September 24, 2026 · Taipei, Taiwan

The Abstruse Art of Being Bad

Why ever pick up a paintbrush if you’ll never paint like Monet?

I never had much interest in the Olympics, or sports in general. Something about athletes pushing themselves to the extremes time and time again, just to be forced to retire sometime in their twenties or earlier, often due to injury, just seemed to me like participating in their inevitable demise. And yet I couldn't escape the coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics, gold medal Olympian Alysa Liu captivating the hearts of not only the judges, but the general populace as well. I read many articles and comments talking about how effortless she made the sport look, how she was changing the sport from being about rigorous training to actually having fun on the ice. Seeing her Olympic performance even won me, a lifelong sports disliker, over as well.

Inspired by her and the other extraordinary athletes at Milano Cortina 2026, I tried briefly to get into figure skating too (what's with me and always collecting expensive hobbies…?). It turns out, skating is a lot less effortless than it seems when watching it on YouTube Shorts. I maybe should have predicted that already being unsteady on my feet on land would not translate over well to balancing on 4-millimeter-thick blades on a surface with a near-zero coefficient of friction. I tried again recently, as Taipei had a free entry day at my local arena. I remember texting someone after, saying, “I think I only like the concept of ice skating. I’m not good enough to actually enjoy doing it myself.” Because it was not immediately easy for me, I decided it wasn’t for me at all.

Tangentially, when I was really young, one day my dad showed me videos of people my age or younger playing full piano concertos. He would praise their musicality and technical skill. After getting me excited about playing piano and maybe one day being like these kids, he turned off the computer and said, “But you'll never be able to play like that anyway.”

Psychological maltreatment aside, this statement stuck with me for many years. I abhorred practicing the piano in my youth, doing just enough each week to not completely disappoint my piano teachers but no more than that. It wasn't until high school, when the peer pressure of all of my friends doing and competing in music made me strive to actually improve. Yet, the statement continued to infiltrate my pursuits. I once got into my all-state jazz band, and yet even then, I still felt the crushing weight of not being good enough, feeling like I cheated my way there… by practicing.

I always felt others were more deserving of the spot, being just naturally better than me. Even with a lot of practicing, I never felt like my soloing on the piano ever even held a light to some of the people I performed with, or some of the people I competed against. Me getting the spot over them felt like pure luck. Thinking back now, I wonder why?

While I have many a bone to pick with him, Freud’s concept of the ego as the mind’s way of mediating the demands of the id (our immediate desires) and the constraints of the superego (our ideal self) with the reality of the external world does, in part, explain the reasoning for why we feel this way.

When your ego convinces you that an accomplished sportsperson or musician is simply naturally gifted on another level, your mind raises them to an elite status in order to protect how you see yourself. In addition, we want to believe that it just comes easy to these people. That Alysa Liu just went out on that rink and dazzled everyone without even breaking a sweat. It hurts our psyche to know that we could have maybe been on that podium too if we had put in the effort for a consistent amount of time.

It’s easier to put someone on a pedestal when you truly believe you would never be able to achieve the same yourself. Because a three-minute skate doesn’t show us all of the scrapes, falls, bruises, scars, or tears that it took to make it look that easy, we just see it and believe that it came naturally to her. Even when we try to account for the tremendous amount of effort that it took to get there, we hardly ever truly believe that we could do the same with the same amount of effort.

Because starting now and putting in that amount of effort seems pointless now. If only I had started years ago… maybe in another life…

This defeatist attitude is what keeps us shackled to unhappiness, unable to overcome the idea that we must always be doing something that adds value or profit to society. Why ever pick up a paintbrush if you’ll never paint like Monet? Why ever strum a guitar if you’ll never solo like Hendrix? Why do anything if you’ll always be bad?

Thus brings me to my point about the abstruse art of being bad. We desire so badly that we could just do things and automatically be good at them. Because what is the point of doing them if it amounts to nothing? It’s almost embarrassing, especially as an adult, to attempt to pick up hobbies and be bad at them.

Because when someone at work asks you what you did this weekend and you tell them, “I practiced my skating,” what’s there to show when you spent those hours just circling the rink, no fancy jumps or spins, just focusing on trying not to fall and break your arms?

Why is it so bad to be bad?

As some of you are too aware, I am currently studying Mandarin. It is a struggle I have grappled with for around two years now, with breaks in between where I had no official instruction. When I came to my first day of class in Taiwan and saw I was in the level 2 class, I got a bit excited.

I had previously tested into “Intermediate Mid” on the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview, marking approximately the halfway point to “Advanced,” or fully fluent. I thought the level 2 class was out of 3 levels, signifying intermediate. You could imagine my disappointment to know that no, I was not in the intermediate class. I was in level 2 of the beginner course sequence.

While I ultimately ended up switching to level 3 of the beginner course sequence, my grapples with inadequacy did not halt. Especially as I was learning an entirely new reading and writing system than I had studied previously (traditional instead of simplified characters), I started internalizing the feeling of being bad.

When you know so many characters, and yet you go outside and can’t read a single sign or hold a full conversation with a person, what’s even the point of continuing to learn?

Many have laughed at my attempts to study Mandarin, as the idea of becoming fluent in any language as an adult is already a monumental undertaking, Mandarin being perhaps one of the hardest for an English speaker to grasp. I get asked all the time why Mandarin and, truthfully, I don’t have a good answer.

I got a scholarship to study it and I ended up having more fun than I imagined. It was, at its best, a hobby for me, but turned into so much more than that. And yet, a part of me, one I try to ignore, is always telling me to stop wasting my time with something I’ll never be good at, or likely even use in my professional life.

But if we believed that everything wasn’t worth doing for the risk of being bad at something, we would probably never have anything at all. If only geniuses, virtuosos, and prodigies were the only ones keeping the world together, we would have died out millions of years ago.

Taking the time to be truly, deliberately bad at something is painful for the psyche, yes. But the growth it provides to you overall cannot be understated. Once you accept not being good, once you realize you don’t even have to be good, only then can you begin finding joy in the things you do.

Because in our hypercapitalist society where everything must always be exploited for a profit, being bad at something is looked down upon, because what’s even the point if you can’t immediately make money off of it?

Being bad at something is a rebellion against the status quo, a beautiful reminder that we are not locked into a fate of simply working until we die. People will try to convince you otherwise, but there is value in doing something badly. Even doing something badly for the rest of your life—as long as it brought you joy, it was well worth the effort.

I cannot sit here and say “there is no shame in starting” because realistically, there is a bit of shame that comes with starting out and being bad. Instead of feeling that shame, feel the shame of the you that never started.

In 20 years, you will be 20 years older, no matter what. To me, there is more shame in never starting than in starting late and starting out badly. In 20 years, you will look back at your life and have regrets. If you only take the time to be bad at something now, even if you never truly become “good,” at least wishing you actually started will not be one of them.

~Liz