I want you to look silly

I saw a short video the other day. A football coach talking to a group of kids.

He told them:

“There’s a moment, when you learn something new, where you have to be okay with looking silly.”

Then he asked them:

Who here can talk?

Who here can walk?

Who here can eat?

All hands went up.

And then he reminded them:

When you learned those things, you looked ridiculous!

You didn’t start life walking. You crawled. You fell. You wobbled like a drunk little penguin.

You didn’t start by speaking in perfect sentences. You babbled. You made weird noises. You tried, failed, tried again.

Every skill starts with looking silly.

But for some reason, when we grow up, we develop this fear of the beginner phase. We hate looking stupid. We want to skip straight to being good.

And that fear kills more creativity, more careers, more ideas than failure ever will.

Because looking silly is actually a signal. It means you’re learning.

Every project I’ve ever started had a silly phase. Every idea I ever launched looked dumb in the beginning. Every brand, every campaign, every experiment begins with awkward steps.

The only people who never look silly? The people who never try anything.

So here’s what I want (and it’s the same thing that coach wanted from his players):

I want to see you look silly.

I want to see the rough drafts. The bad first reps. The experiments that suck. The ideas that don’t quite land. Because that’s where progress actually lives.

If you’re not willing to look silly for a while, you’ll never get good.

Tino