Learning by doing

Why are we so afraid of the doing? I have been thinking about this for a while. As someone who works on many tangible things, and in some craft oriented domains, doing is the ultimate way of learning. And yet, starting new things takes time, and then actually doing them takes even longer with mountains of barriers, of resistance in between.

So many things require you to “do” but it is hard to do. You want to learn by reading but you can’t. Doing feels scary, it makes the fear much more pronounced when you know for real that it can fail. Maybe that’s what makes doing scary. It’s the ultimate test of knowing. It’s not about the abstract, the imaginary at all. It is all about what you can see. What you make, and how that gets absorbed.

If I think about making a line, it is super easy to keep thinking about it, but the moment i actually physically make it, it would be hard to not scrutinise each and every aspect of it. This is why doing is scary. And hard. Coz who can face so much rejection and so much harsh reality of all the gaps that you already have.

So, I want to write, but writing regularly feels scary. Every time I put something out there, it is easier to find data and information about how what I am writing doesn’t connect to people. How maybe no one responds to it. Maybe no one finds any value in it. And then I can convince myself that maybe I don’t want it so much. Not with that much urgency or with so much value. And somewhere deep inside me, I do feel it, but easier to let myself bottle up my inspiration and curiosity, than to expose myself to failure.

Why are we so failure sensitive as people? What if one isn’t perfect? What if one actually is perfect? I wonder what the pressure for that must feel like.

And what is the antidote to this fear of failure? I haven’t found anything other than doing, making, creating. Honestly it’s probably coz I have been feeling more in a doing space for the last some weeks, and that’s the sole reason why I am able to even tackle this topic. Otherwise this would have too much like calling myself out.

Hopefully this is one of those things, where the more I do it, the easier it becomes to continue to do it.