What types of mental roadblocks are you likely to face when reaching your full potential? Why is it important to encounter these roadblocks?
Just because you learn more when you’re having fun doesn’t mean that the path to your full potential will be a walk in the park. Adam Grant notes that the most effective learning is fun, but it also has uncomfortable roadblocks.
Let’s look at the three uncomfortable mental roadblocks you’re bound to cross.
Mental Roadblocks to Overcome
Grant contends that the number one mental roadblock you’ll encounter when trying to reach your full potential is the ability to stay focused on your goals when it’s uncomfortable to do so. If you focus on strengthening this ability, it’ll pay off more than any other skills or expertise. This is because uncomfortable obstacles are inevitable on the path to any major goal. Without this skill, you’ll give up as soon as you encounter these obstacles.
For instance, starting a business is a difficult, uncomfortable process, but if you care about your goal of providing for yourself and your loved ones, you’ll be able to push through this discomfort and eventually succeed. In contrast, if you don’t know how to tolerate this discomfort, you might endlessly procrastinate instead of taking action to launch your business.
(Shortform note: In Can’t Hurt Me, David Goggins concurs that achieving your full potential requires pushing through a great deal of discomfort. He elaborates that your tolerance for discomfort isn’t domain-specific—building the strength to overcome discomfort in one area of your life will make it easier for you to accomplish anything in life. To raise your general tolerance for discomfort, Goggins recommends identifying a healthy habit that makes you the most uncomfortable and sticking to it until the discomfort doesn’t bother you anymore.)
Grant breaks down the practice of staying focused on your goals into strategies for coping with the three distinct forms of discomfort on the path to mastery. Let’s discuss these kinds of discomfort and explain how to overcome them.
Discomfort #1: Making Mistakes
The first kind of discomfort you must overcome to stay focused on your goals is making painful mistakes, argues Grant. Most learners do whatever they can to avoid awkward, uncomfortable failures when acquiring a new skill. However, doing so sets them up for inevitable failure. Why? To learn anything, you have to practice it before you’re good at it. This is naturally uncomfortable and sometimes downright embarrassing, so most learners avoid this kind of practice. They prepare indefinitely or try to teach themselves solely through abstract theory, in hopes that they can become competent without trying and failing along the way.
Instead, Grant recommends taking the opposite approach. Put your skills into practice as soon as possible: The very first day you start learning how to do something, try your best to successfully do it. When you inevitably make mistakes, take each one as an opportunity to learn what you’re doing wrong. Make it a habit to expand the most uncomfortable parts of your training—the parts where you make the most mistakes—rather than minimize or avoid them. For example, if you’re learning how to draw and feel embarrassed because the faces and hands you draw always look bad, challenge yourself by drawing more faces and hands.
Additionally, the more mistakes you make and learn from, the more comfortable you’ll become with making further mistakes. If you can connect your feelings of discomfort to the knowledge that you’re making progress, you’ll discover that the effort you’re putting in is satisfying in itself, even if it continuously results in awkwardness and failure. This mindset is called learned industriousness.
Discomfort #2: Acknowledging Your Flaws
The second kind of discomfort you must overcome to stay focused on your goals is acknowledging your flaws. Grant explains that many people suffer from perfectionism, which counterintuitively prevents them from doing their best work. When you aim to create flawless work, you exhaust yourself trying to fix unimportant problems that don’t need to be fixed.
Perfectionism also causes you to emotionally punish yourself for your mistakes. This self-flagellation makes you more afraid of making mistakes, which in turn teaches you to avoid mistakes rather than learn from them. As we’ve discussed, trying to avoid mistakes is one of the most common ways people stunt their personal growth.
Grant argues that perfection shouldn’t be your ultimate goal. It’s impossible to create perfect work, he says. Once you embrace this fact, you can direct your efforts strategically rather than putting maximum effort into everything. Focus on improving the aspects of your work that will have the greatest impact on its overall quality, and let go of everything else.
Your work doesn’t need to be perfect to be groundbreaking; it just needs to have some excellent qualities. For instance, when Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, critics derided it for being far too expensive and locked onto AT&T’s slow 2G network. If Apple had obsessed over optimizing their supply chain to lower the price of the iPhone, or tried to build their own perfect cellular network, they might have wasted millions of dollars chasing these unnecessary and potentially impossible goals. Instead, the iPhone’s user-friendly touchscreen, multitude of functions, and sleekly designed software were excellent enough for it to sell six million units in its first year and revolutionize the smartphone industry.
Discomfort #3: Proving Yourself Wrong
The third kind of discomfort you must overcome to stay focused on your goals is proving yourself wrong. Grant contends that to reach your full potential, you have to actively seek out errors in your thinking and identify aspects of your work that you could do better.
To do this, first take responsibility for your own growth, advises Grant. Many people don’t bother trying to learn how to improve—when they want to do something, they wait for someone else to show them how to do it. If you want to tap into your potential, this isn’t good enough. Aim to educate yourself rather than passively accept whatever information you happen to encounter.
To further discover how to improve at a task, become comfortable with humility, recommends Grant. Even when someone is actively trying to get better, they’ll often make the mistake of reflexively denying or ignoring information that challenges their ego. Learning that you’re totally wrong about something can be uncomfortable and embarrassing, but it’s a necessary step if you want to grow.
According to Grant, the best way to prove yourself wrong is by getting advice from experts who know more than you about what you’re trying to do—a strategy we’ll discuss in the next section.
