#71 - Learning to Unlearn
Reflect on your career, and take a second to consider what got you here.
Then think on this quote that you probably know, but don’t always appreciate: what got you here won’t get you there.
I’ve uttered this statement no less than 100 times in my life, and until very recently, I didn’t really know what this meant.
What got you here was some way of doing your work that you likely honed through feedback from hard-working and/or smart people. You honed it over and over and over again, and now you’re _______. You feel good about yourself because you’ve achieved something. You’ve grown!
But then one day you wake up and do what many people before you have done. You say, “I’m going to do something different.” You change your job or company, you move to a different city, you go back to school, you take some time out of the workforce. Whatever you do, you decide that your path ahead will look fundamentally different than your path to here.
When you make this brave, exhilarating choice to eschew the safety of the known for the potential of the unknown, you are committing yourself to evolve. And real evolution feels uncomfortable.
You have some choices when this discomfort occurs:
You can resist the discomfort and give up
You can “try” to embrace it and you’ll feel constant friction as you seemingly force yourself to grow, or…
You can embrace the idea that you actually don’t know anything. That henceforth you’re going to dig into your propensity to learn. You’ll ask tons of questions, you’ll “pre-worry” about why you’re going to fail and you’ll use these “pre-worrying” points (shout out to Dave Payne for the terminology!) to drive pro-active processing with the people around you in the new environment.
You’ll do this regularly, often, and you’ll be excited about finding what’s somewhat broken about your own mental / operating model
The reward will be that you will be in greater control of your success. You’ll explore what you can change / grow into, and what is simply not possible for you. You’ll gain the clarity that results in:
I’m great / have the potential to be great at X, and
I am awful and cannot “growth mindset” myself into being great at Y
So, I will work on teams where other people have Y, but maybe lack X
And together we’ll do more than we could do on our own
This ability to un-learn is probably the most important thing for anyone who wants to continue to do new things and actually have fun while doing it. Throwing your ego out of the window a bit and just going back into learn-it-all mode (as Satya Nadella loves to say). I mean, who are you trying to impress? No one’s got it all, and it’s better to embrace it and grow than to fake it and stagnate.
I think if you can learn to unlearn, you’ll experience greater joy in your (professional) life. Suddenly there’s less friction when something is uncomfortable. Instead, the discomfort is an opportunity to peek at and discover your future self…The future self that worked through it and found a new way.