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# Are you willing to be bad at something?
- URL: https://www.wtft.life/are-you-willing-to-be-bad-at-something/
- Published: 2026-09-29T02:37:09.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T02:37:09.000Z
- Author: Franck @ WTFT
- Tags: Growth, Learning a language, Perspectives, Japan 2027

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7d/01/7d0190e6-0d1d-48b4-ad5a-f339e47871ca/content/images/2026/09/IMG_2502-1.JPG)

Learning to read again at 66...

I feel like a ten-year-old again, struggling to remember yesterday’s lesson.

I am in Fukuoka to work on my Japanese for next year’s [walk across Japan](https://japan.wtft.life/en?ref=wtft.life).

I am being bombarded with information. Everything seems to move too fast. I stumble over words I know. I recognise a character one day and forget it the next.

It is humbling.

Learning something new can feel less like growing and **more like becoming less capable.**

We want the new career without feeling junior again.  
We want to live somewhere unfamiliar without feeling lost.  
We want to create something without producing the embarrassing first version.  
**We want a larger life without looking small inside it.**

But nobody enters an unfamiliar future already competent. For a while, our old abilities are not enough and our new ones do not yet exist.

There is no way around that period.

Only through it.

---

## The Perspective Shift

> ***Being bad at something new is not evidence that you do not belong there. It may be evidence that you have entered territory in which you can still grow.***

Learning Japanese is forcing me to accept that discomfort.

It is not an obstacle to the experience.  
**It is the price of entry.**

Walk your talk,  
Franck

**P.S.:**

- *What possibility have you kept outside your life because you were unwilling to enter it as a beginner?* Reply and tell me. I read every response.
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