With school fast approaching (or for some, already here) this mid-June post by Seth Godin is worth keeping in mind when you are attempting to get better at any skill.

I’ve written about Seth Godin before (you can find the posts here and here), and if you never heard of him, he’s worth checking out. He’s written some great books (I recommend The Dip and Purple Cow, but all of them are great) and while he focuses lots of his topics on business-related stuff, they are quite applicable to any creative, competitive field (like music).

His June 16, 2018 blog entry, titled The danger of “not good enough” is a great example of how we usually talk to ourselves and how we should  talk to ourselves.

He also has a very short paragraph that is one of my most favorite teaching ideas that lots of students don’t really seem to internalize as much as I’d like them to:

Of course, at least once you wrote a great line of code or crafted a good headline. At least once you made a good diagnosis or calmed a patient. At least once you did something extraordinary. So it’s not that you can’t do it.

You can pretty easily swap out “wrote a great line of code or crafted a good headline” anything, and yet the underlying principle still holds true.

The next line is maybe the most important sentence on the entire page, so make sure that you go check it out. It’s relatively long for a Godin blog entry, at 8 paragraphs, but half of them are only one sentence long!

If you want more Seth Godin, you can either subscribe to his RSS feed or you can get his blog articles delivered to you each day by email. And don’t forget about his books!