Do you have to be good at something in order to enjoy doing it?

Of course you can! (I love dancing – enough said!)
: clarification: of course you can enjoy it without being good at it

I don’t think it has much to do with a competitive nature (unless the activity includes). I think that there is just only so much you can enjoy something if you are not very good at it – and the better you are the more you can indulge yourself in this activity and do more with it.

For example playing a musical instrument. If you are not very good at it and can only play a few tunes you are very limited with what you can do. However if you are very good at playing an instrument you can do much more – play more songs, compose songs, improvise etc.

However some activities will be exempt from this as you can do a lot with them with little expertise and still enjoy.

I enjoy many recreational activities that I am not particularly skilled at… bowling, billiards, tennis, golf, volleyball, etc. I sing for pleasure and catharsis, and can carry a tune, but I don’t have a voice to perform in public.

However, when choosing a career, I suggest finding something that you enjoy and are good at.

No. I used acryllic paints for the first time the other day. Two paintings. At the moment, they look like two massive muddled rainbow turds on paper. But I still had lots of fun.

So long as you enjoy it personally, what does it matter if you’re good or not?

People are only overtly competitive if you allow that to exist and allow yourself to get drawn into it. I don’t complete, I don’t measure myself against others, cause I don’t care one bit about them. All I care about is my happiness, which is gained by doing things I love.

Example: my recent project has been to process a sheep’s fleece from raw fleece to wool and felted items. I had no idea what to do, I was completely clueless. But thanks to resources online I’ve been able to learn and explore and gain knowledge. I am having so much fun doing this learning even though I was completely unskilled to begin with. That’s because I highly value knowledge and learning, so even if I failed and ruined the fleece (which I haven’t), I would still enjoy the voyage. In fact, it is ultimately the observation of my skills increasing that give me so much pleasure, and this would be impossible if I had complete mastery over the craft.

I love creating music using a couple of loop mixing programs. Am I good at it? Compared to REAL musicians, my attempts are amateurish and atonal. I couldn’t create real music any more than a fish could ride a bicycle, but do I enjoy it? You bet your ass I do.

Personally, with a few exceptions, yeah pretty much so. But that’s my perfectionism at work, and it’s something I’m working to overcome.

I really enjoy the process of getting better at skills. I can tolerate my own ineptness as long as I can see my way forward toward improvement. If I feel that I’m stuck in mediocrity and don’t have what it takes to do better, that kills my interest.

I’m very critical of my own work. Flaws haunt me and overshadow whatever’s good about it. The upside of this is that I’m always pushing to get better at what I do so that I’m not nagged by evidence of ineptness when I look back at what I’ve done. But the downsides are greater, because this perfectionism is unrealistic and ego-driven.

No. I suck at games of any/every kind, yet I still love to play them.

Sometimes if you are TOO GOOD at doing something, you enjoy it LESS. Ex., I’m very good at Chess. When there’s no competition from my opponent, it’s no fun. When I get someone who IS good, then I enjoy it.

If I play piano with musicans that don’t have experience and we sound bad, I don’t enjoy it. It I play with professionals, it’s awesome.

You can enjoy it on your own without being the best their ever was. people play music at parties or for themselves, sing in the shower, join community choirs, paint pictures.

Of course you can.

Of course not. For example, I love sex.

Ocassionally, but not on a regular basis. I suck at bowling, but I do it every so often. The activities I enjoy on a regular basis I guess I had a natural talent for, because I’d never do something I was only mediocre at with any consistency.

I can’t sing or dance very well, but I do them anyway. I don’t sing publicly because the embarrassment outweighs the fun.

You are often not good at something new while you are learning it, but it can be fun just the same.

A professional might say my photos are lousy, yet I LOVE taking pictures.

I know plenty of people who are horrible in bed but love doing it…

While there are some parents who do their darndest to instill professional quality skills in their kids (like the 5 year olds on the t-ball team getting $60 an hour tutoring from a former pro-baseball player), generally anyone should be able to enjoy doing something even if they totally suck at it. If your parents support you when you are a child, you can often keep on enjoying various activities as an adult even if you would never, ever be a star. That’s why there are such things as community theater and adult art classes.

For example, I was a pudgy and uncoordinated kid, but I loved playing basketball and field hockey. So my parents encouraged me to go ahead and play. It didn’t matter to them or to me that I was on the intramural teams and not the varsity (of even the JV). I simply enjoyed the running and jumping involved.

My son simply lives to take things apart. However, he never ,ever puts them back together again. Since he now scrounges most of the things he takes apart, I don’t care. When he took apart my functioning power tools it used to bug me, but now that he finds the stuff that the neighbors are throwing away I just wait until he forgets about whatever it is and then I throw it out bit by bit. In the meantime, he is enjoying himself immensely.

Of course you can enjoy something without being very good at it. I sound like a croaking frog but i love to sing along with the radio while driving. My kids and fiancee tell me i sound great but i know better lol…My son loves to dismantle things “we have lots of extra parts laying around” but he doesn’t really know how to reassemble them. He also like to work on cars. Or more to the point piddle with them but in the process he learns from others as he does. So as u do the things you might not be too good at you could learn things you didn’t already know.

Not at all. I suck at baseball, basketball, soccer, Drawing, sketching(the difference between drawing being detail) and I’m only around average at the video games I love so , but I enjoy all of them very much.

what I don’t enjoy is when there are over-competitive players who ruin others’ fun for their egos.

The only time it would matter is if you are on a competitive team sport, and winning is very important. There are many team sports that are played just for fun, usually with a group of friends. My own experience, I love to paint, but I couldn’t make a representative picture if my life depended on it. I was never a “stay in the lines” kind of person.

I love bowling (mostly for the cheesy music and the shoes), but I can’t score over 60 more than once every 6 months.

@zephyr826 – I know what you mean. I generally bowl in the 30’s, but teams love to have me on board as long as I don’t show up – I have a huge handicap.

You have to do it to get better at it, and the fun is in the trying.

i like playing popcorn, but i rarely ever win.

you know, the game where you throw the ball up in the air, and try to clap at increasing intervals before you catch it…

I am one of those people who cannot play a game that I consistently lose, if I know all the rules. I have the patience to learn, but once I know the rules, if I can’t do it correctly (win) I do not enjoy it.