phrases. I looked around and everyone was at the same level. Nobody was good. That should've been fine.
I lasted three sessions. Not because it was hard. Because being the person in the room who doesn't know the answer made my skin feel like it was on fire.
That's the trap. You spend ten, fifteen years getting good at one thing. You build a business. You learn systems and sales and operations and you get to a place where most problems in your lane feel solvable. And then that competence becomes the only way you know how to feel about yourself.
You don't think of it that way. You think you're just someone who picks things up fast. But you're not picking things up fast. You're only trying things you already know you'll be decent at. Anything where you'd have to sit in the discomfort of not knowing, you bail before it gets real.
I was like this during my logistics years too but I didn't notice because I never had time for anything else. No time for hobbies. No time to discover that I couldn't handle being bad at something. The business was my whole identity and I was good at the business. Everything checked out.
Now I have time. Lots of it. And the time exposed something I didn't want to see. I need to be competent the way some people need to be liked. It's not a preference. It's a dependency. If I'm not good at something quickly, I feel worthless. And instead of sitting with that feeling, I just stop doing the thing and go back to checking dashboards where I know what I'm doing.
You've felt this. Maybe you tried something creative and stopped because the first attempt wasn't good enough. Maybe you signed up for a class and quit the second week because being bad in front of other people felt like something was actually wrong with you. Maybe you watched someone fumble through a new skill with zero self-consciousness and thought what the hell is wrong with me that I can't do that.
My buddy with the guitar. He's genuinely not good. He misses notes. Forgets chords halfway through a song. Stops, laughs at himself, starts over. He played for me and two other guys on the beach after a morning session and he wasn't performing. He was just doing something he enjoyed doing.
I sat there thinking: I have not done something I enjoyed doing without needing to be good at it since I was maybe twelve years old.
That's a long time to only allow yourself things you can win at.
I still have the guitar. It's leaning against the wall in my apartment. I pick it up sometimes. Not to practice. Not to get good. Just to sit with the feeling of being bad at something and not run from it.
Some days I last ten minutes. Some days I put it down after two. But I haven't sold it yet. That feels like something.
The waves here have been good this week. I've been surfing two years and I'm still mediocre. The difference is I stuck with surfing long enough to get past the part where being bad felt personal. Took about five months. Five months of eating shit in the whitewash before I could just be a guy on a board who wasn't great and didn't care.
I'm trying to get the guitar to five months.
No guarantees.
— Best, Jose
