We “overvalue performance,” as one psychologist put it, “and undervalue the self.” We’re afraid of being just okay at things. This is a trap. “For to permit yourself to do only that which you are good at,” writes the legal scholar Tim Wu, “is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment.”

The reason you might be having trouble with your practice in the long run—if you were capable of building a practice in the short run—is nearly always because you are afraid. The fear, the resistance, is very insidious. It doesn’t leave a lot of fingerprints, but the person who manages to make a movie short that blows everyone away but can’t raise