Why You're Not Improving - FDDTC #35

All right, guys. So I wanted to talk to everyone about two different things today, and they're both core values of scup. But the idea here is that we all want to grow as individuals. We all want to get better in our personal lives, at our crafts, at our hobbies, our passions. I know a lot of you guys have passions outside of work, obviously. Like Fabian, for instance, wants to open a gym, and he wants to help people beat up other people and stuff like that, right? But if we look at every single person around us, right, there's a lot of people who have goals, a lot of people who want to get better at things. There's people who've been trying to build stores, for instance, for like, 10 years. There's people who've been trying to get better at golf for 10 years. There's people who've been trying to do X, Y and Z for 10 years, but they're not making progress. There's people who go to the gym for 10 years and they don't make progress. And I want to talk about two scup, core values that we can use to make progress, obviously, in our roles here at scop, but we can use it anywhere, really. So there's this professor. His name is professor, like Anders Ericsson, I believe. Let me Google that to make sure it's right. Anders Ericsson. Yes. Okay. Anders Ericsson, professor, really smart guy. Wrote books like Peak Secrets from the Science of Expertise, how to Master Almost Anything. Basically, he's a professor who studies how to perform extremely well, how to go from average to excellent. And he's worked with some of the most talented people in the world and is basically that we exist as we're learning a skill. We exist in three stages, okay? We have the first stage, where we don't really know what we're doing. We have the second stage, where we start to improve when we're practicing something. And then we have the third stage, which is like, okay, we kind of do it on autopilot. We don't really need to be conscious of it. So, for instance, when you first started typing, right, on a keyboard, you would type and it would be difficult and you'd have to consciously look at the keyboard and it would need to assist you as you typed. The second stage, right, is where we're getting a little bit better. We're typing. We don't have to look at the keyboard as much. We're still making errors, but we're not making as many. And the third stage is the automatic stage, right, where you type automatically. You don't have to look at the keyboard any longer. And the amount of mistakes you make are very few. And this is most people's journey to mastery. No matter what you do, you're going through these stages. Like if you're a golfer, at first the swing is like really weird. You know, it's like, oh my God, this doesn't make sense. How do I do this? The second stage, it's like, okay, I understand this a little bit better, but I'm still conscious of it. I'm still over analyzing and overthinking my swing while I'm doing it. And the third stage is like, okay, the swing is just natural. I can just do it and I'm going to get a very similar result most of the time. Now the big issue with self improvement or like mastery is that once people hit this third stage of like the automatic zone in their work and their hobbies, whatever they do, they're. They cease to improve because they're doing it automatic, right? Most people, they reach a certain level of typing and they never get any faster or they never get more accurate because they're just operating automatically. Now, the only way to continue to improve, the only way to continue to get better is by embodying one of our core values here at scup, which is raising the bar. So that Professor Anders Ericsson, as he worked with professionals, masters in their field, one thing he discovered from people who never progressed versus people who became masters and who continued to progress, is they raised the bar. And what I mean by that is they exited their comfort zone. Because when we operate from that automatic place, what feels good, what's comfortable, and we're not pushing ourselves like every day to get better, then we just stay where we are forever. And a really easy way to think about this is, is going to the gym. Because if you go to the gym and you do the same workouts every single day and you never increase the weight or you never increase the reps, you never exit that comfort zone, you never exit that automatic routine that's obvious to you, you're never going to progress. You never get further. Or you could look at it in terms of eating. When you're trying to build muscle mass, if you don't exit your comfort zone, if you're not like increasing calories significantly to the point where you're like, fuck, I feel like I'm going to throw up. This is super uncomfortable, right? You don't make progress and you're never gonna hit your goals. So we have to constantly be aware of what we're doing. And we have to ask ourselves, like, are we pushing ourselves? Am I operating in my comfort zone, or am I operating out of my comfort zone? And look, if you're the kind of person who's like, ah, I just wanna show up, like, I don't wanna grow. I want things to be easy. I never wanna progress. I. By all means, like, I'm not here to tell you that you have to always be uncomfortable. Like, dude, if your goals are just have an easy life where you never really accomplish anything, by all means, stay in your comfort zone forever. But I know everyone on this team, and I know myself, and hopefully we all align with the core values that we have here at Scup and we all understand that if we're not growing, what's the point, like, of anything? I think that there's. What's that? That saying right there's. In every single block of stone is a beautiful sculpture, and it's up to us to sculpt that stone, right, and knock off all those pieces, there's greatness in all of us. But the way we get there is by taking a step out of our comfort zone and making that our normal place of operation. And it's like, I'm not going to lie to you. It's going to be really hard at first. This is something I struggle with a lot. And 75 hard is something that's helped me significantly with this. Because with all things, like, really, everything is just comes down to habits. And if we make it easy, if we make it a habit to push ourselves and operate outside our comfort zone, it's going to make a world of difference, like, an absolute world of difference. And that's why doing something like 75 hard can be extremely useful, because as long as you stick to it, you adhere to it, and you're like, don't lie to yourself. You don't bullshit yourself. Like, in 75 days, you're gonna have that mental toughness that will allow you to easily build these new habits instead of letting your brain control you. And you guys all know what I'm talking about. Like, when you go out to eat or something and you're like, oh, I should eat healthy. And then your brain's like, no, no, no, I should. You know, I'll eat healthy tomorrow. I deserve this unhealthy food today or whatever, right? Like, that's us operating within our comfort zone. Operating outside of our comfort zone is pushing back, being a little uncomfortable and saying, I'm in control, not. Not my brain. I choose to do things the hard way, not the easy way. It's so funny that we consider like not eating junk food to be hard, but the more we practice it and the more that we put ourselves outside the comfort zone and we make these conscious decisions to take the hard path and not the easy path, the easier it becomes. And then self mastery and like self growth will start to happen on autopilot. It'll. It will be that unconscious level, right? You know what I'm talking about, that third level where you're operating unconsciously. If make it your normal to push yourself, if you make it your normal to operate outside the comfort zone, do hard things, do things you wouldn't normally do, push yourself, then that will become your unconscious level and you will continue down the path of self mastery. And this also ties in really well to one of our other core values here at scup, which is if nothing changes, then nothing changes. Right? It's like that same vein. We cannot do the same work. We cannot operate in that same comfort zone. We cannot not try to improve and expect to make more money, get better results, to see different results at the end of the day, right? I just had the same thing twice, two different ways. So creative. But it's something I've been thinking about a lot because I've been thinking about my own personal results, how I operate, the input I'm doing and the output that I'm getting. And I realized like, I just need to stop being so self serving almost. It's like we're all addicted to the easy path or pleasure. It's so much easier to not do the work and it's so much easier to like watch Netflix or do whatever, right? And that's not necessarily what I do. What I have an issue with is like after 5pm I'm just like, I don't want to work anymore after 5, I want to go network. I want to go like hang out with people at the crowd and bar and drink Kratom, stuff like that. But I realize like that's operating within my comfort zone. It's not going to push me and I'm making changes to make it easier and I'm pushing myself to be better. And it's just something I've thought about a lot and I thought maybe it would be beneficial to you guys too. The thing is, is it's something that we need to be conscious of. Like if we want to improve, we want to be better. We need to constantly be conscious of that and aware that it's not just something that happens. It's something that we go out there and it's something that we do, that we make conscious effort every day to do. So, hey, that's my scup talk, guys. I would love to have discussion if any of you guys want to talk about it.