the case for doing things badly

i want to make a case for the first attempt.

not the polished version, or the one you'd feel comfortable showing someone. the actual first one. the one where you didn't know what you were doing yet, where your body or your hands or your instincts hadn't caught up to the thing you were trying.

that one. i think it deserves to exist somewhere. i think it deserves to be saved.

what we actually do with first attempts

most first attempts disappear. not because we throw them away, but because we just don't acknowledge them. we try something, it goes badly, and we file it under "doesn't count yet." we'll start the real record once we're better. once the attempts are worth saving.

the problem is that the threshold keeps moving. you get a little better and the new version of you decides the earlier stuff still doesn't count. and somewhere in that loop, the whole first chapter of the thing gets quietly erased.

sherry turkle, a researcher at mit who has spent decades studying how people relate to objects and collections, writes about how the things we keep become part of how we understand ourselves. what we save shapes what story we can tell. and if you only save the good versions, the story you get is a highlight reel that starts somewhere in the middle.

the first attempt, bad as it was, is actually the beginning. it's the proof that you started.

the beginner's mind problem

in zen buddhism there's a concept called shoshin - beginner's mind. the idea, as the teacher shunryu suzuki put it, is that "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." the beginner hasn't foreclosed anything yet. they try things an expert would never try, because the expert already knows those things don't work.

what doesn't get said enough is that beginner's mind is also beginner's freedom. when you don't know what you're doing, you can't really fail in the way that counts. you're just learning the shape of the thing. every bad result is actually information, not failure.

the problem is that most people don't experience it that way. they experience the bad first attempt as evidence about themselves, about their ability, their potential, whether this is "for them." they're already applying expert standards to beginner work.

and when the attempt is bad and there's nowhere to put it, that interpretation has nowhere to go except inward.

the first reformer class

a few weeks ago i walked into a reformer pilates class at a new studio. it was their early days, so it ended up being just me and the instructor, who also happened to be the owner. she took one look at me and assumed i'd be fine. i looked reasonably fit. she started the class.

very quickly, she realized i needed modifications. then more modifications. by the end i was trembling so hard i couldn't complete most of the moves. i'd attempt something, my body would disagree completely, and i'd just sit there taking a break while she waited patiently. i was holding the bar for support at the end of a sequence that was not designed to involve the bar at all. i was, objectively, the least prepared person who could have walked into that room.

i went back the next week. and the week after that. i still can't do everything. i'm still getting modifications. but i'm also noticeably stronger than i was, in ways i can feel but couldn't have predicted from that first class.

here's what i wish i'd done: taken a photo of something from that first session. not to post it, not to perform humility about being a beginner, just to mark that it happened. because that class is the beginning of this particular era, and without some record of it, the story of how i got stronger starts somewhere in the middle, after i'd already improved enough to look like i knew what i was doing.

the first attempt is always the beginning of the arc. it's not an embarrassing outlier. it's chapter one.

what the research says about failure and learning

carol dweck's work on mindset is useful here, but maybe not in the way it usually gets applied. her research distinguishes between a fixed mindset (ability is static, you either have it or you don't) and a growth mindset (ability develops through effort and practice). the growth mindset finding that gets quoted most is that people who believe they can improve tend to persist longer and perform better over time.

but what's less quoted is the mechanism. in her studies, people with a growth mindset didn't just try harder. they processed failure differently. they stayed curious about what went wrong. they treated the bad attempt as data rather than verdict.

the first sourdough being bad is not a verdict about your ability to make bread. it's data about what happens when flour and water and starter and heat interact under these specific conditions, on this specific morning, with your specific technique at this specific stage of learning. that's actually a lot of information.

saving it is a way of staying curious instead of closing the file.

why this is actually a design philosophy

soft launch has no way to mark something as a first attempt versus a later one. there's no rating, no quality filter, no way to distinguish the early photos from the recent ones except by when they were taken. the first reformer class and the twentieth just live next to each other, in order, which is also the order things actually happened.

this is intentional. the app can't tell the difference between your best attempt and your first one, because that distinction is not the point. what you tried is the point. that you showed up and took a photo is the point.

there's something bj fogg calls "the celebration habit" in tiny habits. the idea that acknowledging a behavior immediately after it happens is one of the most effective ways to wire it in. not because of the celebration itself, but because of what it signals to you about the behavior. it says: this counts. you did this. it happened.

saving the bad sourdough is a version of that. it says: this attempt counts. you started. it happened. even if the loaf was wrong, the morning when you tried was real.

what changes when you keep the bad version

here's the thing i've noticed about collections that include the early, bad attempts: they become honest in a way that polished collections aren't.

when you look at a collection that starts from the beginning - the actual beginning - you can see the real shape of how something develops. you can see that it wasn't linear. you can see that there were harder weeks and easier ones, attempts that felt like going backward before they went forward. you can see that you're not the same person who showed up for the first class.

that's a different kind of document than a highlight reel. it's closer to what actually happened.

and practically, it changes what feels possible to start. if the first attempt is worth saving - if it's expected, even - the bar to begin drops considerably. you don't have to wait until you're ready to have something worth showing. you just have to be willing to try and take a photo of what happens.

every era starts somewhere. that somewhere is always worth keeping.

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