The speaker breaks down Anders Ericsson's stages of skill mastery and argues most people quit before reaching true expertise. Success requires pushing past your comfort zone through deliberate practice and mental toughness, not just habit alone.
Alright, 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 scup, but we can use it anywhere, really. So there's this professor, his name's professor. Like Anders Ericsson, I believe. Let me Google that to make sure it's right. Anders Ericsson, Yeah. So K. Anders Ericsson is a 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 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 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 gonna lie to you, it's gonna 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, it 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 gonna 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, 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 to 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 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. 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 will be that unconscious level, right? You know what I'm talking about? That third level where you're operating unconsciously. If you 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 own 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 said the same thing twice, two different ways. So creative. But it's something that 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 realize 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 five. I want to go network. I want to go like hang out with people at the Kratom bar and drink Kratom, stuff like that. But I realized 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 and that we make conscious effort every day to do. Oh. So hey, that's my scup talk, guys. I would love to have discussion if any of you guys want to talk about it.
