I remember watching an old movie that starred some popular Nigerian actors. For the life of me, I couldn’t believe how poor quality of the production and the acting. Even the story was weird.
We may have laughed at those actors and producers years ago, especially if we compared them to their international counterparts. Well, they are the ones laughing now.
Their acting and movie quality was poor. That was years ago. Now, these actors have become outstanding in their work. They have become legends in their field. And the movie industry has improved production quality dramatically, too.
They were willing to start doing something poorly and improve over time. They didn’t wait until they had all their ducks in a row before they pursued their dreams. They were not perfect, things were not perfect, but they were willing to start where they were with what they had. They put in the work and they grew.
Of course, I took a lesson from all of this: We need to be okay with doing something poorly at first before we start doing it well. Otherwise, we may never start at all. It is practically impossible to start at level 100; everyone starts somewhere, and it’s not at level 100. It is unrealistic to think we can get something right the first time we do it.
Whoever we want to be, whatever we want to do, excellence has been wired into our DNA because we have the Spirit of God. For this reason, excellence is a possibility, a potential. It doesn’t happen automatically.
Many times, we will truly be inept and inadequate at something, and it will take some practice and time to adjust and do it excellently. We should not let our desire for excellence stop us from getting started. Because it is in getting started and moving forward that we become excellent.
Excellence comes with practice and feedback. The more we do something, receive feedback, and improve on it, the better we become at it. And this applies to anything – loving, praying, writing, doing business, forgiving, making videos, acting, giving, communicating, parenting, public speaking, creating products – anything at all.
So, if you’re starting something new, it’s okay to do it poorly at first. In fact, it’s almost a given. What is not in keeping with our divine nature of excellence is if we remain poor at it. We can and should continually improve. Knowing this, what are we going to start where we are and grow at?