Every pro woodworker has a pile of offcuts and failed joints. The table you see sits on that pile.

You see finished work and almost never the wreckage behind it, which makes other people’s skill look like a different substance from yours. It is not. The clean table exists because of a hundred cuts that went wrong first, and the maker kept the lesson and threw out the wood. Comparing your pile of failures to somebody’s finished photograph is comparing two different stages.

Keep your failures where you can see them for a while instead of hiding them. A folder of bad drafts, a box of botched joints, a playlist of rough takes. Once a month look back through and name what each one taught you.