Maybe you believe you're not a very good writer. Maybe you're an excellent writer, very confident in your abilities. Perhaps you're somewhere in the middle. But no matter how skilled a writer you are today, you can become a better writer tomorrow. You always have room to grow.
Me too. I'm a decent writer, and I know a great deal about the craft...but I'm always eager to learn more.
I didn't always feel this way. Early in my career, I looked forward to reaching a point where I "got it." I would know everything about writing and be a true master of the craft. There'd be nothing left to learn.
I look back on those days now and laugh. After a quarter-century of making my living by putting words together, I've instead learned that I will never, ever "get it." I will always be able to stretch my skills beyond where they are today.
I take some comfort in this, especially when I think about that line from the Bob Dylan song: "He not busy being born is busy dying." Or as Dylan put it another song, performed best by the Byrds, "I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now."
Speaking of rock and roll, that's how I came to the realization that I would never reach the end of what I could learn. I've played guitar an indie rock band for many years, and at one point took lessons from a guitarist in his sixties whose playing amazed me. He was so skilled, I couldn't imagine him ever running into any hurdles or techniques he didn't know.
One week, I went to my lesson and voiced some frustration about how difficult I found it to learn some of the jazz chord progressions he was teaching me. "It must be nice," I mused aloud, "to already know all this stuff."
My guitar teacher stopped playing and looked at me seriously. "I know some things you don't know yet," he said. "But there are a million things about playing guitar that I don't know, and when I try to learn them, I still feel the same way you do about learning these chords. I hope the day never comes that I can't learn something new."
My guitar teacher showed me much more than just some jazz chords: from him, I learned there's no end to learning. Just like nobody is the world's best guitar player (though it's fun to argue about), nobody is the world's best writer.
Someone might be the best writer of advertising copy for direct mail marketing, but there's someone else who writes more effective speeches. That person may be the world's best speechwriter for mining executives, but there's someone else who writes better customer stories. You might be a great novelist, but a lousy documentation writer.
There's no limit to knowledge. And no matter how good you get, there's always somebody better at something you do. And that means there's always somebody you can learn something from. If you're ready and willing to learn.