Stop Forcing What You’re Bad At (Do This Instead)

When you lose too many fights in business, life, or relationships, your brain starts to doubt itself.

In this episode, I explain how uncertainty destroys momentum, and why stacking small, winnable successes restores clarity, confidence, and forward motion.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The first thing I want to bring up is it's
okay to be a bit stressed. If you are looking
for I must be at complete ease, then you're looking
for the wrong metric. If you are looking for ease,
that's good. You should be looking for ease. Lots of
things are hard, and lots of things stress us out,
and that's okay. And if you know that it's a
little bit easier, that doesn't mean you don't want to

(00:20):
seek alignment. But I've found knowing that it's okay to
be a little bit stressed makes it easier to find
the alignment where you're less stressed. So here's here's why
we want it to be easy is because if it's easy,
then we can be more effective at it. Right. If
it's really easy for you to shoot three pointers in basketball,
then you shoot more three pointers. Right. But the goal

(00:44):
is shooting three pointers, right, it's not it being easy.
And so what you do if you're trying to shoot
three pointers is you work on making shooting three pointers
as easy as possible so that you shoot more three pointers.
But you don't, for example, stop throwing the ball because

(01:09):
it's hard, right, because that defeats the goal and so
I will give you an example. For me. I had
a lot of camera shyness. I still have a lot
of camera shyness, actually, and I wanted to produce more content.
And every time I looked at the camera and memorized lines,

(01:31):
I looked at the camera and stuttered because I couldn't
remember the lines. And so I was my goal was
make more things. And as a result of that, I
was able to come to the conclusion, well, what if

(01:51):
I stopped looking at the camera, And so I wrote
a script and I turned my head and I ran
read it off the screen like a zombie, and I
went viral. That's actually how I first went viral is
because I was literally just reading stuff off a screen.
And I went viral by producing the thing that was

(02:14):
the easiest for me to produce. And the way I
did it was by giving up on all the stuff
that I was bad at. And so there's a certain
phase of life where a person's competence has raised enough
that he is competent at some things, but because of
the way a person grows up. When a person is

(02:38):
growing up, they go through a phase of increasing their
competence at everything that they can and becoming more skilled
at everything is the goal, and accomplishing the specific thing
is not, And so they emphasize the importance of being
good at stuff over the importance of accomplishing something. And

(03:03):
when a person is switching to say a career phase
of life or a production phase of life where they're
trying to create things, their goal needs to switch from
I need to be good at this stuff to I
need to get this thing outdoor right. I need to
get this painting into the gallery. I need to get

(03:23):
this episode out on TV right, whatever it is that
you do, I need to get this piece of content posted.
And when you start thinking that way, it is no
longer valuable for you to try to get good at everything.
It is actually valuable for you to find the things

(03:43):
that you are good at, isolate them, and only do
them because everything else slows you down. And so at
this phase of life, all of these values of persistence
and like sticking with something that's hard until you get

(04:04):
better at it, these things that were core values that
were so important for your personal growth from you know,
let's say ages zero to twenty five ish, they suddenly
become the roadblock because you actually should give up on
it and go, oh, I could do these three things

(04:28):
right here. Let me just do that. And so an
example in content creation, So you're doing vlogs, I can
guarantee if you are doing vlogs, and vlogs are still
a struggle to you, and you kind of like them
and they're kind of working, but there's problems. I can
guarantee you. There are three angles that are three camera
angles that are really easy for you, and one that's

(04:50):
like really hard and you spend hours getting right and
you have to learn how to go. Oh, this camera
angle over here, it's just a real challenge and struggle
for me, and I need to just stop doing it
and learn how to make good art with these three
camera angles over here. And here's where the magic starts

(05:14):
to happen. We know the way to create great things
is through artistic constraints. Here are your constraints. Your constraints
become defined by what you're bad at. Your constraints are
you're only allowed to do the things that you're good at.
So it's one of the most weird, mind bending and

(05:37):
exciting things. It's really hard to get this, and it's
so cool when you get it. People talk about artistic
constraints all the time, and also artists struggle under them
all the time. We're like, no, I need to be
able to do everything right. And then I go in
and I tell people, look, things that you're really fantastic at,

(06:03):
you're only allowed to do those things. All of a sudden,
they just go they create incredible things. And so it's like,
if you're only good at improvising on the piano and
you know, canning strawberry preserves and talking about the stock market,

