Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Is This Why You Suck at So Many Things?
Hey, don't take the title personally. I could have just as easily focused that title on me as the one who sucks. But then you wouldn't have been as likely to read it, would you?

You're not going to take the time to read someone else whining about how they suck at things. But when I turn it around and throw it in your face, it triggers the insecurity that each one of us has.

All of us feel deeply aware of our own shortcomings. A title like the one above plays into it. It suggests there might be a reason for those shortcomings, a reason that -- once you know it -- you can easily correct and effectively "de-suck" yourself once and for all.

What it comes down to
What it comes down to is this: you... and I... and just about everybody else on the planet... suck at a lot of things because we don't try to master them.

"What do you mean?" you might say. "Do you have any idea how many hours I pour into building my business?" or whatever it is that you beat yourself up about not doing well enough.

Yeah, but are you really trying to MASTER it?

I came across a great quote from Dr. K. Anders Erickson, a psychology professor at Florida State University:

"For the superior performer the goal isn't just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That's why they don't find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time."

Why we get in a rut
We may work at things repeatedly. Often, though, we're satisfied to keep doing them exactly the same way. And that makes all the difference between sucking at something and mastering it.

Even if you've progressed to the point where you OK results at what you do, if you put your brain on autopilot to do it the old familiar way, you're not going to get any better at it, will you.

You get better at something -- you master it -- by consciously trying to find a way to do it a little better each time. That applies even if the amounts in which you improve come only in small increments.

As a matter of fact, most progress comes in small increments. And that's what turns us off about trying to master what we're doing.

Why we let our improvements discourage us
If we knew we would experience a big jump for every small effort we took toward mastering something, we'd delight to make those efforts. More often, though, it works the other way around.

We step outside our comfort zone of the "way that feels familiar" and we see only a small return of improvement. Or else we fail to see the improvement entirely because our expectations were unrealistic.

So we content ourselves with sticking to the old, familiar ways of doing what we do and we never stretch ourselves to accumulate all those small gains we could get by simply striving to master it over time.

The antidote
The antidote for this suckiness? Rather than settling for the way you've always done something you would love to master, promise yourself to try to find one, small thing you can do to improve your results each time you do it.

Pat yourself on the back each time one of your experiments succeeds at making a small improvement. Assess and learn from each experiment that doesn't bring about an improved result.

Over time, you'll find yourself progressively mastering whatever it is that you're trying to master. And you won't suck at it anymore.
Jeff

Labels: mindset