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Let’s Be Amateurs

Words by Hannah Weil McKinley

I’m learning to play mahjong, and it’s like learning another language. A group of friends decided we should try it—a hobby that also serves as an excuse to get together with more regularity. “We’re playing mahjong,” we’ll tell our spouses and kids at least once a month and carve out that hard-to-get time to do something fun and also kind of different. 

So I’m sitting there on Tuesday night, taking in the mahjong card (yes, there’s an official card and you must have one to play), and feeling lost before we’ve even started. Right after introductions and before we even start dealing the tiles, my stomach lurches and I’m wondering how? Truly, the patterns and the hands you need to win seem to read more like an equation I blocked from geometry than a game I signed up for. 

It’s a familiar sentiment for me—the feeling of drowning when I’ve hardly got my feet wet. I’m already convincing myself I’ll be in over my head before I’ve given myself permission to start. I think that feeling has been with me for much of my life, and certainly into adulthood. But, I’ve also largely limited the amount of new things I’m doing as an adult. I haven’t actively picked new hobbies that aren’t well-suited for my interests and existing talents. So, truthfully, I haven’t even given myself much room to fail. Even at something as low-stakes as a game night with girlfriends.  

I suspect part of it is confidence (a topic I’ve struggled with and addressed head-on in issue no. 9, too.) The other part—and it’s totally linked—is perfectionism. The idea that something isn’t good enough until it’s perfect. So, while my parents have always been champions of “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”, I was so inundated with “perfect” that it was impossible not to let it permeate my own efforts. 

If you’re an older millennial like me, some of your early-ish adulthood was likely spent consuming perfectly curated Instagram feeds. “Perfect” moms and “perfect” entrepreneurs and “perfect” artists—hell, we came of age during the era of “perfect” supermodel and celebrity bodies. We rarely saw people show their work; they just seemed to end up on “30 under 30” lists or at the helm of new companies. 

It seems perfect, doesn’t it? Again, how? 

So I’m struggling to process the many winning mahjong combinations at my seat, picking up the tiles and putting them on my rack, my mind swimming with questions for our instructor. So, I ask; and I ask again. And during the round, I ask a few more times for her opinion or her buy-in before I make a move, before I commit to any hand (I think that’s what you call it?). On our third round of the night, a friend I’m playing with offers up this, “Let’s just play. Let’s go faster. Let’s make mistakes. It’s fine, we’re learning. We’re not going to learn unless we make some mistakes, right?” The three of us at the table agree. We nod and decide to go faster. We pick up tiles and discard and move on, and nothing’s too precious. Nothing’s too serious. We’re playing a game, and it starts to feel that way. I even win one. 

A couple of days almost serendipitously, my Linkedin algorithm unearths this post from creative Kristen Ludwig: “The era of polished perfection is crumbling and I’m here for it,” she wrote. And, of course, in this context she’s talking about work life and permission to show up with new ideas that push boundaries. But as I read more, her thoughts and my experience playing mahjong are the same, “Momentum is the secret sauce of success…This 'mentality' of moving fast, breaking things, and staying unedited isn't just useful—it's revolutionary. It's vulnerability and confidence walking hand in hand, creating magic.” 

I sit there nodding along, soaking it in, letting the truth of that wash over me, just marveling at the timing. A little wink from the universe to remind me—and you too, if you need to hear it—that the things we might try our hand at (whether work or hobbies), aren’t so precious that we can’t embrace them as ourselves. Not perfect, but just as we are. We’re not afraid to be amateurs, humans who enthusiastically chase opportunities and experiences, make mistakes and keep going, closer to figuring it out because we try it—anything we want to—without judging ourselves before we do.

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I might have a new favorite pair of jeans…

After a full two years that I devoted my denim days almost entirely to Citizens of Humanity’s Horseshoe silhouette, I’ve traded them in more recently for these. Cropped and incredibly soft, this pair (also from COH) is slightly stretchy and comes in the perfect khaki for fall. I love the distressing, the wider leg, and the high-rise, and because I believe that flats look best with pants that show a bit of ankle, these have become the ones I’m wearing the most right now.