I read John Imah’s “You’re Allowed to Be a Beginner Again” and it named a feeling I would have happily skipped: you know exactly what good looks like, but your skills are still stuck in the parking lot. If you have ever had to be a beginner again after years of being good at something, you know the one.
The gap between taste and ability
Imah describes the point where your judgment runs ahead of your ability. You can see the difference between what you made and what you wanted to make. So you start explaining yourself before anyone asks: “it was just an experiment,” “I barely spent any time on it.” Underneath those explanations, he says, is a very human request: please don’t let this first attempt change what you think of me.
Picture someone who has been good at their job for twenty years opening a new piece of software and feeling like a toddler handed a steering wheel. Their taste is fine; it’s their hands that haven’t caught up. That’s when “I’m too old for this” and “I don’t have time” show up. They sound like observations, but they’re really armor.
If that sounds familiar, our post on how to be bad at something in front of other people goes deeper.
Your résumé is not a shield
Imah has been through Samsung, Meta and Snap and now builds SPREEAI, and he still says a list of companies tells you very little about the work of figuring out what comes next.
Success should give you the confidence to learn. Sometimes we let it give us an excuse to stop.
John Imah
I got my own version of this after college. I was looking for a teaching job and ended up as a substitute teacher for three years. Then I took some temp work over one summer to pay the bills, and that’s where I met the owner of the first business I ever worked for. I didn’t know a thing about the business world, but I took the jump anyway. Soon I was picking up responsibilities and helping the company grow.
I kept telling myself I had no idea what was going on. Then it turned out I had customer service chops and knew how to use them, which was a great feeling. The company grew and I grew right along with it for a couple of years. Being part of something that was growing and employing people felt even better.
Experience travels with you
Being new to something doesn’t mean the rest of your life stops counting. Imah says you bring the patience, discipline and judgment you earned from getting things wrong, plus a better understanding of how you learn. You also bring a few habits that will need to change. In my case, the skill that mattered wasn’t on any résumé yet. It was just sitting there waiting for a job that needed it.
He also points out that with AI changing how so much work gets done, we’ll all need more of this humility. Knowing your craft and still having questions about a new tool can exist together. He’d rather work with someone honest about what they need to learn than someone whose certainty has become impossible to question.
Be a beginner again and give the first attempt a chance
Imah thinks back to himself at seven, taking a computer apart just to see how it worked. There was no career to explain yet, only curiosity, and he doesn’t want achievement to take that away from him.
So here’s the question I’ll leave you with: what do you keep coming back to, then talking yourself out of? Too late, too busy, too far from what people know you for? Some of those excuses are real. Others are just you waiting to feel accomplished before you let yourself start. Imah’s advice for that is simple: let the first attempt be the first attempt.
Source: John Imah, “You’re Allowed to Be a Beginner Again,” johnimah.com (Oct 16, 2026).
