I’ve never done this before is a scary thing to have to admit. Because, if you’ve never done it before how do you know you’ll be any good (or even competent?) If you’ve never done it before, how do you plan? how do you reduce risk? how do you decide that it’s the right thing to do?
I’ve recently agreed to take part in a charity art auction that requires me to do a 1.5×1.5m canvas painting in a medium I’m unfamiliar with. I’ve never done this before.
Doing things you’ve done before is safe. You’ve made mistakes and have since corrected them. You’ve understood your limits, and the limits of the materials you’ve worked with. You know what not to repeat, and what to do again.
But, at some point, the thing you know how to do so well now was a thing you never did before. That could be about making art, sure, or it could also be about making pizza, meeting a new person, visiting a new city, or simply sleeping on a different side of the bed.
If almost everything we know how to do was something we had never done before and, most of the time, it’s worked out OK, then maybe we owe it to ourselves to try the new thing we’ve been putting off. After all, doing things we’ve never done before, whilst scary, can also unlock new pathways and passions in our lives that we’ve also never had before.
