Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
I want to talk to you about a subject today that is something that I think will help you
a lot in your life if you can understand this, if you're willing to make the tradeoff that
it entails.
It's something that's helped me a lot, something that I've been focusing on a lot in order
to get better.
I've hit some plateaus in some areas of my life, some areas of my personal development
that I realized that the only way to get out of those plateaus was to do what I'm going
to talk to you about, which is calibration.
What do I mean by calibration?
Calibration is basically where you take some kind of behavior or some action and you go
to different extremes with that behavior or that action.
Through that process of going through different extremes, you figure out how to tamper it
and how to actually make it work for you.
A lot of times in life when you hit a plateau, when you hit some kind of plateau perhaps
in what you're doing, a lot of creative things.
This would entail a lot of things which I've talked a about a lot, overcoming fears with
dealing with things like developing your social skills.
This is a big one.
This is the one that I was working on.
If you understand this concept, it's going to help you a lot.
With calibration, here's the thing.
If you think about it this way, there's a lot of things in life that—you've got opportunities.
Here's the big mistake that a lot of people make, which is that when you get a certain
opportunity in life, you feel like it's really important that you don’t screw this up.
If you've ever been in a—have you ever had that feeling like I can't screw this up?
What you do when you try to not screw it up is—a lot of times when you have that feeling,
first of all, you do screw it up.
When you have that feeling, a lot of it comes from a lack of confidence because you're in
a situation, you have an opportunity, you have something that you don’t feel confidence
in and you don’t have the skill level required to have that confidence.
Your behavior or your default thinking is, "Well, you know what?
I better just try really hard and make sure that I don’t screw this up."
It seems like a good strategy, right?
It's the default strategy that I think most people would take, but it's a horrible bad
strategy because what ends up happening when you do that is you may not screw it up.
You may get a mediocre performance out of the thing, but you don’t grow because, again,
I've talked about this a lot.
I have a video on five soft skills every software developer should know where I gave this long
talk, and it's all about you only grow when you go into your uncomfort zone, when you're
willing to be uncomfortable.
What ends up happening is that you may make it through that thing and you make it a mediocre
result, but you don’t get the main out of that which is the experience or the growth
that comes from it.
A lot of times, the way that this manifests and plays out in your life is that you end
up having to make this tradeoff.
This is what I'm going to tell you today is that sometimes and quite often, it's worth
throwing away a perfectly good opportunity just to gain information, knowing that you're
going to get other opportunities that come along.
There's a lot of times that you're going to be faced with having something that you don't
want to screw up and you're going to have a choice.
You can either blow it up and find out what was wrong in order to get that calibration
experience or you can hang on, white-knuckle it and try to get through it and maybe you
do get through it and maybe you screwed up anyway but you don’t learn anything.
I've been focusing a lot in life in going to different extremes.
You can think of this as driving a car outside of your lane in order to figure out where
the barriers.
It's a great dangerous thing to do.
It's probably not a good way to learn how to drive, but you're going to get a lot of
information by doing this with your life.
You have to make this tradeoff between going to these opportunities.
I'll give you an example for this as someone who does a lot of creative work, who does
YouTube videos and has done a lot of writing, and for trying to find your voice.
A lot of doing creative stuff involves finding your voice.
In order to find your voice—I've talked about this, I think, at least once before,
but in order to find your voice, what you have to do is you have to be willing to go
to multiple extremes.
You have to be willing to go to very high extremes.
Maybe you're going to try and write or act in such a way that's extremely trying to be
funny or sarcastic, or maybe you're going to say fuck a lot.
Maybe you're going to amp up the amperage where you really are going beyond the threshold
of what you should do in order to tamper it down.
Maybe you're going to go the opposite way and you're going to be really calm and really
Zen like.
The same thing would apply with social interactions with people.
I'll tell you again for you guys out there with calibrating with dealing with the opposite
sex, having conversations or progressing with someone of the opposite sex that you're trying
to attract.
