The Valley of Humiliation and Confusion

To start doing something you can't do yet, you have to walk through a valley of confusion: fear, helplessness and shame. Here is how I do it.

How do you get to the next level?

Whenever we want to change something important in our life, we have to walk through a valley of confusion and incompetence.

A new level always means we start taking fundamentally new actions. Our current level of skill and thinking guarantees (and even then, not always) only our current results.

For new things to start working out — things we don’t yet know how to do — we have to start practising. To get off the starting blocks in our learning.

The first steps in a new direction are often fear, confusion, a feeling of humiliation, a sense of helplessness and hopelessness.

Want to become a photographer? You go through the valley of confusion with camera settings and the Lightroom interface. You learn how to grow an Instagram account with 19 followers and zero reach in stories.

Want to work in IT? The valley of confusion with a new programming language and a code editor. You hear the words “server”, “GitHub” and “Docker” for the first time.

Want to build a happy relationship? The valley of not understanding the person you love, the logic of their actions and thoughts. You learn emotional intelligence from scratch and figure out how to handle your emotions.

Want to become a blogger? The valley of confusion with social media algorithms and the technical settings of different platforms. You shoot dozens of takes and don’t like a single one of them.

And it works this way in everything. For something to start working out, we have to step into an area of growth that is new to us. To walk onto a racing track on foot, so to speak. Other people — the ones who have been in this game for years — go flying past us in fast cars, while we are trying to attach a flat wheel to our scooter and move forward somehow.

But that is only the beginning. Those who make it through the valley end up with very decent results. Practice in any field pays off in time.

How do I personally get through valleys like this?

1. I open YouTube and Google and spend 10–15 hours researching the question I need answered.
2. Then I buy books by the authors who looked useful to me online.
3. I buy other people’s time and knowledge. People who are already experienced in that field and can give me a consultation.
4. If my new approach doesn’t work, I try a different one very quickly. At the start of the road, the speed of testing your hypotheses matters more than their quality, in my opinion.
5. I keep growing in the topic even when the main “valley of confusion” is long behind me.

If you stay in the position of a student rather than an “expert”, it is impossible to embarrass yourself as an expert. When you are a student, you are open, and the result matters more to you than being right and protecting your pride.

For a lot of people it is exactly that crown on their head that keeps them out of the valley of not knowing. How can it be that I, so smart and so grown up, would learn a subject from scratch like a schoolkid? Ask stupid, embarrassing questions, ask them again…

But pride and being closed off cost a great deal. A closed picture of the world means we will keep dancing with the very same problems forever.

So how do you pick up new skills?

How do you get through valleys like this?