After years of studies and six months in New York, I was convinced I’d mastered English. I was cracking jokes with American friends, binge-watching shows without subtitles, and even thinking in English half the time.
Then I moved to London for my first job at Google, and suddenly, I felt like I’d never truly master the language. Colleagues used phrases I’d never heard. Cultural references flew over my head. I found myself nodding along in meetings, pretending to understand jokes that left me completely lost. It felt terrible.
I was encountering the growing pains inherent to mastery, but everything I’d been told about getting good at something had set me up to misinterpret this growth as failure.
Our cultural narrative about mastery is not just incomplete. It’s actively misleading, and we’ve mythologized mastery in ways that make people quit right when they might be breaking into new territories.
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