(It’s Great to) Suck at Something With Karen Rinaldi

Live Happy Now

Live Happy LLC

Health & Fitness:mental Health, Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.7 • 522 Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Most of us focus on pursuing things we’re good at, but what if you like doing something … and discover you’re really bad at it? Karen Rinaldi, publisher at Harper Wave—a book imprint she founded in 2012—finds happiness in being able to surf, even though she does it poorly. Learning to accept her “suckitude” on the surfboard, she says, has helped her be more forgiving of herself in other areas of her life. In her new book, (It’s Great to) Suck at Something, she looks at the gifts she’s gained from embracing imperfection and letting go of the need to succeed at everything. She talks to us about how this has helped her find joy in the pursuit of something rather than in reaching an end goal—and how you can, too. In this episode, you learn: Why it’s beneficial to try something you might not be good at. How not being good at something can invite kindness from those around you. How sucking at something can help build resilience.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to episode 215 of Live Happy Now.
0:06.5	I'm your host, Paula Phelps, thanking you for joining us today.
0:10.7	Most of us enjoy doing things we're good at, but how do we feel about the things we're not so good at, and what can we learn from them?
0:18.4	Today's guest is here to talk about that very thing. As publisher of Harper Wave,
0:23.3	an imprint she founded in 2012, Karen Rinaldi is at the top of her game professionally. But when it
0:29.4	comes to surfing, a sport she truly loves, she freely admits that, well, she sucks. And her new book,
0:36.3	It's Great to Suck at Something, explains what she's
0:39.0	learned by embracing her shortcomings and learning to love the gifts that come from being
0:42.9	truly bad at something. Erin, welcome to live happy now. Hi, Paula. Thanks for having me on.
0:49.1	This is an exciting topic to talk about. One of the reviews calls your new book an anti-self-help book, which I love that.
0:57.3	I love that terminology. Did you set out to write it with that intention?
1:01.8	I didn't. I didn't even know that that was a category.
1:05.7	You've started a whole issue. Well, you know, I've been, I've had this idea about, you know, this phrase in my head, it's great to suck at something. Oh, for 12 years or more, 14 years. And I've been writing around it for a really long time. But it really didn't occur to me to make it into a book until I wrote a New York Times essay that was published
1:29.1	in April 2017, so a couple years ago called It's Great to Suck at Something, and it was about
1:34.7	sucking at surfing. And the response was so huge that my agent called me and said, I think that's
1:40.6	your next book. So I set out just to tell these stories and just to talk about
1:45.1	my philosophy of, you know, the joys and that sucking that something can bring. And I, it seems
1:52.5	that I've fallen into a zeitgeist moment where failure is being embraced. And that, I mean, I didn't
1:59.9	realize that was true or that was coming. So I've
2:02.6	been thinking about it for over a decade. So it's really funny. It's the way things happen. Things,
2:06.9	you know, sort of come to a sort of an inflection point where an idea kind of bubbles up from the
2:13.2	culture. Probably we're all responding to the same thing, right? So, you know, perfectionism.
	...

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