In this episode, we discuss the importance of putting many reps into your craft. This is how you will reach mastery status.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe where I combine financial planning with self-development coaching for Latino professionals.
In today’s episode, we’re are going to talk about the need for repetition in your life. There is a study out there that put students in a pottery class in two different groups. Group A was told to make the perfect clay pot and that is how their grade would be determined. The second group was told that their grade would be based on quantity. If they did over 30 clay pots they would get a C if they did over 40 clay pots they would get a B, and if they did over 50 clay pots during the term they would get an A.
After the term was over, the study concluded that the students who focused on quantity did a much better job than those who focused on quality. This study has been done with other activities like photography and the results were the same. The more you focus on quantity, the better off you will become.
This is because every time you do something, you will figure out how to do it a little bit better the next time around. I found this study pretty relieving because it told me that if I practice something enough, I will get better at it. I already found that out in this podcast. Since I write every day and I record and edit the podcast, I’m able to do them a lot faster and I feel the content is better.
So if I focus on something then I will get better. The first couple of times might be really embarrassing but if you can get over that initial reaction, and just push through, then you can get better. It’s like those people who go on America’s Got Talent and they just suck. Instead of saying they will never be good, they just tell themselves that they are not great yet. If they put more time and energy into their craft they will get better.
Imagine being embarrassed on national television for sucking at something, but a year later you’re killing it. Some people will crumble if they have a fixed mindset and don’t believe they can’t get any better, but if you have a growth mindset, then you know that there is a way to get better, you just have to find the right way.
That might require to hire a coach who can help you out, to read more books and watch more YouTube videos to help you get better, or just go back to the drawing board and keep practicing your craft. All this depends on what your goals are but remembers, if you take one lick from the lollipop of mediocrity, you will suck forever. To be mediocre means you satisfied with good and good enough is not good enough for a lot of things in life.
Interesting fact, the word mediocre comes from two Latin words, medi which means half and ocris which means mountain. So if you’re mediocre, you’re literally halfway up the mountain. If you’re halfway up the mountain no one will see you because it’s a crowded space to be in.
If you’re on top of the mountain, you’ll be more visible as a person and you’ll have a great view, but it requires work to get to the top of the mountain. By continue step by step, and not quitting on that process, you can get to the top of your mountain, but that requires you to continually work on your craft.
I find the best way to focus on your clay pots is to just put the activity you want to get better at on your calendar. By doing this, you’re going to have the awareness to know that you should be working on your craft. To help me with writing and my podcasts, I just put it in my calendar and when that time pops on my calendar, I just do that task.
It requires discipline to stick to a schedule but that is what professionals do. They stick to the schedule and amateurs let life get in the way. You will suck at the beginning and it will be painful but that pain will go away, plus if you’re just starting out, not that many people are paying attention to you and you can afford to mess up on a smaller stage. Beyonce even fell down on a stage a couple of years ago and nobody is shunning what happened in the past. If you stopped working after that incident, then people would be talking about it but if you just continue with your work and keep producing new work, that is what people will focus on.
People just care what is new is going on. Especially in today’s media, where there is something always to focus on, so just keep working on making more clay pots. If you want to become a better marketer, then put more things out there. If you want to be a better office manager, keep doing things that will make you a better office manager in your free time. It doesn’t matter what job you have, just keep doing the work and study your industry so you see trends and understand how you need to change your craft if that is required.
It takes 10 years to become an overnight success. You just need to put in the hours to get where you want to go. Success rarely happens on the first try, it will require many different attempts. but if you don’t put in the attempts, then you’ll just see your progress as a person start to regress and then you’ll have to do twice as much as work to get back where you started.
So whatever you’re trying to accomplish, you just need to put more hours in and look at the feedback. If you want to become a madden champ, then you need to play madden but also review what is working and not working so you can get better at the things you’re good out and remove your weaknesses.
Right now, I’m trying to get better at pull-ups because I believe they are the best upper body exercise you can do. They give you better posture and if I’m ever on a cliff and I need to pull myself up, I can do so. A couple of months ago, I made it a goal that I would do 20 pull-ups a day, then it turned into 30, and now I’m at 40. I tell people, 40 pull-ups a day keeps the bad posture away. If you do 40 pull-ups a day, you’ll feel stronger, you’ll stand up straighter, and you’ll have more confidence, but if I didn’t focus on doing them, then I would have gotten better. I would have gotten worse. If enough time passes, I won’t be able to do even one pull-up. I remember that I could just do 4 pull-ups but now I can do about 17 pull-ups in a row. My goal is to do 25 in a row and I’ll just keep increasing the amount until I get there. But first I just need to keep doing them and along with other things.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode, to summarize it, you have to make your clay pots. The more you do something, the better you will get better. Don’t get embarrassed by starting from the bottom. We all started there but the difference is that some people continued on while others just quit. It’s okay to quit but make sure that it’s something you really don’t want to do and you’re not quitting to protect your ego. If you’re quitting to protect your ego, then that is a just slippery slope towards mediocrity and being comfortable, and remember, nothing grows in the comfort zone.
To get a free copy of my book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and just pay for shipping and handling.
I have a quiz on my website that grades your inner circle, so if you want to find out if your inner circle is an A, B, C, D, or F, you can take that quiz at growwithjoe.me/quiz
I’m also trying to do a feedback Friday episode, so if you have a question that you would like to have my answer on the air, just e-mail me at [email protected]
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
