In the spring of 2017, Karen Rinaldi penned an essay for The New York Times, born of personal experience and fervent belief, about the importance of sucking at something. The story quickly went viral, and a year later, Rinaldi was still receiving emails from readers. In the piece, she explained that after 15 years of surfing, she was still a total amateur, or what would be classified as a “kook” in the parlance of the sport.

Yet, despite recognizing that she had probably reached the peak of her skills on the board, she never felt that her love of surfing was misplaced or even unrequited. Falling, failing, and getting thrashed in the waves left her with a valuable realization: Being okay with sucking at something is its own kind of reward.

“Without striving, we would never progress, because we would never get better at doing the things we need to do in the world that help us grow and take care of ourselves and the people around us.” However, taken to the extreme, striving can also stunt: Falling short of “perfection” feels like failure—a false binary—in a way that stops us from participating in things just for fun.

“We’ve come to a place of aspirational psychosis, where everybody is smarter and prettier and better than we are,” observes Rinaldi. Men fall prey to this problem, but for women it’s particularly insidious. “Men have an eight-lane highway, and women have a very narrow lane—there’s just more forgiveness for men who stumble, whereas women are judged for being too much or too little no matter which way we turn.”

“The way out of the bind is to give yourself freedom in something where the stakes are low, where you can learn something about yourself and not worry about whether or not you can succeed at it,” she says. For Rinaldi, that’s surfing. For someone else, there are myriad options—ping pong! Knitting! Late-in-life ballet classes!—but the purpose is to get comfortable with sucking while distracting yourself with something that makes you feel good. Aside from developing a relationship with your own vulnerability, the only goal is to do something you suck at because it makes you happy.

At a reading of her book at the surf shop Pilgrim in Brooklyn, Rinaldi emphasized that she is not just modestly pretending to be bad at surfing: “I really am bad,” she said, and her two young adult sons—surfers themselves—both nodded in a way that managed to affirm and encourage. “When I surf, people are always so stoked for me. When I catch a wave, everyone is so excited, because they know I have been working really hard at it,” she adds. But another good reason to suck at something is that it brings out the best in others: It creates an opportunity for generosity.