Yesterday I was reading an article on Medium called The Perfectionism Conundrum - How to Overcome Perfectionism and Its Ramifications and the Author of the article shared an interesting quote that really resonated with me:
The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel.
For example, comparing your writing process with the best work of a writer who spent years mastering his craft won't bring you anything but insecurity and frustration. You'll look at what that person made, probably after years of hard work, and you'll wonder why you can't do the same thing, and why it takes you hours to write a 1000 words article.
Too many people do this, myself included, and in many cases that brings us down and destroys any mood we have to try harder and learn new things. We're not and we're probably not gonna be as good as some professionals not because we're not capable of that, but because we didn't work enough yet.
We compare what we do in hours of work and weeks of practice/learning with the work of those who spent decades doing one single thing and getting good at it. That won't help you get far.
What you could do, instead of comparing yourself with people who are much better than you, is to allow yourself to be competent.
In the same article the author talked about how he recently started to take martial arts classes and how frustrated he felt at the beginning with the basic things he was learning and practicing again and again.
He was frustrated not because he thought those things are useless, but because he knew he won't become a professional in just a few days or weeks by constantly repeating the same basic lessons.
Even tho he knew it was impossible to be really good in that short amount of time, he was frustrated that he can't get at the level of those who practiced that particular fighting style for years.
The way he solved his problem was by trying to forget about becoming the best and achieve perfection, and instead allow himself to be competent.
Most of us are competent to do something, no matter what it is, even tho we're not the best, and that should be enough for us to keep moving forward and make progress as we learn. If you start learning a programming language, you won't be the best at first, not even after months of hard work.
However, you are competent because you can learn the basics - what variables are, how to use them, how to create functions and loops and so on. If you can learn those things, then you're more than capable to achieve even a higher level of programming knowledge.
All you need is enough patience and dedication. Working every day and practicing as much as you can will eventually get you where you want to be, but that will take a lot of work. No matter how frustrated we feel, there's no way we're gonna get amazing at something in a really short period of time, unless we have a natural talent for that thing.
This is an important lesson I've been trying to integrate into my daily thinking. Allow yourself to be happy with being competent and to do something every day hoping to get better, but without comparing yourself with those who spent decades improving and getting amazing at what they do.
Once you stop looking at those professionals and be mad about your undeveloped skills, you will realize that even the slightest effort you make daily towards improving helps you move one step forward and that's huge.
No, you're not a professional, but you're competent and that's all you need to be as good as you want.