A lot of times you're going to want to hold onto it and you're going to want to mess this
up, but it might be worth it to mess up a few things, to mess up a few relationships,
to mess up a few videos that you do, a few blog posts that you write, a few whatever
it is in order to figure out where your calibration is, because when you blow something up really
badly, it can sometimes help you to figure out—when you examine that, it can show you
where the extremes are.
Sometimes what you'll find when you do this is that you can go way further than you thought
was possible or that you thought was advisable and you're still in the safety zone.
You're still in a good place and you can get extremely good results.
You can do things in life that seem really bad.
Really, like a bad idea and really extreme, but that extreme is actually not an extreme.
It was just an extreme.
It was just a limiting belief that you had that was a barrier for you.
I'll give you a good example for a lot of you that have social anxiety and you feel
like you don’t have good people skills or social dynamics, you can't talk to people
is that one thing you can try and do is being overly, overly talkative and gregarious and
just like—I mean try, for example—Here's a good example.
When you meet someone, instead of just shaking their hand, you just like come after them
and you say, "Hey, how's it going?
Man, it's good to see you."
You grab their hand and you shake their hand.
You give them a hug and you just come out with a huge amount of energy.
It's kind of funny because I actually did this experiment at a couple of conferences
I was at because they actually had us do this.
You expect that to be like ridiculous, that people are going to react to that in a negative
way, but almost always—this is really pushing a boundary, but almost always what happens
is the other person is just so damn happy that you're greeting them in such a manner.
I'm not saying that you can't overdo it.
What you think might be overdoing it might not be.
There's a lot of ways in life where you can do this and you can find out where that actual
boundary, where that line is.
The only way sometimes to know where it is is to cross it.
Sometimes when you're at a plateau, it's a good idea, a good strategy in life, to say,
"Okay.
There's this thing."
Maybe it's an opportunity.
Maybe it's a business opportunity or a job opportunity, or a relationship opportunity."
You say that, "I'm willing to trade this for experience.
I'm willing to blow this fucker up.
I'm willing to blow this up just in order to learn from the experience because that's
going to be more valuable because there's going to be more experiences that could come
along.
There's more fish in the sea, however you want to say it, but the learning opportunity
is going to be worth sacrificing some of the reserve that you have, some of the opportunities.
This is a really, really hard thing to do.
It's really, really hard especially when opportunities come that you've been waiting for to have
the mindset to realize that there's going to be more opportunities.
Example: I'm trying to give a real good way to give an analogy here, but let's suppose
that you have—There's actually a psychological experiment that's kind of based around this.
I can't remember the exact terms of it, but let's say that you have 50 tries at doing
something in your life.
In those 50 tries, one strategy that most people take would be to take the safe choice
on all 50 of those and to try and get like a mediocre, and then figure that over 50 times
getting that mediocre result will add up and it will be worth it.
That seems like a good strategy.
It seems reasonable, especially when you don’t know that you have got 50 opportunities that
are going to come up in your life.
Instead of doing that, what you can do is—a better strategy but a harder one to do—is
to say, "Well, you know, I'm going to take the first five and I'm not going to care about
the outcome of the result of those first five.
I'm just going to fucking play it as hard as I can.
I'm going to push the boundaries as hard as I can.
I'm going to make—For those of you who are inspiring to make YouTube videos and what
not.
I'm going to make some ridiculous videos.
I'm going to go extreme.
I'm going to go wild with my character and how I'm presenting myself on video.
I'm going to go real deep.
I'm really going to put my heart into this and say some embarrassing shit.
Okay.
I've said some embarrassing shit on videos before.
Knowing that you're probably going to bomb and blow those things up.
You know, here's a good example.
It's actually standup comics go through this a lot.
One of my buddies, one of my good buddies, are talking to me about Chris Rock and how—He's
not naturally funny and he was talking about how—I think I heard this also from—so
good they can't ignore you from—What's his name?
Gosh.
I can't—the comic, the one from Naked Gun now.
