In this audiobook excerpt, Erika Andersen, an executive coach and leadership trainer, reflects on three decades of experience helping people acquire new skills. She cites historical innovators such as Michelangelo, da Vinci, Einstein, and Steve Jobs as exemplars of extraordinary learning. Drawing on observations of these figures and thousands of coaching clients, Andersen identifies four mental skills that consistently enable rapid mastery: aspiration, neutral self‑awareness, endless curiosity, and a willingness to be bad first. She explains that these skills form the ANEW model, a simple, replicable framework she now embeds in her coaching and training programs to help leaders—and anyone—learn faster. The clip concludes with a promotional note directing listeners to purchase the book and take an online quiz to assess their own “bad‑first” capability.
A clip from Erika Andersen's latest book, Be Bad First: Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future.
Because a lot of what I do for a living boils down to supporting people in learning new skills and capabilities, whether through providing executive coaching, designing leadership and management training, or writing business books, I've thought a great deal over the past 3 decades about how we learn and how we get in the way of our own learning. Along the way, I've noticed certain people throughout history—Michelangelo, da Vinci, Galileo, Christine de Pizan, Albert Einstein, George Washington Carver, Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, and Norman Lear, to name a few—who have been unusually good at learning new things and applying that knowledge to break new ground and create success for themselves and others. I've reflected on how each of them approached learning, to the extent I knew or could find out about it, and I've also observed hundreds of coaching clients and thousands of training clients and noticed what they did either to support their own learning or to impede it. Then, a few years ago, I wrote a book called Leading So People Will Follow. When the book came out, I did lots of interviews about it, and the one question that interviewers invariably asked was, Do you think good leaders are born or made? I would always answer the question in the same way: that I see natural leadership capability as existing along a bell curve, and that the 70 to 80% of us who are born in that part of the bell curve are, fortunately, quite improvable. And the next question would be, well then, what does it take to improve as a leader? I noticed that I referenced 4 things over and over. 4 mental skills for learning that I had observed throughout my years of coaching and training, and that I had practiced myself. As I noticed how my responses centered on these 4 elements, I started to get excited. Each of the 4 was simple, explicable, replicable. I began to think that I had happened upon a model for turbocharging one's ability to learn, an approach that could be enormously helpful to anyone who wanted to acquire new capabilities, not just in leadership, but in any area of knowledge or skill. And given that I was, at the same time, coming to understand that the ability to acquire new skills and knowledge is the key skill of our time, for all the reasons I talked about in the first couple of chapters, I began to think that I had stumbled on something very important. I called out these 4 skills of mastery and named them as I understood them: aspiration, neutral self-awareness, endless curiosity, willingness to be bad first. I started incorporating these new skills, these 4 elements of mastery mindset, into my coaching practice and into my company's leadership and management training. These elements resonated with our clients, who were able to use them to improve their ability to learn new skills and knowledge quickly and well.
Thank you for listening. You can find Be Bad First on Amazon.com and anywhere books are sold. And if you'd like to find out how good you are at being bad first, go to getgoodatthingsfast.com and take the quiz.
