Be crappy as fast as possible.

Seriously. The biggest mistake people make is trying to skip the “crappy” stage. They want to show up already good. Already polished. Already impressive. And when that doesn’t happen… they stall out. They hide. They wait until some mythical day when they’re “ready.”

Except that day never comes.

I saw this all the time in our language school. Students would sit silently, notebooks filled with perfect grammar rules and vocabulary lists, waiting for the moment when they could open their mouths and sound fluent. They wanted the final step without ever taking the first wobbly, ugly ones.

But the only way you get to fluency is by tripping over your tongue a few hundred times first. You don’t “think” your way into speaking. You stumble into it. You mispronounce half the words, forget the other half, and make a few strangers laugh at your terrible accent. And then… after doing that long enough… you wake up one day and realize you’re speaking.

I see the exact same thing in our college prep counseling business. Parents who need help are scared to raise their hand because they think it makes them look like bad parents. They think asking for help is admitting failure, when in reality it’s just the normal first stage. Every parent is “crappy” at some point (because parenting doesn’t come with a manual, and if it did, you’d probably spill coffee on it before page two anyway).

Here’s the truth most people don’t like to hear: no matter what “it” is (playing guitar, launching a business, writing, parenting, cooking) at some point, you were or will be terrible at it. Unless you’re a once-in-a-generation prodigy, you have to be crappy before you’re good. That’s the entrance fee.

So why waste time pretending you can skip that part? Why not just lean into it?

Be comfortable being crappy.

Better yet… enjoy it.

Because when you’re crappy, you’re free. You don’t have expectations weighing you down. Nobody is shocked when you mess up. You get to experiment. You get to laugh at yourself. And you get to learn without the crushing pressure of “I should already be good at this.”

The faster you can get through that stage, the faster you get to the other side. It’s like running through a rainstorm. If you tiptoe and try not to get wet, you just stay miserable longer. But if you sprint (if you let yourself get soaked) you’re out the other side way sooner.

Same thing here. If you want to stop being crappy faster, the trick is simple: be crappy more often. Speak up more. Try again sooner. Take another swing before your brain talks you out of it.

That’s the whole formula. Don’t avoid the crappy stage. Multiply it.

So go ahead. Be crappy. Be proudly, unapologetically, wonderfully crappy. Do it today. Do it tomorrow. Do it so many times that “crappy” runs out of steam and has to hand the baton off to “pretty decent.” And eventually, “pretty decent” hands it off to “good.”

That’s how you get there. Not by waiting. Not by hiding. But by being crappy… and doing it faster.