I started practicing Aikido years ago. When I walked onto the mat, I felt awkward and confused. I was horrible. Bad. Terrible. Nothing ended up in the right place. I couldn't fall, roll, turn, attack or keep my balance. My techniques resembled a bad stop motion film with strobe effects.

Hardly anything done in Aikido is what a normal person would choose as a first option. Do you know how much practice it takes to make stepping into a punch or kick feel like the right thing to do? Do you know how much confidence it takes to realize just when your attackers think they have you where they want you, they just gave you a great opportunity to introduce them to the Earth... very suddenly.

In an online business, it's much the same. You're going to start out doing everything badly. The first product will not be perfect. It will contain typos and squeaks and whines. You'll say to much in some places and too little in others. The conversion rate on your first sales page will probably be less than 1%. You'll list features instead of benefits. When you start blogging, the posts will be short and me tooish or too long and cumbersome. Your articles won't contain the pizzaz needed to bring traffic. Traffic and sales will be slow for a long time.

So what if you suck, it's just important they get done and released. What you're looking for at this time is feedback. Did the sales page convert? Am I getting a lot of returns? Where is the traffic coming from? How can I get more? What could I have done better? You'll be embarrassed by some of the things you do in these early days. You'll survive and hopefully apply the lesson the next time. And the time after and the time after... Focus on getting better, not how terrible you are today.

Here's 3 reasons why being bad at something is good:

1. For the ideas. Any problems you have is an opportunity to create a product, blog post or article. Did you find an effective way to generate traffic? Create an e-book. Don't understand what FTP is? Create a blog post. Can't do something in WordPress? Build the plugin yourself and sell it on to others. My suggestion: WRITE DOWN YOUR PROBLEMS. Keep it in a journal or a simple txt document. Log everything and someday when you're stuck for ideas, open it up and viola, no more research needed!

2. You get better at it. Even the master was once a beginner. Leonardo Da Vinci started out drawing stick figures. But he drew those figures and then drew something more complex, until he was able to paint the Sistine Chapel. You don't get better my reading, you get better by practicing. My suggestion: Consider every action between now and whenever it is you consider yourself a master to be practice and for fun. If it's for fun, there's no pressure to do it well. Just do it better.

3. It's fun. Perhaps it's just me, but I find learning fun. I've learned you can't learn about things your already a master of, so if you're learning, you're going to be doing it badly. There isn't a single person who is good at everything. So make learning fun. My suggestion: Kids find most everything interesting. Adopt a child like attitude towards all the tasks you're faced with. When you learn something let out a big AHA! Then do a little dance.

So get out there and be horrible at something. If you keep at it, in a couple of months/years, you'll actually be good at it. That's how the masters got to be masters.