#208 You aren’t lazy, you suck at learning…

We all have something we want to be good at. Cooking, school, sports, health, etc. We all personally know a good amount of people struggling to accomplish even the most simple of goals like lose weight. One of the fortunes of my profession is that it allows me to be surrounded by highly motivated and successful people who have been gracious enough to share some of their insights. I have put them below in no meaningful order.

Time – One of the most unappreciated aspects of any endeavor is the amount of time it takes to achieve competence. Part of this is due to the fast nature of the modern world via technology and how quickly our whims can be satisfied. Nonetheless it has had little effect towards the process of mastery. If you want to be good at archery, the internet definitely has some great resources at your disposal, you can have John Dudley or Cameron Hanes teach you tips on hunting elk or shooting a bow but at the end of the day, you’re going to have to put in the time and practice for years and even decades.

Process – Many people are under the impression that learning is easy. A clear example of this is unaccomplished people who criticize hard working people that have accumulated wealth, even portraying them as bad or malevolent individuals who reached their status by means of manipulation. In reality most of these people learned skills over a long period of time that enabled them to provide a quality service which led to their fortune. Scott Adams who wrote the book Loserthink would probably appreciate me calling that “loser talk”.

Consistency – One of the things you must be quick to learn in your pursuit of mastery, is that every single day you can get better or make a small improvement in the skill you so desire. Also known in the business world as Kaizen. Too often students take an aggressive approach that is often unsustainable and leads to failure. Believe it or not, health is a skill and those who have mastered it have continually exercised habits which incrementally led to their performance and physique. If you can’t do it every day or damn near, maybe it’s not for you.

Frustration – This is something often experienced by beginners in any field. What you must come to understand is that life simply boils down to overcoming struggles, if you are not experiencing challenge there is a good chance you are also not experiencing growth. Learn to view difficulty as not only a good thing but the entire reason you are there, in its absence you should start to sense something needs to change. “Frustration means you think the path is easy”.

Study – When you know a lot about something, not only does it give you a significant advantage over your competition, but it becomes much harder to turn away. As a white belt my lack of knowledge on the subject of Jiu Jitsu could have easily turned me elsewhere had it not been for the captivating idea of learning to dominate and submit a larger and stronger human. From the lower belts on I learned to study on YouTube, dvds (before BJJ Fanatics 😁), watching matches, blogs, forums, but most of all, tournaments. Having an arsenal of knowledge and the practice to go with it, becomes a double edged sword, too much of one and the other side becomes full. Successful people STUDY ALL THE TIME. If you can’t, perhaps you are lazy 😉

Putting it all together – Ultimately for you to be good at anything and experience success it is going to be fucking hard. The people you see with the body, the money, skill, or relationships you want work very hard for a long period of time until they reach their goals. It means embracing a lifestyle of education and discipline where you can always look back at yourself one or two years ago and say “Wow, I was garbage back then”. The alternative is to be comfortable and stay where you are while continuing to make excuses for why your diet didn’t work, why you lost, why someone else got the promotion while you got laid off. For you to be rewarded like the few who do, you will have to work really hard for a long time and be relentlessly obsessed with whatever it is you pursue. Only then can you look back with pride of what you’ve accomplished versus trying to dull your memory with gluttony, drugs and alcohol.