The Virtue of Being Bad

I recently picked up Hollow Knight. If you've never played platformers before, they're these games where you have to jump around a lot… you guessed it, from platform to platform. And basically everything involves jumping: moving around, fights, etc. Lots of jumping.

Hollow Knight is one of the hardest platformers out there, from everything I've heard, so I should have known that I would get frustrated playing it, but here I am. Why am I punishing myself? Because the art and the music are spectacular.

All this to say that I am bad at this game. I'm so bad it's laughable. It's taken me 7 hours to get through two of the bosses. I've done in 7 hours what speedrunners have done in like 10 minutes. I think I've probably died about 90 times. If the game kept stats, I'd actually think it was funny, but it doesn't.

I don't particularly enjoy being bad at things. I don't know if anyone does. It's not particularly fun to have to do things over and over again. I don't get thrills out of micro-wins—finally making it through a jump puzzle once after dying and running back to it only to die again fifty times. The endorphins and little celebration I do after are fine and all, but sometimes I just think the juice isn't worth the squeeze. It's a video game.

But let's reframe our thinking here. I may be bad at this, but I'm also a beginner, and being a beginner might be one of the most interesting times on the journey to getting good. Everything is novel.

The Strange Joy of Productive Struggle

Hopefully, we all make the journey from beginner to expert numerous times in our lives. I think everyone gets relatively good at something once or twice in their life, though for most of us, there has to be some extrinsic motivator, be it money, respect, or fame. And we all go through repeated failures to get there.

But here's the thing: failing is sometimes fun. I used to dance. My favorite was ballet. I was alright—never great, but I performed with a small amateur company for a season before a combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and injuries took me away from it. Being a beginner at ballet was exhilarating. The wins were thrilling. My first big tour jeté, a basic but impressive jump when executed well, in class was electrifying. I remember it like it was yesterday.

What made ballet different from Hollow Knight? Both involved countless failures, repetitive practice, and slow progress. But with ballet, each small breakthrough felt earned in a way that connected to something larger—the artistry, the community, the physical expression. The struggle wasn't just about conquering arbitrary obstacles; it was about becoming someone who could create something beautiful.

When Being Bad Becomes Valuable

I don't know anyone who has learned meaningful skills from only succeeding. Failures teach significantly more. Trying something, seeing if it works, reassessing, and trying again—this is how we learn from beginner to late into our careers. The only real difference between a junior and senior engineer is the amount of time we've spent trying things and learning from them.

This makes me think about how we approach being beginners in our professional lives. Being a beginner in the tech industry these days is not like it was when I started. The avenues for getting into tech are numerous now, and the tools available to newcomers are more powerful than ever. But I wonder if we're inadvertently changing what it means to struggle productively.

When I was learning to code, getting stuck meant really getting stuck—sometimes for hours or days. You'd read documentation, try different approaches, ask for help, and gradually build an understanding of not just what worked, but why. The friction was frustrating, but it was also where the real learning happened.

The Question We Should Be Asking

Today's beginners have access to AI tools that can generate code, explain concepts, and help debug problems instantly (within some margin of error). This is largely good—it democratizes access to programming and can accelerate learning. But it also raises a question: Is AI changing the nature of the productive struggle?

Instead of wrestling with syntax or basic implementation details, beginners might find themselves grappling with different challenges: understanding AI-generated code, learning to craft effective prompts, or distinguishing between good and bad AI suggestions. The question isn't whether AI is eliminating productive struggle, but whether it's changing the nature of that struggle in ways that still build the problem-solving muscles we need.

However, if we're not taking the time to truly understand our failures, then we're only learning to use the tools, not to think through problems independently. Without that deep understanding, we miss the opportunity to innovate. And innovation is what, at least for now, truly separates us from generative AI.

I'm not advocating for artificial obstacles or unnecessary difficulty. I'm suggesting that the discomfort of being bad at something—really bad, laughably bad—might be more valuable than we think. It's in those moments of struggle that we develop the problem-solving muscles and resilience that can't be outsourced.

And So On

I’m pretty bad at a lot of things. I’m not particularly handy or crafty. I’m a total basic bitch when it comes to cooking. I am trying my hand at other kinds of dance without much success. I think I need to embrace my failures and lack of skill in more areas of my life. I might take some cooking classes. Maybe I’ll watch a YouTube video and finally fix the chain that pulls the thing up in the toilet. Maybe I’ll just go make a fool of myself at a hip-hop class.

Because maybe the virtue of being bad isn't about the eventual success it leads to. Maybe it's about learning to sit with uncertainty, to iterate without immediate answers, and to find meaning in the process rather than just the outcome. Even if that process involves dying 90 times in a video game.