Hobbies – You Don’t Need To Be The Best

I wrote a post a little while back about how taking up a hobby can be a great thing for you to do. This is a kind of follow up to that about one of the biggest problems people face when taking up a hobby.

I love to read and finally have a bookshelf that can hold all my books inside a cupboard now

Starting a new hobby is kind of intimidating. You’re not good at it yet, you’ll fumble, you won’t know enough about what you’re doing and you’re just bad at it in general apart from a few lucky streaks. But that won’t last. Soon you’ll be up there with the rest of them, looking at people just starting and hearing them express the same doubts you did before.

People view hobbies as being something serious and demanding but they don’t have to be. I fuss over what my embroidery will turn out like because I want it to be perfect but it doesn’t have to be. It just needs to be whatever I do because I’m putting effort into it. There’s too much focus on doing things for a particular purpose – going to the gym now means you need to be at that level to run a marathon, if you’re enjoying uploading Lets Plays to YouTube then you’re trying to gain a following to earn money and so on.

A main hobby of mine is embroidery, this is a manticore that I’ve been working on for a while now

That manticore design above is something I’m using as a learning piece. I’ve never done laid work like that before trying this and each little bit I do I’m seeing improvements and I’m also starting to understand easier ways of doing things and how to correct any mistakes I make. That’s the point of a hobby like this.

I’m not saying to not try and do the best you can do, but if you’re giving it the most you can and you’re a beginner then embrace that. I look back at some of my embroidery and I wince because it’s so bad to me now, but at the time I loved doing it and I still love doing it and that’s what’s important.

Just remember – you don’t have to be perfect at something to have it as a hobby, it’s something you’re doing for fun

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Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.

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