“People don’t believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They often believe what their friends tell them.
They always believe what they tell themselves.”
Asking for a guarantee before you start isn’t helpful. Instead, we need to look at a concept, an idea, and be willing to try it out with intent because if we do, if we try it on for size, we will figure out if it fits us as opposed to the opposite which is spending a lot of time figuring out who we are and then going and finding the things that fit us
The change you Seek to make
- Are you here to make a contribution or are you here to take something?
- Are you here to do what you are told or are you here to question and to make things different?
Answering that question honestly is really difficult because it’s all about the story we tell ourselves. If we can figure out how to tell ourselves a different story, then we might be able to make a different level of contribution.
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- Some people wake up in the morning and say, “How do I double my net worth?”
- Some people wake up in the morning and say, “How do I help the people in Bareilly, India, get through another night without electricity?”
Those are two totally different kinds of changes that you seek to make in the world but they are both a change.
What possibility do you see?
The second pillar, which fits into the first one because I think the first one is too hard to start with is, what possibility do you see? We have indoctrinated people from birth to either to believe that they are entitled or not, to believe that they are special or not, to believe that they have leverage or not.
- Do you see a possibility in the change you seek to make?
- The flip side of that, which goes with it, is learning to see the world as it is.
Learning to see the world as it is because it’s so easy to imagine we get to make it the way we want it to be but we don’t.
The world is the way it is and learning to see that reality is critical. It changes our understanding of what is possible. If no one has ever done the work you hope to do then you might be deluding yourself. If, on the other hand, there’s a well-trodden path and people have gone on that path, then you might be able to follow it.
How much emotional labor are you able and willing to expend to accomplish the thing you set out to do?
When I think about learning versus education, which I can talk about for hours, education is compliance, education is compulsory, education is coercion. Learning is serial incompetence on our way to getting better. The pairing, the tandem of emotional labor is do you care enough to learn something. There are all these things in my life I don’t care enough to learn. That I could go get a book from the library or I could go listen to 20 podcasts or I could go practice something and I would get better at it. I haven’t done it and I’m 60 years old. The honest answer is not because I’m talented or not talented. It’s just that I don’t care enough to expend the energy of what it would take to get good at that.
– Seth Godin
- What should I do when I grow up?
- Principles to live by
- I was lost and now I’m found