Do you remember when you first learned to ride a bike? I am guessing, that like me, you didn’t automatically get on and ride off into the sunset. You probably had a few wipe outs and falls. Maybe you struggled with making a sharp turn. Or perhaps breaking was your problem. Either way, I am sure you have a few memories of your mom or dad putting bandaids on your scraped knees, like I do.

Riding a bike certainly isn’t the hardest thing we’ve ever learned, but it wasn’t easy either. I think many of us have forgotten that fact. Because it is “riding a bike”—none of us have forgotten how to do it, which means we don’t remember that it took time to find our balance. We don’t readily remember the training wheels, the falls, and the scratched knees. And above all, we have forgotten that learning something—anything new—takes time.

Over the past few years, I have been reminded of this—of the long process involved in becoming good at something. I left a job that I was really comfortable in, one that I had become an “expert” at. In many ways, there wasn’t much left for me to learn where I had been—and there weren’t any opportunities to grow. So I left, and eventually realized I needed to take up writing. But I was scared.

Like anyone starting something new, the idea of failure haunted me. What if people who had known me in my former job watched me fail at writing? What if I put my writing online and it wasn’t good? What if I made a terrible mistake? —All of these questions and more seemed to come at me everyday to the point where my fear felt paralyzing. But more than anything, my problem was that:

I had forgotten what it was like to learn to ride a bike.

To learn how to ride a bike, as a child, meant I had to be ok with falling. Even though I tried to avoid it at all cost, I knew from watching others that it was inevitable. Falling was a part of learning—it was a part of becoming good at riding a bike. But, as I have discovered, it is also an important part of becoming good at anything.

In order to succeed, to become an expert at something, we need to be ok with first being terrible. We need to expect to fall, while working to become better. Opposed to what our fame-hungry culture shows us, no one is an overnight success. No one.

Michael Phelps didn’t jump in the pool for the first time, and swim a record breaking 400 meter. Tom Brady wasn’t picked in the first round of the NFL Draft—people thought he was too skinny to be a quarter back. He had to work to prove himself. And one of my favorite authors, Jen Hatmaker, talks about how people know her for the past two books she has written—yet know nothing about the other nine she wrote when no one knew who she was.

There is a journey to becoming good—to even becoming known for what you do. But for all of us, it begins much like learning how to ride a bike. There may be some falls, a few tears, and perhaps quite a few scrapes and bruises. However, if it means we never have to wonder “what if?” about a dream that we didn’t chase, I believe the falls will be worth it.

Do you remember how you learned to ride your bike?

What dream of yours is stuck, because you’re afraid of falling?

 

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