The eternal beginner explains how to get over the fear of looking stupid

If you think about ‘adventure’ television, there’s a good chance the first thing that comes to mind is something about survival. Adventure TV is chock-full of professional athletes pushing the limits of the human body, often in extreme conditions, and with survivalists throwing themselves into hardcore situations for the sake of making it out alive.

Paddy O’Connell is neither a professional athlete nor a survivalist. Actually, he’d probably tell you he sucks at a lot of outdoor pursuits. And not only is he OK with that, he’s probably having a lot more fun than you are.

In his new show for Outside Watch, PaddyO Sucks At…, O’Connell bills himself as an “average outdoor enthusiast inflated way beyond average size.” In each episode, he teams up with coaches, mentors, and experts in pursuits like climbing, burro (donkey) racing, whitewater kayaking, fly fishing and orienteering.

“Maybe you’ve considered trying one of these sports, and maybe watching me succeed is just the push you need,” he says in the show’s intro. “And if I fail? Well, that’s gonna be fun for you, too.” 

We could use a whole lot more people going outdoors just for the sake of having a good time and letting nature humble them. So, I asked Paddy for his wisdom. What’s it like to go into something knowing not only that you’re probably not going to crush it, but that any number of viewers anywhere in the world could watch you fail? If you learn one thing from Paddy, make it this: We all need to get over that great big fear of looking stupid. It’s holding us back. And life is a lot more fun when we’re ridiculous, anyway.

 

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KC: We used to work together, and I don’t ever remember thinking, “Paddy sucks at stuff.” I’m so curious how you got the idea for this show.

PO: “Well, thank you. But I think my entire mountain experience has been about being an adult beginner. I didn’t learn how to ski until I was 23. I was living in Chicago after college and I wasn’t super happy with my job at the time, I just felt like I wanted a little more. Whatever that means in terms of, you know, the great big air quotes around ‘more’ when you’re a 23-year-old. But I visited a friend in Telluride, Colorado, and I skied for the first time and fell in love with the sport and the passion and the community around it. A couple of months later, I moved to Telluride and I was a ski bum for my 20s and dove headfirst into the community. I think that really started my love affair, or relationship with adult beginnerism.

In the last few years, I’ve gone on assignments for different magazines and tried fly fishing for the first time, and endurance running, and mountain biking. I’ve gone through the ups and downs of being a beginner, and I’ve just kind of fallen in love with the final outcome of working through all the stuff that sucks about it.

I was working with Outside Studios, and I was writing a lot of things about being an adult beginner. Slowly but surely this idea came about, and we filmed episodes of me trying things I’ve always wanted to try or purposely avoided because of, you know, the great big fear of looking stupid.”

What’s your advice for people who haven’t yet let go of that great big fear of looking stupid?

“Looking stupid is the best. Try it. Just go out and try it. I hope this series can serve as an example of the power of trying hard, and just going out and trying something new and laughing your way through it. You know, I’m not going to go out and buy 120 meters of climbing rope and a bunch of hardware after trying climbing. That sport is so friggin hard. And I think just physically, as a 6’5″, 250-pound human, I’m not really sure that is my sport. But what I do know is that trying it totally changed the way I thought about it.

Looking stupid is kind-of a myth that we tell ourselves to stop us from doing stuff. And it’s so much better to try. Honestly, when somebody tries something new, I’m like, ‘Oh my God! That person is so cool!’”

You’ve got such great excitement about being an adult beginner, and you’re bringing this energy to the show like, “I might be great, I might be awful.” 

“Either way, that’s the goal. Far too often in our outdoor community, there’s this idea that we came out of the womb shredding the gnar, and we were never a beginner, and we were always great, and I’ve never fallen on skis or on a bike before, or during a climb. I’ve never faltered, ever. And that’s just total bullshit, you know. I also think there’s this weird thing about how expertise equals cool rather than like, trying something. That, to me, is the coolest thing ever, just trying something.

I see myself as an athlete. I think anybody in the outdoors would probably say that, right? And there’s some kind of weird twist of the mind that happens when we try something new and we’re immediately not good at it. We’re even bad at it, or we suck at it. We’re like, ‘Oh my God! My identity is shaken up now because I suck ass at climbing!’ But it’s like, no, no, no! You can still be an athlete. You can still be a person who goes outside and has fun, even if you’re brutal at this thing, even if you need to work at it.”

What do you want the viewers of the show to take away from it?

“My wife and I recently had a watch party for the show with some friends. They’re biased, but they’re not bullshitters, and by the end of it, they were like, ‘I want to go outside and try X, Y, and X. Like, this makes me want to try something new.’

We live in the Roaring Fork Valley, just down the road from Aspen [Colorado]. There are Olympians and X Gamers who live in this valley—extreme athletes. The group of people who are over here are some of the most talented athletes I know of. You’d think of them as quintessential experts, awesome humans, awesome athletes. And the fact that they were saying, ‘Hey, I want to try something new,’ is remarkable.”

How do you distinguish between ‘success’ and ‘failure’ on the show?

“What we try to do in the shows is go from zero to hero in three days. That third day challenge is always something that sets a high bar in terms of where I started and where I want to finish.

I think success, to me, is trying to get within whatever the goal is for that. For the climbing episode, the goal is to make it all the way up 80 feet. For fly fishing, it’s to see if I can fish on my own. I think success is getting close to any one of those things.

In the orienteering episode, I so desperately wanted to give up. That was the closest I’ve been to just like, “phone a friend” to the crew and just say, ‘That’s it, get a van, get me out of here. I am sad.’ The hope was to try to get that whole experience done in around four hours, and it took me close to six. The success there was that I was able to work through a major emotional block of, ‘I want to give up right now,’ and to keep trying. 

What’s coming up next season?

“We’re in pre-production for Season 2 right now, and we have a running list of 20-something ideas. I wrote down a bunch of ideas from my friends—sports they want to see me do. There are a lot of things I want to try. Biathlon. Snowboarding, because I think it would be hilarious. I also really want to try surfing.”