It’s ok if you can’t walk right away. It’s ok if you can’t run, sprint, or perform a flawless long jump right away.

It’s ok for your skills to be mediocre at first.

It’s ok for your project to be average and rough around the edges when you launch it into the world.

It’s ok for your craft to be less than you want it to be.

It’s ok to fall over.

It’s ok to end up on your face, in front of your friends and peers and audience.

Really, it’s ok.

It’s ok to make mistakes. At worst you’ll be a little bruised, at best you’ll learn something new and never make the same mistake. In the middle, where most of us are, you’ll do it a few more times and then learn. That’s ok, too.

Those who get us started doing something are often very, very good at it. They’re the sprinters, they’re the gymnasts. It’s how we found them in the first place – they’re who popped up in Google because they’re the ones who are spoken about the most. And people don’t spend a lot of time talking about those who are crawling.

It’s easy to look at them and wish to walk and run and sprint and dance the way they do. Those people often become our heroes.

But before they were able to do the things that made them our heroes, they crawled. And fell over. Probably a lot. Probably a lot more than any of us can imagine.

Chances are those heroes of ours never stopped putting themselves in situations in which they felt like they were crawling.

Eventually they get to be so good at learning to crawl that to others it looks like walking. But they’ve got their eyes on a kind of movement the rest of us don’t even understand. That’s when people move from good to great.

And we all want to be great, don’t we?

But still, in their minds, they’re crawling. A lot. They do it happily because they know it’s how you get better.

So we might as well get comfortable doing so.

We might as well get comfortable saying to ourselves “I’m crawling”, because it means we’re acknowledging that we’re at the start of a journey.

And if we just keep focusing on how we’re crawling, pushing ourselves to get through everything crawling requires we learn, we’ll be walking before we know it.

(What isn’t ok is to decide that we want to dance more than anything in the world because we see others dancing and it ignites something in us, then getting upset when we realise all we can do is crawl, and giving up because crawling is embarrassing or, as many do, thinking that we’re too good to crawl.)