If you wish to improve, you must be willing to look clueless or stupid about something.

That means:

  1. You have to be willing to ask dumb questions. If you don’t ask, you can’t learn. If you are afraid of what other people think, you’ll never learn what you don’t know. But the other part is you have to be willing to not care about stuff - to be like “I don’t care about that. I am not following that. I am out of touch about that.”.
  2. You have to be willing to be bad at stuff, to be in the beginner stages, to be embarrassingly figuring it out, or to be mediocre.

So if you want to improve, the Stoics say you have to be willing to look stupid, because that is how you get from where you are to where you want to go.

This article is part of the 30 Day Writing Challenge. I’ll challenge myself to write whatever comes to mind.