Learning & Growth

You Didn’t Quit Because It Was Hard — You Quit Because It Was Embarrassing

The guitar in your corner isn’t collecting dust because you’re lazy. You just couldn’t stand being bad at it while people watched.

You told yourself you lost interest. You know that’s not what happened | Image by BrettJordan from pexels

I went to the gym alone for the first time last year.

Walked in. Looked around. Everyone seemed like they knew exactly what they were doing. And I just stood there near the entrance like a sim that lost its command. I didn’t know which machine to start with. I didn’t know how much weight was normal. I didn’t even know where to keep my bottle.

I did like 10 minutes on the treadmill because that was the only thing I couldn’t mess up. Then I left. Went home. Never went back for three months.

And the thing is — I didn’t quit because it was hard. I quit because I felt stupid. There’s a difference and I don’t think we talk about it enough.

Think about every hobby you’ve ever dropped.

That guitar in the corner you bought during lockdown. That Duolingo streak that died at day 4. That sketching phase. That coding tutorial you watched 30 minutes of and never opened again.

Did you stop because the thing itself was too difficult? Probably not. You stopped because somewhere in the first few days, you hit a moment where you felt like an idiot. Your fingers couldn’t make a clean chord. Your Spanish sounded like a parrot having a stroke. Your sketch looked nothing like the reference. And instead of pushing through, you just quietly put it down and pretended you lost interest.

“Yeah I just got bored of it.”

No you didn’t. You got embarrassed by it. Those are two very different things.

I think school broke something in us.

From the time we were kids, not knowing the answer meant something was wrong with you. Teacher asks a question, you say the wrong thing, thirty kids look at you. That moment gets burned into your brain. And you carry it into adulthood without even realizing it.

So now you’re 22 and you won’t ask a question in a meeting because what if it’s obvious. You won’t try cooking for your friends because what if it’s terrible. You won’t post that thing you wrote because what if nobody reads it and it just sits there with zero claps like a public record of your failure.

We’ve been trained to think that not knowing something is the same as being dumb. But it’s not. It’s just being new. Those are wildly different things and we treat them like they’re the same.

And then there’s the internet making everything worse.

You want to learn guitar so you go on YouTube and there’s a 14 year old playing better than you ever will. You want to start writing so you open Medium and everyone seems polished and confident and you’re sitting there with half a draft about your morning routine thinking who would even read this.

Nobody shows you the ugly phase. Nobody posts the first pancake that looked like a crime scene. Nobody shares the code that broke everything. You only see the finished version and then you compare your day one to their year three and wonder what’s wrong with you.

Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re just seeing everyone’s highlight reel and comparing it to your behind-the-scenes.

Here’s something that helped me a little.

I asked my friend — who’s genuinely good at basketball — when he started playing. He said he was 13. I asked if he was good at 13. He laughed and said he couldn’t dribble without looking at the ball.

Think about that. The guy who makes it look effortless now couldn’t dribble without staring straight down ten years ago. But he kept going. Not because he wasn’t embarrassed. He was. He just didn’t let that be the reason to stop.

The difference between people who get good at things and people who don’t isn’t talent. It’s not discipline either. It’s tolerance for looking stupid. That’s it. Some people can sit in that discomfort a little longer than others. And that’s the whole game.

I eventually went back to the gym by the way.

Still felt weird. Still didn’t know what I was doing half the time. But I stopped expecting myself to look like I belonged. I gave myself permission to be bad at it. And weirdly, once I stopped trying to look like I knew what I was doing, I actually started learning.

So if there’s something you gave up on — the guitar, the language, the writing, the gym, whatever — maybe don’t tell yourself you weren’t interested. Be honest. You were interested. You were just scared of being seen at the starting line.

And look, the starting line is ugly. It’s awkward and uncomfortable, and no one claps for you there.

But it’s the only place anything good has ever started.