I’m a terrible painter. Genuinely awful.
The last watercolor I made looked like a bruised sunset throwing up on itself. My sister said it was “interesting,” which is what people say when they can’t find anything nice.
I paint anyway. Almost every Sunday.
The problem with being good
For most of my adult life, I only did things I was good at. Not consciously—I didn’t sit down and make a rule. It just happened. I drifted toward activities where I could succeed, get praise, feel competent.
Work. Cooking (eventually). Organizing things into spreadsheets. The handful of video games I’d played enough times to actually win.
Everything else? I quietly stopped.
I tried pottery once in my late twenties. Made a lopsided bowl. Felt embarrassed. Never went back.
Picked up guitar at 23. Couldn’t get past the F chord. Sold the guitar six months later.
Started running, got shin splints, decided running “wasn’t for me.”
See the pattern?
What changed
Last March, my friend Dani invited me to a painting night at her apartment. Six people, cheap wine, a YouTube tutorial, zero expectations.
I said yes because I wanted to see Dani, not because I wanted to paint.
Two hours later, I had the worst painting in the room. Everyone else made something recognizable. Mine looked like a fever dream in acrylic.
And here’s the thing—I had fun. More fun than I’d had in months. My shoulders dropped. I laughed at myself. I didn’t check my phone once.
On the drive home, I kept thinking about it. When was the last time I’d done something purely for enjoyment, without any hope of being good at it?
I couldn’t remember.
The experiment
I decided to try something for three months: pick an activity I was bad at and do it weekly, with no intention of improving.
Watercolors. Sundays. One hour minimum.
The rules were simple:
No tutorials. I didn’t want to learn. I wanted to dabble.
No sharing. Nobody would see these except me. No pressure to make them Instagram-worthy.
No judgment. If it looked like garbage, that was fine. The point wasn’t the painting.
The first few weeks felt weird. I kept catching myself trying to get better. Watching my brush strokes. Analyzing what went wrong. Old habits.
But around week four, something shifted.
I stopped caring. Not in a defeated way—in a free way. I’d slap color onto paper without planning. Mix pigments that shouldn’t go together. Make deliberate messes.
It was the most relaxed I’d felt in years.
What I actually learned
I didn’t get better at painting. That wasn’t the point. But I did notice a few things.
My need for competence was exhausting. I hadn’t realized how much energy I spent trying to be good at everything. Work, relationships, hobbies, even relaxing—I was optimizing all of it. Painting badly gave me permission to stop.
Fun doesn’t require skill. Kids know this. They draw stick figures and feel like Picasso. Somewhere along the way, I forgot.
The best hobbies are the useless ones. There’s nothing productive about my Sunday paintings. They don’t improve my career. They won’t become a side hustle. They’re just… enjoyable. That’s enough.
The things I’m bad at now
The painting experiment opened something up. I’ve since added a few more “bad at this” activities to my life:
Chess. I lose constantly. My rating on the app is embarrassing. I play almost every night.
Singing. In the shower, in the car, occasionally at karaoke. I’m off-key more often than not. Doesn’t matter.
Baking bread. My loaves look like sad rocks. They taste okay, though. Sometimes.
None of these will ever be impressive. That’s the whole point.
The look on my sister’s face
Last month, I showed her my latest watercolor. Still bad. Maybe slightly less bad. She didn’t say “interesting” this time.
She said, “You really like doing this, don’t you?”
I do. I really do.
What’s something you used to enjoy before you decided you weren’t good enough at it?