(06:28):
that's all you're allowed to do in your YouTube videos.
Can you think of a million people who would watch
that account? I can. Yeah, that's weird. I want it.
That's super cool. Right if all you do is spoken word, poetry,

(06:50):
country music and real estate, like, I want to watch
that channel. That's a channel that would succeed. And people
get caught up in like two major blockers. One is well,
there's so many things I want to do, and then

(07:14):
the other is I'm not good enough. So the way
through that is you say, all right, you got to
go through a phase of life where you're only allowed
to do the things that you can do. And this
is so immensely freeing because this whole I want to
do everything. If the constraint is you're only allowed to

(07:39):
do the things that you're really great at. You're gonna
resist a little bit, but it won't be so bad
because you're doing a bunch of stuff that you're good at,
and you get to be proud of the fact that
you're doing stuff that you're good at, and so it's
not so hard to push against that requirement of limitation,

(08:04):
that is, you don't get to do everything, and then
the whole you're not good enough. If the constraint is
you're only allowed to do the things that you're good at,
it gets easier to set down the things that you're
obsessing over. You know, that camera angle, that one line

(08:24):
that you say that you know, particular appearance of the packaging,
whatever it is that you struggle with, and you develop
a greater capacity to go, oh, I just can't do that.
So what would I do if I knew that I
couldn't do that? And that is one of the most

(08:45):
powerful questions that I know of for creators who have
already developed a level of competence but are struggling to
get into like the phase of like really professional and
easeful creation where it's like, I'm really churning out good
stuff regularly. Is they have to get to this point

(09:06):
where they can actually let go of the things that
they're bad at and only allow themselves to do a
couple of the things that they're good at. And then
when they run against a roadblock, actually don't try to
push through it, but say, okay, what would I do
if I couldn't do that? And by the way, this

(09:30):
only works for a certain subset of humans. This is
for a certain personality traite. For people that are creative types,
there's different there's different rule sets for people who consider
themselves to be less creative and more on the execution side.
But I know that you lean towards creative in terms

(09:51):
of like your personality. And so for somebody who is
a creative type, meaning you tend to ideate a lot,
you tend to have a lot of different ideas, you
have a lot of broad interests, you come up with
cool things, and you're very creative, this particular rule set
works really well, which is do the thing that you

(10:12):
can do, and if you run again it's a roadblock,
assume that it's not because you're bad. It's not because
you're inadequate, and you need to be better, assume that
it shouldn't be one of the ingredients of the thing
that you're producing. And you know, where you're a perfectionist.
The most is on the stuff that you're bad at. Yes,
you're a perfectionist. The most on the things where you're like, oh, like,

(10:35):
let's say you're bad at like camera sets or like
the production sets. You're like, I got to move this
light two inches to the left, No, two inches to
the right, No, a half inch to the left, No,
a quarter inch to the right. Right. If you're good
at lighting, you don't really do that. You just go
that looks good, right. And so if you find yourself

(10:59):
getting in a perfectionist loop, what you have to do
is you have to go, oh, is this something that
shouldn't be in here at all? This is this is
so powerful. When I used to produce music, I used
to spend hours, like on a bassline, and I like,
I'd write it and it would sound okay, but it

(11:20):
wouldn't quite fit. And then I'd re record it, and
then I re record it five more times, and then
I'd be a little bit better, but it still wouldn't
quite fit. And then I'd go like, okay, well, what
if I like switch the sound and do some sound design,
and now I'm five hours into this bassline, and then
all of a sudden, I'd go, oh, what if I

(11:42):
deleted the bassline and there just wasn't one in this
particular song, and then I delete it, and all of
a sudden, I'm like, that sounds pretty good. For creatives
that are trying to get good at stuff, it's one
of our last instincts is to just not do it.
And you need to make it one of your first

(12:03):
instincts because there's so many things that you can do beautifully.
You have to learn how to do those things. Do
you see how this like applies to everything creatively for
the phase that you run. Like for me, the thing
that I was good at was writing, and so the
path was how do I get my writing out with
as little distraction as possible? Right when I was overthinking

(12:26):
and I was like trying to come up with like
skits and like how do I make this a performance?
But it was like, no, Like my words were good,
and so how do I remove as many things as
possible and just expose my words to the world, m
expose the beauty