This is a guest post by Andrew Hall.

It’s an unfortunate, occasionally infuriating truth, but almost everything worth doing requires practice to master, no matter what it is. And if you’ve decided to take up something new, and especially if you’ve decided to make that thing the center of a new career, this is even more true. Your success, especially as someone presently unestablished, will require dedication, persistence, and giving up the safety and comfort of what you had. There’s no question about it: pursuing something new can be a daunting and occasionally frightening thing.

Examples of Starting Late and Succeeding Slowly

For many people, especially artists, success in their medium wasn’t at all immediate, nor did they start at an age typically considered young. Take these music industry examples for starters:

• The acclaimed folk singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen was a poet and novelist for many years, but he didn’t release his first album of recorded material, Songs of Leonard Cohen, until he was 33.
• Stuart Murdoch, leader of the band Belle and Sebastian, struggled with chronic fatigue syndrome and floated in and out of colleges for much of his life until he was in his late twenties, at which point he met the rest of the band in an undergraduate class called “Music as a Business” and released his first album of material, Tigermilk.
• The New York-based guitarist and singer Marnie Stern completed journalism major in her early twenties, and then spent the next decade learning how to play the guitar like the guitarists she admired in bands like Don Caballero. From this, she then submitted an unsolicited demo of what she believed to be her best material to the Portland-based label Kill Rock Stars, who signed her almost immediately, kickstarting her career as a musician in her mid-30s.

Still not convinced that change (and success) takes time? Consider, Ira Glass, the host of the now long-running radio documentary series, television series, and touring show This American Life. Ira recorded a piece several years ago in which he shares early work that he did in the medium of radio. Before anyone else, he is the first to admit that it isn’t particularly good. And this is an important thing, more for us than it is for him; people who are talented and well-established at their crafts rarely share the material that shows them as anything less than what they are now, and it makes their successes seem all the more inconceivable on a personal level.

Do you see where I’m going with this? Even people who are very, very good at what they do — good enough to live comfortably off of it, good enough to be considered the best in their fields — didn’t start off that way. Practice — the hard work of creating something and participating in that field for many, many years — got them there.

And that’s why it’s crucial that no matter how old you are and no matter how bad you think you are at something, if you want to do it with any seriousness, you need to start now. You don’t need to share your work with anyone, but you need to begin as soon as possible. You will improve in time. What’s more, you will be on the way to achieving something that at one point seemed completely out of reach.

* Please note that the title of this post was inspired by a self-help book written in the 1990s to help people overcome mid-life crises.

Andrew Hall is a guest blogger for the up-and-coming career blog, Pounding the Pavement. In his free time, Mr. Hall also tackles topics related to technical schools for Guide to Career Education .