learn to be bad at the thing for as long as it takes. the slow way. where you do it badly on a tuesday and again on a wednesday and again every day for three years. where you make a hundred things you would not show anyone. where you absorb the craft through your hands before your mind has any idea what is happening. almost nobody stays in this room. the room of being bad is a room they cannot tolerate. they need the proof, the progress, the visible improvement - and the visible improvement does not come for a long time. it comes after enough mornings have passed that the badness has started to refine itself, quietly, without your supervision, into something else. you have to fall in love with being bad at it. nothing else will keep you in the room long enough.