Skill Issues by Shorna A. '25

I recently downloaded a chess app on my phone. Now, I know people who have been reading chess books since grade school and have numerous opening plays memorized, but to be entirely clear, I’m not one of them. My older brother didn’t have the patience to play chess with me (I had a tendency to just sort of… not follow the rules), and as a result I never actually picked it up. I didn’t even remember all of the names (much less the movements) of all the chess pieces when I decided to hit the download button. The other day, I called Allen, one of the underclassmen in my wing, and he (very patiently) coached me through a game. It took an hour – I’m kind of painfully bad at chess right now. I’m also incredibly sucky at videogames. I sometimes play my friend Satya in Smash, and I don’t think I’ve ever managed to kill him more than once. I fall off stage, use my special attack at the wrong moment, and if I’m not playing Samus I’ll spend the better part of the game just bashing buttons.

I still play Smash, though, and I’ll probably try to continue playing chess once in a while, too. And, like, sure, I could make this post about tenacity, or whatever. But I think my suckiness at Smash is interesting because it’s probably not temporary. I’m almost certainly not going to put in the hours required to be good at chess, or learn to play Smash really well, because they’re just not a priority. I hope eventually I’ll be passable at these things, but I don’t mind the fact that I do these things, I’m bad at them, and I probably will be for a while. It’s easy to interpret that as lazy. And maybe it is – I’m not sure that it’s necessarily the most disciplined philosophy. And I won’t deny that progress can sometimes creep up on you. I am now able to squat more than my body weight, despite being pretty weak when I started college, because I just kept going to the gym, kind of thoughtlessly. It wasn’t my whole life, and I often ignored it in favor of PSETs and meetings, but I did it because it was fun and appealing. But I want to emphasize that progress doesn’t have to be the end goal. I think recognizing and accepting that I can be really bad at things was one of the most freeing decisions I’ve ever made.

It wasn’t an easy epiphany to come to. One of the things about MIT is the stunning awareness that you’re surrounded by people that pick things up at lightning speed. I’ll turn my head and realize that my friend has become surprisingly good at parallel algorithms or Hollow Knight in the course of a few weeks. Nowadays, it’s mostly just a source of quiet appreciation, one of those moments when you think to yourself, Dang, my friends are cool.

It didn’t used to feel like that, though. When I was a freshman, many of my friends used to play a game called Tractor, which I believe they learned at competitive math camps (?). I abhor Tractor, with a burning passion. It’s mildly interminable, since in order to successfully win a game you have to get through 14 rounds. It’s played in silence, because you have to remember the number of cards of a certain type that have been placed down, and that requires a lot of concentration (at least on my part).

Everyone knows the quiet shame of being the worst at something in a group of people who don’t have the patience for you. You’re petrified of slipping up, perpetually defending yourself from mild jeering after every mistake, and for some reason it really hurts to feel irredeemably terrible at something, even when that something is as simple as a card game. Somehow being bad at cards feels like an indictment of your intelligence; everyone is looking at you because you’re the dumb one who messed up. Of course, most people probably don’t really care whether you remembered to place down your queen of hearts, but some people are so competitive, it can feel like not being among the best at an arbitrary skill is a personal failure.

The first time I played Tractor, I was introduced to it alongside my friend, who was better at math and had played many more card games than I had. I admitted that I suspected I wouldn’t be as good of a player as he was, so my partner should accept me as a major handicap. Another friend paused, asking why I thought I’d be any worse than him, since we had approximately the same (nonexistent) experience. My fellow newbie laughed, and as I accepted my hand from him, he leaned forward conspiratorially and simply stated “I’m just better than her.”  I felt a soft burning in my nose and realized with a shock that his dig had hurt. It was as if the statement had plunged its hands right into my chest, yanking the insecurity and teary embarrassment of grade-school Shorna straight from my past. I mentally chastised myself – I was too old for this, too grown, too capable to be hurt over a card game. But when I left the room, the tears still came.

Admittedly, I had pretty bad taste in friends when I was a frosh, and I eventually realized that. The hate for card games stuck around, though. A friend and I exchanged practically identical stories about Tractor not too long ago. This past CPW, one of my freshmen was on Next CPW Comm, and suggested a Tractor Event. I reacted almost immediately, pressing that he should host something with wider appeal. A nearby prefrosh lazily cocked his head at me and simply said, “If you don’t like cards, maybe you don’t fit Next House culture” I stared at him, disgust bubbling under the surface. I stayed up for over 30 hours making the 2023 Next House i3 video when the first one fell through. I’m the Vice President of Next, and I put so much work into making the house run and keeping 3E welcoming and clean. I wanted to chew him out, to put him in his place, to call him out on his bullshit. But I was a soon-to-be junior and he was just a kid, so I held my tongue and simply shrugged, noted that “Next House is a heterogenous place”, gave a final suggestion against cards, and left.

I find it hard to overstate how badly I never want to make anyone feel like that. To be clear, I think this is representative of the actions of a few bad apples, not the culture of MIT (or Next) as a whole; most people I’ve met here are helpful, charitable, and compassionate. More importantly, though, I have simply learned that I just want to be able to teach my friends things without making them feel inept.

I like asking my friends to paint with me. It’s stupid – I’ll pull out my portable watercolors, hand them a brush and a cup of water, and let them work. It makes me unreasonably happy. I say this with love in my heart – some people are shockingly bad at painting. I don’t care whether or not it looks good, though, because a person I care about is spending time with me doing a thing I love. I guess the best way I have to express this is actually through a line from Adventure Time. There’s a scene in which Jake, the older brother (who… also happens to be a very elastic dog) assures the main character, Finn, that “sucking at something is the first step to being really good at something”. It’s a little bit silly, but to be honest I think the correct philosophy is just that “sucking at something doesn’t have to suck”.

I spent that hour with Allen groaning over the fact that I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to prevent him from taking my bishop. And Satya has somehow managed to not get exasperated at me despite the numerous hours playing Smash I’ve spent dying, over and over and over again. Having casual relationships with your skills is important – you don’t have to be the best at anything, or even particularly good at many things, to be worthy of grace. So, in too many words, don’t let your fear of sucking at something get in the way of actually sucking at it, because with the right people, sucking at something should never make you feel inadequate, and it should, actually, be a little bit wonderful.