Jon Kolko wrote a wonderful personal essay called Look, I Made a Thing: Confidence in Making:

If you stick with it, through the years of shitty ashtrays and embarrassing critiques and rejections, you start to learn that making things is powerful, mostly because on the way to making things, you build confidence. You can take on problems that are out of your league. You can become a teacher with no teaching experience. You can make money and provide value. You can lead a conversation, advance an idea, and drive specificity where there were only vague generalities.

This idea—that just because you’re not good at something right now, it doesn’t mean you can’t become good at it—is something I try to instill in my daughters as well. And in doing that, I end up lecturing myself in the process too. One of my favorite books to read my daughters is Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts, because it explains this concept in language even I can understand…