A successful friend recently gave me some advice. He said, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” It took me a while to get it. What he’s saying is we aren’t going to succeed the first time we try something, or the second, or the third, or even the fiftieth. There’s a learning curve for everything. One famous writer says it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. The truth is if you don’t give yourself permission to do something badly, you’ll never do it well, or at all. You might reach a plateau and think, you’ll never go beyond it, but that’s the time to up your game, and keep going. So take a breath. Look at the progress you’ve already made. Make a list of things you can do now you couldn’t before you started to remind yourself, and keep on going!