i'm glad to hear you've taken this idea to heart sword. any aspect of self improvement cannot begin until you accept this premise. while it is important to keep in mind how others perceive you as the end of all bettering of the self is ultimately for the purpose of blessing others with your actions, it is equally important to remember that every man looks like a fool when he first sets out to master any skill
there has never been a master carpenter who has not cut boards short or angled incorrectly, a master painter without thousands of scrapped works by the error of a few misplaced strokes, a master programmer who has never delivered broken programs by misunderstanding fundamentals, or a master gardener who has never come to the end of a season with nothing to harvest
whenever i begin in my heart to despair over how much i have messed up or failed in my endeavors due to short sightedness, mismanaged time, laziness, or whatever other fault on my part, i consider how little i knew of all the things that dominate my mind currently even but three years ago and am comforted in considering how much i will know and have done in another decade, and that even in those days my youthful vigor will not have fully left me
the unfortunate corollary to this, of course, is that you cannot have years of accrued wisdom to look back on if you never begin in the first place. if you allow yourself to be afraid of looking like a fool in the eyes of others when you first begin learning any skill in earnest, you will never come to know anything and shall truly become a fool rather than merely looking like one for that short time
every masterful man was once a fool in his skills of choice. will you allow yourself to play the fool for a time so you may one day come to mastery? or would you rather become a fool in truth by the comfort of inaction? choose wisely
(i should clarify this was a polemic that i considered from sword's post directed at anyone that would read this rather than directly as a response to sword himself. just wanted to be clear p:)
