I promise this won’t be a “once you’ve wrestled, everything else in life is easy” essay. Quite the opposite actually.

Two months ago, my wife and I had our first child. The eight months (he came early) preceding were about a 50-50 mix of feverish excitement to meet the little guy and frantic anxiety as we tried to learn everything about parenting before he got here. I can hear all of you parents laughing at me through the screen. But I really, genuinely thought I could get myself onto level ground before he was born. I wrote about what my priorities and philosophies would be as a parent, I knew about feed schedules and wake windows, and I researched every baby product on Earth to death. Thank Gable for spreadsheets.

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” -Mike Tyson

Almost immediately after he arrived I realized the flaw in my planning. Everything I had prepared for was big picture stuff. Obviously it doesn’t hurt to have a long-term vision for parenthood, but what I had completely neglected was the granular, minute-by-minute actions that would constitute my new daily life. I had only ever held a baby once in my life before that day. Instantly I was struck by how much I had to learn.

I got a hang of the cradle hold (not a cheesy wrestling reference) pretty quickly. My first formidable opponent was swaddling. I buzzed for a nurse every time the shifts changed so I could learn their personal technique. My first successful swaddle that stayed intact was proportioned completely wrong and looked like a cannonball. By the time we left the hospital, several dozen swaddles later, he was looking like a masterfully wrapped burrito. It wasn’t until we got home that we learned they make swaddles with Velcro.

One day in the week that followed, I saw my wife holding our baby with one arm as she used the other to hold a book. This was a revelation for me, as I had to this point forsaken all other basic human tasks whenever he was in my arms. I knew I had to learn this technique and I asked her to show me. But I couldn’t get it. I tried and I tried and every time I either couldn’t support his head with my arm or his body would slouch down my side until he was a crooked blob. I got frustrated and was ready to accept that this hold just wasn’t on the table for me when, I swear, I had a flashback to wrestling practice.

That feeling, the one where I’m trying to make my body do something and it simply refuses, was the exact feeling I had learning a new wrestling move, especially early in my career. I would watch someone hit a move correctly then try myself and feel off-balance, frozen in a position held together by metaphorical paperclips, and then blame the technique. When I was young, I shuddered from the idea of being bad at something so if a technique didn’t come naturally, I would simply decide that it didn’t fit with my “style” and neglect learning it. This yielded a pretty narrow skillset and left me actively avoiding certain positions in matches. As I matured, however, and as coaches instilled in me the idea that success required more development, I began to set aside my ego and get comfortable finding value in progress rather than execution. In hindsight this seems obvious. It would be an affront to the sport if everything was easy to do; technique would be nullified as a factor in success. The more I embraced this mindset, the more moves I added to my arsenal, and the more successful I became (still not all that successful, but less unsuccessful). That’s the beauty of this sport: it teaches you how to accept when you suck at something. Then the skill-building can begin

Later in life, after my wrestling career had ended I found new hobbies to fill my time: skiing, running, guitar, and cooking to name a few. At the onset of these ventures, I was always terrible. But now the idea of being so unspeakably bad at something seemed exciting. It was like I was peeling back the curtain, revealing a world of new skills I could develop. Especially at the beginning when growth happens more rapidly, the feeling of progress was addicting and led me down many deep, all-consuming rabbit holes.

So back to the topic of this essay. I’m a parent now. It would be an insult to every parent in the world to believe that all aspects of parenting should come naturally. Confronted with this reality that they certainly do not, it would be far too easy to hide from that feeling and resign myself to only doing the things that work on the first try. But that’s not what I intend to do. I am going to fail miserably at things, laugh at how bad I am, then hop back in and try to do better, recognizing that mastery is not attainable but improvement absolutely is. And wrestling is, at least in some part, to thank for that. I can hold my son and eat lunch at the same time now. Next up is clipping fingernails.