If Something's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Badly...

For many reasons, among which is that trying and failing helps you really appreciate the skill and technique required to do it well.

G.K. Chesterton has many great quotes, including the line, “If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” This seems to reverse the ordinary formulation, that anything worth doing is worth doing well, but the two sayings are complementary. If something is worth doing well, then it is worthwhile to try to do it yourself, and your first attempts will probably go badly. Mistakes will be made and, hopefully, learned from, but if you stick with it and keep trying, you will eventually do it well — at least well enough to enjoy it and derive benefit from doing it.

If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly . . . well, most things. You probably don’t want to do mountain-climbing “badly.” (Photo by Brad Barmore on Unsplash)

One of the benefits of trying to do something well, even if you end up doing it badly, is that you develop a real appreciation for the skill and technique required to do it well.

Anyone can enjoy watching a competition between athletes playing at the top of their game, but nobody appreciates it more than those who have trained and competed in the sport themselves. They pick up on the little things that an inexperienced spectator misses: the mastery of fundamentals and the synthesis of a thousand little techniques into a grand, dynamic strategy to outperform a similarly skilled competitor.

Everyone loves a great comeback story, but nobody loves those stories more than those who have fought similar battles, and who stayed in the fight even though victory seemed impossible.

This is true in any creative endeavor. You may have little knack for painting, but if you give it an earnest shot, you will have a better experience the next time you go to an art gallery; you’ll notice aesthetic details you would have otherwise missed.

Even the most seemingly prosaic tasks can be like this: as someone who has never been mechanically inclined or gifted, I can say that after trying, and failing, to fix a broken appliance, I have experienced genuine admiration and awe when I watched a repairman restoring the machine to good working order.

I love playing piano and writing music as a hobby. Though my skills are very unpolished and I will almost certainly never make a dime from it, I do enjoy it, simply for its own sake. One of the added benefits of this is that it has enhanced my enjoyment when listening to others performing music well (although it has also increased my frustration with and disdain for the absolute shite that is most popular “music” today).