Build These Skills To Change Your Life | Seth Godin EP 766

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11Almost nobody is talented. Talent is completely overrated. I would argue that you were born with certain physical talents that enabled you to excel in sports that I could never have acquired no matter how hard I tried. Even that said, though, Larry Bird was not born with the kind of talent that Michael Jordan was. Larry Bird just grounded out and shot more practice shots than anybody else. That's a skill. Talent is a betrayal. It is undermining all of the people who put all that work into skill. Don't call someone skillful, talented, because they're not. They're skillful. So we can agree that playing the piano is a skill in the sense that if you work at it, you get better at it.

0:57But I would like to believe that being enthusiastic is a skill. And then so is being creative. It's a skill. You can get better at it. You can choose to put in the work in whatever form it takes. We're not talking about graphic art here, unless you want it to be graphic art, to gain the skill. And if that's true, that's really good news. Because it means you're not stuck where you are. It means you can go to where you want to go. and it's really good news because skills can be acquired and that fills me with optimism about so many things in our world you know we can point to the human condition and say people are just doomed to hate each other and to undercut each other but i can point to a culture where that's not happening so how did that happen well it's because it's a skill decision making is a skill And almost every Western human is terrible at it because sunk costs are something that are probably hardwired into us.

1:59What a sunk cost means is the harder you worked to have something, the harder it is for you to give it up. And we see this mistake happen all the time. the example I'll give is pre-COVID you've got two tickets to the movies and they were really hard to get and you told your girlfriend that you were going to go to the movies together and on your way you bump into a friend who says I got two front row seats to see Hamilton do you want to go that means your tickets are worthless and a lot of people go well no no there's no well it doesn't matter how much those tickets cost you. They're sunk. You already made that decision.

2:41You can't unmake it. And so we stick with the job longer than we should, or we stick to a way of thinking about the world longer than we should, because it costs a lot. We went to law school, so now I have to be a lawyer. No, you don't. The law school degree is a gift from your former self. You don't have to take it. You can say, no, thank you, and go do something that gives you joy instead. debt. So sunk cost is a giant skill-based area. And then what goes right next to that is the skill of saying, that was a good idea, but I have a better one now. So if I think about the car industry, the car industry said, it took us 90 years to develop the internal combustion engine.

3:24That was a lot of cycles, a big sunk cost. And someone shows up and says, why don't we make electric cars? Because internal combustion isn't broken. Because I can show you that if we look at an early electric car compared to a state-of-the-art Lexus, the state-of-the-art Lexus is better, not a problem. Whereas what would have transferred billions and billions of dollars of assets away from Elon Musk is if they had said, nope, you're right. We're just going to copy all the things you're doing that are working and make it even better. Because we have an improvement ratchet in place a dealer network in place we're trusted we can go to the races but senior executives making seven figures said nope nothing could be better than this reassurance feels really good right so we get off doesn't it it's like we get off this call the phone's ringing and kai comes to you and says it's oprah and oprah was listening she just wants you to know what a great job you did right so you're you're flying for like two hours maybe three and then you need to hear it from somebody else because what it means to get reassurance is that someone is telling you that the future is going to be okay and it feels good because we would like the future to be okay but deep down we know that that person doesn't know that the future is going to be okay so as soon as reassurance shows up, it reminds us that we are confronting an uncertain world and we want more of it.

4:55We want to be held safely. And it doesn't scale. You can't get enough of it. So what's the alternative? The alternative is to refuse reassurance. So when someone says you did a great job, Seth, it was amazing. That was the best thing I've ever seen in my entire life. How do we refuse that? Well, that the answer is thank you. I appreciate you being present and giving me that feedback. But it's reassurance if you then say, and your book launch is going to go great, because that you can't know. Yeah. Right. That's the second half of that's what's implied is that I'm going to tell you about tomorrow.

5:33And what's the alternative? The alternative is to say, nobody knows about tomorrow and looking for external validation that i'm going to catch that fish that that thing i am hoping for is going to work that other people will get the joke not only doesn't it help me it undermines my trust in myself it undermines all of the things that i need to merely do the work you've been seduced by like me and everyone else with the just do it thing from Nike. And the problem with the word just is that some people think it means do whatever you want. Doesn't matter. Just do it. And I think it should be changed to merely do it.

6:14Do it without commentary. Do it without drama. Simply show up and do the thing. Focus on the practice, not hoping and wishing for the outcome that you need to be reassured by, but the practice, the best you can do it because if you what could be better than the best you could do it nothing so do that learn from what works and then do it again but seeking reassurance is distracting you from doing a better job of what you set out to do in the first place a bunch of years ago a famous electronics company did a focus group the way focus groups work is you set up a trailer next to a shopping mall you pay people some money they come in for an hour there's hidden glass windows and the client can watch people touch the product.

6:59And they had a clock radio and it had all these gizmos on it and everything else. And they got eight people in there and they're all looking at the clock radio and they're all talking about how much they love the clock radio. And at the end, the organizer says, thank you so much. To thank you for being here, either you can get the$20 we promised you or the$100 clock radio, which would you prefer? And every single person took the 20 bucks. Why? Because that was the truth. that was the moment that they were actually telling the truth. What I have found is I got an ego as much as anybody, maybe more.

7:35I like it when the people around me say, you did a really good job. When Oprah says, that was good, for sure. But I want to see three years later, are people still talking about this idea? Or I just want to see in the afternoon after a blog post, did someone engage with it in a way that changed them? when they didn't know that I would notice, right? Because it's not a performance in that moment. It's, did you have an impact? We play this game with everybody around us. Do I look fat in this dress, et cetera, et cetera. And some of that is totally legitimate. It papers over our momentary insecurities and there's nothing wrong with that.

8:16But when it comes down to the practice and the art that we seek to make, I think it makes sense to surround ourselves with people who say, I respect you. You're on to something you can do even better. And for us to start a cycle of what happened when this went into the world. Because when it's in the world and people had choices, what did I learn?

8:50I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.