Why it's hard

Transcript

Rethink your priors.

This is the last part of my mini series within a series on Felix Rieseberg's post, How to be more ambitious, a tutorial for humans with models.

This one is about why being ambitious is hard in the first place.

Felix's take is that we've always been held back by what we believe is possible.

Michelangelo famously didn't want to paint the Sistine Chapel. He was a sculptor, not a painter.

Psychology has a name for this: self-efficacy. And it can be hacked.

Felix cites Locke and Latham, who went through 35 years of goal-setting research. People given specific, hard goals perform better than people who are told to just do their best.

Then he lists a few hacks. One, believe it's possible.

In 1939, George Dantzig showed up late to a statistics class at Berkeley, copied two problems off the blackboard, and handed in solutions thinking they were homework. They were two unsolved problems in statistics.

Two, watch somebody else do it. Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in May 1954, and stayed the only one to do it for just 46 days.

Three, give yourself permission to fail. The Inner Game of Tennis says you're not playing your best tennis when you're trying really, really hard.

But the example I really want to talk about is my kids. I try hard to fight the limits that get set on them.

Sometimes somebody says it out loud. Sometimes nobody says anything and it's just assumed. And I try to help them fight those limits too.

My five-year-old takes swim lessons. An instructor assumed she couldn't swim the full length of the lap pool. So the plan was for her to only try half.

I spoke up for her. I said, let's see if she can do it first.

She could. And not only could she do it. She became the fastest in her class.

Same thing with math. If I ask my daughter what one plus one is, she says two. If I ask her what a hundred plus a hundred is, she says that's hard math.

So I coached her. Not on math. On the idea that there are no hard math problems.

I asked her to picture her two-year-old sister, who's starting to learn math too. Would she tell her sister that one plus one is easy, or hard? She said easy, of course.

Then I explained that means difficulty is a perception. It's relative to the person.

The way I put it to her was, if two people stand in two different spots and stare at the same thing, they each get a different view of it. And that changes what they assume it is.

And a hundred plus a hundred? She worked out that it's two hundred. Which is truly just as easy as one plus one.

That way of thinking has started to set in. She's picked up simple multiplication on her own. Even division.

Fractions were the same. She already knows how to split a cake between her friends. So I told her, then I already know you can do fractions. Fractions are just how we write that down in the language of math.

With kids in particular, I always draw what they're doing back to real life.

Here's why I'm telling you this in a series about models. Most of the limits on my daughter weren't hers. They were somebody's guess about her, from where they were standing.

I think we do the same thing to ourselves. And to our models. We call something hard math before anyone has tried the full length.

So that's the series. Depth, altitude, range, and why it's hard.

Here's my ask. Pick one thing this week that you've already decided is too hard, for you or for your agent. Try the whole thing before you settle for half. Then tell me what happened.

Anyway. Start from the outcome. Or don't. I'm not your manager. Follow for more.