What Holds Back Highly Capable Creatives, Students, and Professionals
What ends up holding back students who earn near perfect GPAs and high test scores from the growth that leads to impressive and interesting work is fear. They’re unwilling to endure the discomfort of not knowing how and not being able (yet), the unavoidable experience of not succeeding immediately.
Successfully achieving endeavors like executing a large-scale, complex community project, leading the team to transition towards using a new client relationship management (CRM) platform as an intern, or producing a great work of art, starts simply with whether we show up or not.
THE STUPIDLY BASIC MATH OF SUCCESS
Consider this (Oversimplified, Yet Still Accurate) Formula for Success:
Technique x Showing Up = Success
The truth about technique is that it can be imperfect or minimally effective, and yet, if you show up on enough days, you will eventually get there. Cutting grass with a nail cutter or a pair scissors will take longer than using a lawnmower, but stay at it long enough and you’ll have cut all the grass.
Even with a free throw shooting rate of 10% compared to 90%, you might still make one shot out of ten as long as you show up for all ten. You just need to take more shots, meaning it will be more work until you improve your technique.
The non-negotiable reality of showing up is that if you don’t show up at all, you’re not even applying imperfect technique that still has some chance of yielding success and growth.
THE RISK HIGH APTITUDE STUDENTS FACE
Part of my job in working with students (often ones with high potential) is setting goals wherein we pursue interesting or impressive work. For my students who get good grades, they perform adequately if they’re given mundane tasks with instructions that have already been proven to work. These are tasks that are far beneath their intelligence, significantly below their creative capacity, but well within their comfort zone.
But when we pursue work that has a high risk of not working out, a real possibility of being rejected, of not immediately achieving guaranteed success, they back down.
We will even schedule time in their calendar to simply try, essentially acknowledging that they have the time to do it. But because they don’t already have the ability to do it immensely well and have it all figured out right from the very beginning, they’re a lot less willing to invest time towards developing the ability to do it.
As a result, nothing gets done. They stall, and as they stall, they stagnate.
The most significant obstacle for these students isn’t a lack of intelligence, time, or resources. It’s a lack of courage. It’s a clinging to comfort. It’s an unwillingness to go back to being bad at something.
I KNOW THIS FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Two of my biggest regrets since having moved to Asia was waiting years until I started taking lessons for learning the local language, first with Mandarin in Shanghai, China, then with Vietnamese in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Why would I wait so long to take lessons while living in a country where I’m not only surrounded by opportunities for application and practice, but drowning in it?
Being overly particular about perfect technique.
My tendency is to first create the most ideal system, to discover the absolute best technique, and to wait for the perfect conditions like “enough free time” before starting to take lessons.
I tend to want to wait until I have maximized my method’s effectiveness and optimized the angle of my approach. My debilitating belief is that slow progress is a waste of time. I too often believe this at the expense of any progress, and I end up paying for it with no progress at all.
Having taken language lessons in the form of private tutoring on three separate occasions now (Taipei, Shanghai, Hanoi), I’ve learned that it’s the best form of insurance for any progress in language learning. It’s a highly effective forcing function. At the very least, I’ll spend those hours in class practicing and learning something. Add a fluency goal with a deadline and my desire to not want to disappoint my teacher, and I’m now spurred to do more than just show up to class and end up doing better than trying to find perfection on my own.
Any Progress > No Progress. Always.
Show up first, then figure out how to improve technique.