He had made that statement.
Essentially, what it is is that a lot of standup comics, what they do, is you see them and
they're so funny.
When you see them live, you see them on an HBO Exclusive or whatever or HBO series and
you think that they're really funny and they're really talented.
What they've actually done is that they've gone to all these smaller comedy clubs and
they've pushed the boundaries.
They've tried new material that they don’t know is going to work, that they probably
think is going to fall flat.
They've really pushed the boundary and they're willing to look like a real big fucking idiot
in front of these crowds of people, even though they've got a reputation, even though they've
got a name in order to do calibrate their material, in order to make it better.
They're going to actually blow those opportunities purposely.
They're purposely going to blow themselves up, almost purposely sabotages themselves
in order to get better because they realize that that calibration is more valuable than
having a good performance every single time.
They'd rather have some phenomenal performances in their life and to develop their skill in
general than to have decent performances every single time.
it's almost like a swing for the fences.
Every once in a while, you got to swing for the fences because if you're just taking bunts—I
mean you can walk through your whole life taking bunts and most people do.
Most people fucking bunt the whole time when they need to be swinging for the fences.
When you do that, when you do this act that you're going to swing for the fence, you fucking
strike out.
You miss.
You miss, miss, miss.
You whiff until that one time that you crack the ball and it goes home run.
If you're willing to do that and you're willing to whiff so many times and you're willing
to swing for the fences, then you're going to eventually develop the skill through that
calibration of being able to swing hard and still hit the ball.
You see what I'm saying?
I think that's probably analogy I can give you.
I’ll talk more about the subject in the future as—this is something I've been working
on as I found that in order to get to a certain skill level and certain things, you don’t
necessarily have to do this.
You can gain the skill level just by gaining experience.
In order to really excel, you've got to swing for the fences.
When you swing for the fences, you're going to strike out a lot and so it's almost like—another
example would be Tiger Woods rebuilding his golf swing from the ground up.
Even though he was really good, even though he's already a PGA superstar, he went and
was willing to suck for a period of time in order to rebuild his golf swing in order to
get to the next level.
That's what calibration is.
Calibration is doing it.
It's being willing to trade some benefit now and being willing to look like an idiot, being
willing to blow things up, to lose opportunities that you really want to work out, in order
to gain the experience that's going to let the future opportunities that you have in
your life become more successful because you grow more.
That's the concept.
You can apply this to a lot of areas in your life.
Like I said, if you hate an area where you have a plateau, you might want to examine
and you might want to say, "Hey, is this the place where I'm not swinging very hard.
I'm not swinging for the fences.
I'm playing it safe."
I could actually—You know, in the tech world, I think Apple is doing this now.
I think Apple is not innovating very much because they're afraid because they have something
that's really successful, their products, especially the iPhone.
They're afraid to now swing for the fences anymore because they're already making so
much money.
This happens a lot.
Like I said, when you taste success, you don’t want to suck again.
I've had to do this.
I've had to rebuild my golf swing in many areas of my life.
When you do it and you come out the other side, it's worth it but it costs you something
upfront.
My question to you would essentially be this.
Are you bunting?
Are you bunting throughout life?
Are there areas in your life where you're bunting where you need to just take a big
fucking risk and you need to find out where the boundaries are?
If that's the case, then you know what to do.
You got to start doing that.
Just something to think about as I've been, like I said, working through this myself and
seeing huge benefits from doing this, pushing my limits way beyond in certain areas of my
life and finding out that—Sometimes it blows up and it's hard because you're like, "Oh,
fuck.
I really screwed that up," but then also finding out that, wow.
Even though I really screwed that up, I got so much growth from it and that growth is
going to benefit me in the next opportunity that comes along.
There you go.
That's all I got for you today.
If you like this video, make sure you click the Subscribe button below and make sure you
that you take at least a couple swings for the fences if only just to gain that experience
and figure out where that calibration point is.
I'll talk to you next time.
Take care.