You have to feel like an Idiot so some day, you don't.

During my first year on the Sunshine Coast, I rarely surfed. Every time I went, I fell over. Feeling like an idiot, I just decided I’m not good at it. This belief became so engrained that even when I ended up in wonderful places world-renowned for their amazing surf, I never picked up a board (and I regret it deeply).

But for the past month, I’ve been in the water almost every day. I still get tumbled around like an idiot a lot, but I’m starting to catch waves. What changed?

Well, it’s all thanks to a mental model I learned in Basketball years ago. It’s called The Tax and we’ll get there shortly. But first, let’s understand what happened last year.

🔮 Where'd the Magic go?

Getting good at something can be a pretty painful process. Think about the last time you started a new hobby. A new sport. A new project. A new job. If you’re anything like me, it probably looks like this:

The first day is incredibly energetic. Everything is new and exciting. You have all the energy in the world. Just look around in a gym on January 1st, and you see this in action. The first time I went surfing, tried to stand up & fell face-first into the wave, you know I came back to the surface with a big-ass grin.

It’s a beautiful sight to see. In the words of Hermann Hesse (a guy with good words: He won the Literary Nobel Prize):

"Und jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne."
🇬🇧: "A magic dwells in each beginning."

But fast-forward a month and the gym’s a whole lot emptier. Fast forward to my tenth surf, and I was getting frustrated & embarrassed by constantly falling over. What happened? Where’s that magic gone?

Well, sometime in January, the excited gym member realises that they don’t really know what they’re doing. That this is pretty hard. That there’s others around them lifting much heavier weights.

Or in my surfing case: That most people here don’t fall over. That I look like an idiot every time I nosedive and tumble around like someone forgot me in the dryer.

The magic got lost in the Dip. What's that? Let's ask Seth Godin (who wrote a book about it):

The Dip is the time between the first energetic attempts and the point where you can see results. The period where you're not brand new anymore, but you're also not good yet. The point where most people quit.

There’s a Dip in just about any endeavour you can get better at. It’s so common that there's names for specific Dips:

• Our gym example? It’s called “Sweaty January”.
• Those friends that started a podcast and never made it past Episode 7? They’re examples of “Podfading”.

But we’re not trying to feed the urban dictionary - we’re trying to do something worth doing. That’s why we started in the first place, right? So let’s flip the script.

What do we do about the Dip? How do we stick to something once the first excitement has faded? In short: How do we avoid feeling like an idiot?

Here’s where it gets extra fun: We can't & we won't. Our excited gym member won’t magically learn every intricacy of bodyweight exercises. I won’t smack the lip on a gnarly eight-foot wave tomorrow. I haven’t paid the Tax yet.

So, what is this ominous Tax?

🏀 What do they have in common?

Let’s have a look at the best players in Basketball history. Point out any one of them & I’ll bet my left kidney that they have missed upwards of 500,000 shots in their lives.

Not because they can’t shoot - but because they shot. Because they kept holding on through the Dip. Because they paid the Tax.

Why does the Tax matter? Well, imagine you practice for an hour, put up 600 shots and only make 200 of them. Now, you have two options:

• You can go home, beat yourself up about your mediocre accuracy, tell yourself you can’t do it because it’s too hard and decide you’re just not a good basketball player. Give up the new hobby and move on to a new, exciting thing.
• You can go home happy that you’ve paid 400 shots off the tax. You’re 400 steps closer to your goal and you had a lotta fun doing it. So tomorrow, you’re back on the court paying off the tax again.

It’s a fundamental reframing of your practice. The moment I recognised that the Tax for becoming a good surfer is falling over stupidly 1000 times, my attitude got flipped on its head! All of a sudden, a nose dive wasn’t a bad thing anymore. It was progress. I was just paying the Tax.

The moment I didn’t dread the embarrassment of the tumbler anymore, I started going out more. I fell over, grinned & paddled onto the next wave. And who would’ve guessed: 100 nose dives later, I’m much better at surfing. Obviously, I’m still far from great - I have a lot left to pay. But I’m paying.

It’s recognising the price of entry. You can’t play basketball without missing shots. You can’t learn surfing without falling over. It's a simple question: Is that price worth it for me? If it is, get ready to pay the Tax. You can pay it reluctantly or you can pay it with a grin. Either way, you're gonna pay.

🏄‍♂️ But I don't surf...

What a wonderful post for all my surfers & ballers out there. But why should the rest care?

Well, when I felt how this Tax idea completely flipped my approach to surfing, I started wondering if it works for other things. I went through all my projects and found the same pattern. Turns out that for everything worth Doing, there’s a Tax. How do you find it?

This is where we come back to feeling like an idiot. Just look around. Look at the people that have done what you’re trying to do and ask yourself: Where did they feel like an idiot?

For writing online, the Tax is literally just publishing your stuff. Writing every week when no one’s reading it. You better believe I felt like an absolute idiot when I started these essays a year ago. But so did each of the writers I admire today. They paid the Tax. Published for years and constantly improved their writing.

If you wanna be a musician, it’s playing your guitar in the streets while everybody’s walking by. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you better be ready to get rejected at 50 different Venture Capital firms. If you wanna become a great creative chef, there’s lots of burnt dishes and culinary disasters waiting for you.

Miss an important shot. Smack your face into a wave. Publish a bad essay. Sing a song and no one listens. Pitch a company and get a big nope. Try a dish and create dog food. All of these have two things in common:

They make you feel like an idiot. But they make you better at what you do. This was put beautifully by Isabel Unraveled (one of the authors I admire) in her essay on hard things:

You have to feel like an idiot so one day you don’t.

Once you acknowledge this, the idiocy feels so much better. You realise that you’re doing the right thing. You’re doing the only thing that will get you where you want to go. Which is where I have to come clean - I didn’t give you the full quote in the beginning. Here it is:

“The Dip is the long slow slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path.”

😉 Do me a favour: Feel like an idiot.

So today, I invite you to have a look at your current projects, sports & otherwise.

Where are you reluctant to pay the Tax? Where is the fear of feeling like an idiot holding you back from doing something you really want to do?

If it's truly worth doing, a little idiocy seems like a small price to pay. You're not lesser for not being good from the beginning. No one is. They just paid the Tax.