3. Your Level Zero
Keegan Smith breaks down Level Zero, a low-stakes entry point for learning any physical skill by splitting it into tiny tasks. He learned three-ball juggling at 24, which shifted his beliefs about what he could master and opened doors to language and guitar. The framework works across balance, balls, and beats.
Chapters
One of the superpowers of new athlete is level zero. Level zero is about finding a starting point, finding an entry level for the backflip. Part of this level zero is being able to look above you, look behind, roll onto your back. Things that might seem like, well, how does that help me to get a backflip? But when you piece them together, level one, level two, you've built so much foundation by the time you're at level three that it's, it's not like as if you were to just start at that level three. It's the big jumps that hold people back. Same with the juggling. A lot of people have tried to juggle. I thought I was mentally incapable of juggling. I literally thought that I didn't have the processing speed to three ball juggle because I looked in a book, I saw a method, I tried the method, it didn't work for me. As an eight year old, I wanted to juggle. There was something about juggling that really appealed to me. And then again when I was around 20, I saw that some of the players in the Australian under 21s hockey team, when I wanted to be in the national team, they could juggle. There was two guys that could juggle. And again I tried and I played around with it and I couldn't work it out. This is a time before YouTube and it just wasn't as self evident of how you would solve that. But then when I did learn to three ball juggle at 24, it opened me up to possibilities that may, maybe there's other things that I thought I couldn't do that I could. And I then went and learned Spanish and French and guitar and had a big life shift. But it started, a lot of it started with the juggling. Now for you, I don't know if juggling is going to have that, if it has that special place for you, I hope it does. But the chances are there's something within the follow along section in new athlete that you're like, oh, I don't think I could ever do that. Level 0 gives you the opportunity to, to start. If you can start, then you're on the journey and you realize that, okay, yeah, I can do this stuff within a week, within two weeks, maybe within 10 seconds or two minutes, you realize, okay, I can, this is easy. And then that becomes the leverage to go on and do that level one, which is then a little bit harder. And now I'm able to five ball juggle. I can three ball juggle in one hand. Playing around with Six and seven. And I don't have any ambitions to be a professional juggler. They're all tools to me. There's 27 tools in the balance balls and beats paradigm inside of these primary skills and juggling is just one of them. I will continue to work on it and I it has been continuing to improve, but it's not just about the juggling. It's about being able to put yourself into that new thing and see what comes next. Recently I've started to work on basketball skills. I was never particularly good at basketball. I played a little bit as a young man. I played in a team actually for a couple of years and the guys kind of laughed at me because they played seriously. They were regional level players and I was a beginner. But I'm taking it on now. I'm watching Peyton Pritchard, who's got phenomenal ball handling skills. He's got great stuff and you can see it here within the app as the level five of like, this is what the best in the world can do with the ball. And I'm focusing on that. And I don't know how close I'll get to his abilities. I suspect I won't get to where he's at. But I also suspect that in the process, I'm going to get to a place where I can play a game of basketball with my children. If they would like to play basketball with me at some point, or if we're playing between brothers, then I'm going to have a little bit more game. And honestly, I personally enjoy the preparation for that as much as if we ever play. I'm sure it'll be fun if one day we're playing basketball together. Regardless. I'm not saying that I'm going to be better than you and I'm not, you know, it's not that I'm going to take on the world. I'm going to make the NBA. It's not about that. It's about crushing the limiting belief and replacing that limiting belief with capacity, which gives confidence. And it's a. It's a fun process. It becomes a very enjoyable process. Most men are paralyzed by level zero, freaking them out. Like. Like starting, getting started. How would I get started? What if they laugh at me? What if I can't do it? But when you embrace this level zero philosophy and you can start anything in the comfort of your own home, you don't have to have the camera on if you don't want to, then something new opens up. If you really have ambitions with new Athlete. I encourage you to film those first sessions, film that first attempt, those first days, because that's going to be the most powerful footage if you ever decide to become a money making athlete. That footage of contrast showing where you started to where you got to, that's the stuff that's going to make opportunity for you. So the worse you are, the better it is from that business perspective. I'm saying pretend that you're worse than you actually are. That's, that's dishonest. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is the less natural it is for you. Great racket sports. Golf, tennis, basketball, soccer, volleyball. Chances are one of these really mainstream sports you've completely neglected or been excluded from or thought you couldn't do. And when you can do it, when you're improving at it, see what it does for your confidence. When you start being good at it, when you just feel yourself being better at it, the process also becomes much more enjoyable. So this is what it's about with level zero. It also goes for the skill, the strength element, the force elements, like learning to do Olympic lifting, for example, or jumping rope and being more elastic with skipping. It goes for the dance side of things. I know that's been a big one for me where I've been very uncomfortable with trying to find a rhythm and find a beat. And it's less uncomfortable now that I've embraced the beats component. It's one of the three primaries, balance, balls, beats. We're going to go into more detail about these, but Understand this Level 0 concept is very powerful and very transformative. When you embrace it, I encourage you to dive in, embrace it, take on some level zeros. They're usually five minutes at the most. And by the end of that five minutes, you kind of know that you're going to be able to get to a point. If you would like to.
