What can you do badly for a year? (a better filter for what is your passion)

On the question that predicts what you'll stay with, which is not the one you keep being asked.

Aug 09, 2026

Hi, I’m Katie. Welcome to The Multiple Lives Theory, where I write for people who have outgrown a version of a life they worked hard to build. Essays from inside the transition, weekly.

A slightly contrarian one today. I’d actually love to hear your perspective on this one. I’m not sure I have the answer either, but it’s been sitting with me for a while. Because maybe there isn’t a right or wrong answer here. Maybe it just depends on the life you’re building.

I have spent the last few weeks writing about burning down the thing I worked hardest to build, and my brain has not really stopped since.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, a question surfaced that I have not been able to put back down.

I’ve started asking a different question instead of the passion one, and I want to try to explain why, because it initially does not feel like the nicest question.

What could you do badly, in public, for a year, without quitting?

That’s it.

Every time I’ve run it on myself it has given me a more accurate answer than what do you love ever did, and the answers have been less flattering, which I think is the point.

Why passion keeps giving the wrong answer

Passion is measured at the ‘peak.’

When somebody asks what you love, you don’t picture the reality.

You picture the good version.

The version they ‘sold’ to you. The finished thing, the day it goes well, yourself competent and mid-flow and pleased.

Everyone does this. It isn’t dishonesty, it’s really what the question invites.

But nobody enters a skill at the peak.

You enter at the worst point on the whole curve.

You’re slow, you’re bad, the output is embarrassing, and other people can see all of it.

I am not afraid to admit, I have done this in public about 2-3 times now.

Making my career pivot when working as a receptionist, entering coding competitions and documenting about it online via my Katie Kodes instagram.

And another one is building this publication on Substack for The Multiple Lives Theory.

I honestly do not know how well it will go and if it will even go anywhere, but I know this is the lifestyle and type of craft I want to refine daily and show up for.

Passion measures the top of the curve. You only ever get to start at the bottom of it.

So, the question tests you on a day that hasn’t happened yet, and the actual test runs on all the days before it. Which is why people can be completely certain they love something and still be gone by March.

The year of being bad

Every real thing has one. Sometimes longer than a year, though a year is about the shortest honest version.

The writing nobody read, for much longer than I tell people. The early client work that was fine and wasn’t good, which is a distinction you can feel and can’t quite prove. The first ten of anything. The stretch where you can already tell what good looks like and you cannot yet do it, which is the worst part and the one that lasts.

The question was never whether you love it.

I’m starting to see the question as whether it can be seen doing it badly for long enough to stop being bad.

Getting specific

If you’ve changed direction more than once, you’ve already been a beginner several times. You know exactly what it feels like to be the worst person in the room at something everyone else finds obvious.

Which sounds like an advantage. Some of it is. But there’s a trap in it that I don’t think people with straight careers have in the same way.

You’ve got a ready explanation. When the discomfort arrives, you have a sentence waiting for it. This one isn’t right either. And that sentence is usually plausible, and occasionally it is completely correct, which is what makes it so hard to argue with at the time.

So, the pattern isn’t quitting.

Nobody with a nonlinear career is a quitter, they’ve started more things than most people ever will.

The pattern is quitting at the same point each time, and having a good reason each time.

I’ve done this. I could name the point.

It is roughly the moment the thing stops being novel and starts being work I am not yet good at, and I have left three separate things within about a month of that point and explained every one of them convincingly, mostly to myself.

Why nobody uses this filter

Because it sounds like settling. It also implies unnecessary pressure to reach for the ‘perfect’ role and perfect job.

Choosing on what you can put up with, rather than on what you love, in a way feels like giving something up.

That you never had a calling. That you have got practical about something that was supposed to be a feeling.

And the answers it produces are unglamorous.

Again, mine is writing. Something I’ve been publicly mediocre at for years, then burnt out on so badly that I lost my voice and, for a while, my sense of self along with it.

I decided this year to keep doing it anyway. I resisted that answer for a long time because it didn’t feel like a decision. It felt more like a habit I just hadn’t got around to stopping.

That might be what it actually looks like from the inside. Not a pull. Just the one you didn’t stop.

Or that might be a generous story I am telling about failing to quit something.

I go back and forth on it, usually depending on how the week went.

What the question is actually measuring

This is the part that took me longest to see.

It isn’t measuring grit, and it isn’t measuring love. It’s measuring how much of your sense of yourself is riding on being good at things.

If being bad at something threatens who you think you are, you will leave early. It won’t matter how much you love it. The discomfort will find the fastest available exit and dress it up as discernment. If being bad at it doesn’t threaten anything, you’ll stay, and staying is the entire mechanism.

Which is why the honest answer is often something you were already bad at before you had anything to protect.

Things you started young. Things nobody expected you to be good at. Things that sat outside whatever you were known for, so failing at them cost you nothing socially. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s quite a useful place to go looking.

The limit, and it matters

Tolerance for being bad is not the same as aptitude, and I don’t want to be vague about that.

You can cheerfully be bad at something for a decade and remain bad at it. The question predicts persistence. It does not predict that you will get good, and it certainly does not predict that anyone will pay you. Those are three different things and running them together is how people spend eight years on something that was never going to work.

So, it’s a filter, not a forecast. It narrows the field. It doesn’t tell you what happens next.

The question isn’t what do you love.

It’s what can you be humiliated by on a Tuesday and still come back to on a Wednesday.

I have one answer and I’m not especially thrilled about it. It isn’t the most interesting thing I do. It doesn’t pay the most. It’s just the one I have been bad at for years and never quite stopped.

I still don’t know whether that counts as choosing something.

-Katie

What have you been bad at for years and never stopped?

If this landed, send it to somebody who keeps starting things.

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