A career is long enough to start out bad at it. Give yourself the whole length.

Forty years is a long runway and you are judging yourself on the first hundred feet. Being bad at the start is not evidence you chose wrong, it is what a start is. The panic comes from compressing the whole thing into this month, as though your skill at seventeen were the final reading. Almost nobody is good early, and the ones who look it usually began somewhere you did not see.

When you catch yourself drawing conclusions from one rough shift or one bad practice, put a date on the judgment instead. Ask what you want to be able to do by next spring, not by Friday.