When I lived in Germany as a nanny, after I graduated from college, a really interesting thing happened to my brain.

See, I was accustomed to being able to get an A in almost everything I tried to learn. (Except for gym, ugh ><).

German was no exception. The summer before I left for Marburg, I took an intensive 3-month class at my university — and I got an A+. 

But when I stepped off the plane, and it suddenly felt like it was nighttime during the day and day during the night, and EVERYONE around me was speaking German and all the signs and magazines and nutrition labels were in German…my brain just shut down. It felt like someone had poured Elmer’s glue into my ear and it had seeped into my whole head. I couldn’t say a word, and I couldn’t understand anyone. I remember the embassy worker complaining that I really should have learned SOME German before arriving.

This might be the most important lesson I’ve ever received in my life.

Firstly, that being good at something “on paper” does NOT mean you actually know how to apply that knowledge. Please remember that the next time someone pontificates about their fancy degree, or barfs out a bunch of facts about AI. Getting results is what matters; their transcript from Fancy Person University isn’t going to tell them what to do when the feature update is late and half the team is out with the flu.

The second part of the lesson was far more subtle and I didn’t grasp it until I’d been in Germany a few months. 

I now had lots of experiences under my belt:

-I’d sat down to breakfast, lunch and dinner with my host family every day and listened to their cozy chitchat over Blut-Orange tea. 

-I’d started to care for the adorable two-year-old who had approximately the same aptitude for the language as me (let’s be honest, she was better than me) and I suddenly had to say urgent things like Don’t touch the stove, it’s hot!  

-I’d started to make friends with other foreigners and the only common language we had was German.

Here’s what I learned from all that: 

That Elmer’s Glue in the brain feeling? It was a panic attack. It was me panicking because for the first time in my life I had no choice but to do something badly.  I was going to have to navigate a conversation knowing full well how cringe the other person thought I was. That terrified me so much I couldn’t even make one word come out.

I also learned that speaking perfectly is actually not necessary to make yourself understood. My foreigner friends and I would screw up word endings and genders constantly. I know this will horrify language teachers out there, but not being perfect didn’t actually matter that much in my daily life. And being around other people who were learning made me feel way more comfortable making mistakes.

Finally, I learned that when I was calm, I had a lot less trouble understanding people, even when they used a bunch of words that I didn’t know. I learned to use context clues. I learned to use other types of communication - especially body language. 

My brain had just accepted that not knowing every 3rd or 4th word was normal, and nothing to be concerned about. 

But more than that - when I was calm, all that stuff I’d learned in my classes or absorbed from conversations happening around me, it bubbled up, all by itself. None of my knowledge was “lost.”

Okay, so what does all that have to do with my creative life now? Why was it the most important thing I’ve learned?

 It’s because more often than not in this career, especially when you’re getting started, you’re going to run into situations where you going to feel like you’re five steps behind everyone else. And most of the time, that’s going to be warranted and accurate to what the facts are.

But the only way to learn is to allow yourself to be bad at first. And to not only be okay with that, but to accept that you may never have a chance to enjoy your fluency before the next new thing pops up. 

Instead of looking at how good others are, you zoom in on yourself and celebrate yourself for each new milestone you gain. You decide what result you want to have, and you focus on that instead of trying to be good at all of it.

You focus on calming yourself down and letting your brain do its mysterious magical thing where you put in some ingredients and it bubbles them around until they are ready to sink in.

This is what allows me to have fun learning a new prototyping software or design tool every time a new one comes out (so, like every 20 minutes, basically).

Not being perfect doesn’t mean you can’t succeed. In fact, being willing to be imperfect might be the secret sauce in succeeding.

--------------------

Disclaimer: I wouldn’t call myself fluent by German standards at this point in time, but if you air-dropped me into the middle of a random German town I could definitely find food, transportation, and somewhere to sleep.