being a good student is a coachable skill and I gave up on so many things in
life whether that was basketball I concluded I was bad at languages and
ninth-grade and so on and so forth and I think so many people run into this where
they banded things and they accept the partial completeness where they're like
ah my voice just isn't good I'm just not good at X and usually if you track that
back it's because a parent or a teacher or some authority figure criticized you
right really heavily and it turns out that if you just get a better toolkit
sort of a better set of questions that you can do things that seem impossible
to the untrained setting really low expectations not what a lot of people
expect and what I spoke to say Rick Rubin's and he has a musician who's
stuck great musician but they've developed performance anxiety about
songwriting for whatever reason he will say do you think you could get me one
sentence or maybe two words that you like like tomorrow that's it two words
can you do that for me and he gives them a micro assignment best writing advice
that I probably ever received and I've received a lot of good writing advice
but I can get myself really wound up because I expect perfection to flow from
my fingertips like magic and that never happens so then I beat the hell out of
myself and that makes me less likely to put pen
to paper in the first place and I'll procrastinate
which is why if you write two crappy pages per day you've won the day that's
a successful writing day and that does a few things it helps you to maintain
enthusiasm because you're constantly winning and of course on many days
you'll write more than two we get to two then you go to five or to ten but if
you're on an off day great to copy pages even if you never use it it's a
successful day and that I think for longer-term projects and extended
creativity is really important but the story that this writer told me with that
tip he said okay this is where this comes from
did you know that IBM when it was the 800-pound gorilla it was an undefeatable
sales force do you know what one of the rules was it's like no he says well what
do you think their quotas were and I was like oh I'm sure it was really hot
because they wanted to motivate their guys to get after it you just know their
quotas were the lowest in the industry and the rationale was we don't want our
salespeople to be intimidated to pick up the phone we want them to feel like
they're going to pass their quota quickly which they did and then they
shot well past it and clobbered the competition so the counterintuitive
pairing of love expectations leading to higher performance is really odd what
that is is performance anxiety that you've imposed on yourself because your
expectations are too high it's like just lower your standards
lower your standards till you get started you're the average of the five
people you associate with most that's like a basic tenet of my life and
Silicon Valley where I live and my other career is investing in
early-stage startups and I've been very successful in that Twitter Facebook
first free money proceeded money advisor to uber first advisor to Evernote
Alibaba what you realize though when you meet these people when you sit down and
talk to you the people who start those types of companies and by the way like
they all start out where everyone else starts up and that's another like II
hear these criticisms like oh that's easy a really big blog and it's like
well I started with zero readers just like everybody else and you find that
that those thinkers and doers fall into the category of examining the anomalies
as opposed to dismissing them so I think that there are kind of two binary
choices that you have there are probably others but when you see someone who's
doing something that you think is really incredible you can you can either build
yourself up or tear them down to make yourself feel better and tearing them
down doesn't do anything for you it's an illusion I think it's Carlos Castaneda
actually who said you know whether you make yourself happy or you make yourself
miserable the amount of energy required is the same
I focus on building yourself up and the way you do that is by asking better
questions and the power of these questions is just incredible so Peter
Thiel for instance the the first money into Facebook co-founder of PayPal
co-founder of Palantir I mean a billionaire many times over one of
Peters favorite questions is why can't you accomplish to your 10-year goal in
the next six months and when you when you apply these ridiculous constraints
your thinking has to change you can't just up shift one year you have to get
an entirely new car to think about that so to speak and these guys just do not
accept the shoulds and musts at all and so you want to look for the odd
behaviors that produce good results and that can be replicated so for instance
if you want to become a world-class learner treat reality is negotiable
because ultimately what we have to do what we should do are usually a very
fragile collection of just socially reinforced beliefs and just because
something is said often does not make it true like it takes a lifetime to learn
language complete nonsense complete adults can learn languages five to ten
times faster then children period you know kids just don't have jobs and
mortgages if more information were the answer we'd all be billionaires with
six-pack abs it's just just absorbing not even absorbing just reading and
watching and listening to more isn't enough that you have to apply it you
have to use in sentence you have to have rewards and punishments set for yourself
so you actually get things done timelines etcetera so that's that's one
another one is don't be a donkey and the reason is there's a I want to say it
might be a philosophers paradox but I don't think it is nothing it's just
parable about burdens ass so burdens ask about a donkey it's about
a donkey who is thirsty and hungry and there's water on one side a few feet
away and hey on the other and he can't decide whether to do the hay first the
hay first or the water the hay or the water and he dies of thirst at the end
of it he couldn't do them sequentially in effect you can do almost everything
you want in life but you can't do it at the same time and if you can just
dedicate yourself to one thing for even a year and then the next thing for a
year you can do those ten things but if you try to do all ten at once you're
gonna be burdens s you know should do this for they do this which they focus
on this person list so don't be a donkey it's so easy to sit behind screens and
sit on our couches and just learn new information it feels good and it's safe
there's no risk in watching a youtube video and it's so easy to create excuses
for why we haven't taken our first step maybe it just seems all too big you
don't know where to start well let's consider Tim Ferriss his idea
today what's the smallest possible step that you can take today that will bring
you that much closer to achieving your goal if you take that small step I
promise you that the rest of the road will seem a whole lot less daunting
comment down below that one small that you can take today