34: Why You Should Be an Amateur | Deep Dive

Transcript for Deep Dive | Why You Should be an Amateur (Episode 34)

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:00:00] Yes, Einstein was not a “beginner” when he developed his theory of relativity, but he definitely had that beginner's mindset, certainly to the extent that he was willing to throw out what was the conventional way of doing science and come up with a much more powerful explanation for how the universe works.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:19] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DeFillippo. On this episode, we're talking with the head of editorial here at the Jordan Harbinger Show, Gabriel Mizrahi. This guy, you know, you've heard of him. He's in the Deep Dives. If I were smarter and more articulate, this would be my voice, but since I'm not, I rely on Gabriel and he's awesome at this stuff. He really takes a lot of the content that we have in our heads here and in his head and he makes it into just super awesome content. As you know, he creates a lot of the products here. He helps create a lot of the Deep Dive content and he helps create the posts that you read from me online and he's going to be creating a lot more in the future as well.

[00:00:58] But today we're talking about why you should be an amateur. In most areas of our lives, we hunger to improve, we do more, we learn more, we grow more, we acquire more -- All in the pursuit of surmounting our ignorance and developing an expertise we can use to advance our lives and our careers. And we know success requires hard work and a body of experience. So we naturally aim to become masters of our jobs, our crafts, our lives. But we'll see using a couple of stories here that we're going to illustrate. There can be downsides to expertise. Experts tend to lead with experience rather than common sense. I've been guilty of that. The more that experience delivers good results, the more we come to rely on technique and convention rather than insight and intuition. So we rely on what worked before as opposed to what could work or needs to work now.

[00:01:43] Experience, in other words, both helps us and blinds us to possibilities by becoming great we can actually be in danger of not growing anymore. To really thrive, it almost seems like we need less experience, less training, less expertise. It's almost as if we need to remain amateurs and that's what we're going to be talking about here in our Deep Dive today. How to get better at everything while keeping that curiosity, that level of, I guess you would say not inexperience, but that open mind to throw a cliche on it, that just is open enough to let in the growth and that's what we're going to be working on today. That's what we're going to be discussing and I'm excited about this. Amateurism opens up possibilities and we're going to show you how to harness that. Don't forget we have worksheets for today's episode. You can make sure you pull everything that you need to out of this one. That link is in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com/podcast. Now here we go with Gabriel Mizrahi. You know I love these Deep Dives. We're back with Gabriel Mizrahi. Because when you're on the show I can just check out and not do anything.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:02:44] That's the bet I got you. Just want to sit here while someone else talks the whole time.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:49] And then I'm like, wasn't that a bunch of smart things that I just said right there with that guest whose name you won't remember.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:02:55] It's good to be back. Thank you for having me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:56] Yes, you’re welks. Today's an interesting one because this is something that actually happened to Jason, but, well I guess it happened to me and Jason, but it sort of reached into and grew tentacles out into this idea that maybe we're better off having a beginner's mind and as deep as that might sound, I'll just go through the anecdote before I confuse everyone. So basically Jason and I had recorded a show and I had done something wrong in the field and I'd recorded a bunch of crappy noise in addition to what I was trying to get and I wasn't monitoring the audio properly and something happened and I can't remember exactly what it was because it was a couple months hence. And when we took the audio to our engineer, and he's a smart guy and he's very well educated with all this audio stuff and he can fix all these crazy hard problems. You know, he's the guy who couldn't listen to something and say, “Oh, your 1600 Hertz is turned up too high. Let's try to do this, you know, phase reduction, whatever.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:03:56] He knows what's up, he knows how to fix these things.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:58] he knows what's going on, right? It's all crazy complex. And then he tried to fix and tried to fix it. He tried to fix it and it got pretty good, but it wasn't perfect. And then producer Jason took it and went, “I'm just going to try a couple of random things.” And he tried it and he fixed it in a matter of I think an hour. And our engineer went, “What the heck did you do?” And Jason said, “Well, I ran it through this.” And the engineer said, “You know, I wasn't going to do that because I was just sure that it was a waste of time and not going to work. But now I understand that if you did this thing and that and the other thing that makes sense that it would work.” Now, why did a seasoned-decade-plus-long audio school educated professional miss something that somebody who knew nothing about that specific problem figured out in a matter of minutes? Why did that happen? And we end up with the benefits of being a beginner or this idea of the experience paradox. Tell us about this.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:04:57] Yeah, it's such a good example because where the textbook wisdom should have been able to diagnose and fix the problem, it actually missed it because it didn't even think that could possibly be a solution. But the person who wasn't tethered to the idea of the right way to do something actually found the solution in a matter of moments. So the experience paradox I think is this, is that in most areas of our lives we really want to improve where you want to do more and learn more and grow more and acquire more, whether it's knowledge or expertise or insight or just put in the hours so we can get over that period of ignorance and lack of experience as quickly as possible. But what we saw with this quick audio story that you just shared, there are downsides to expertise. There are trade-offs to getting better and the trade-offs are that you start to rely on what you believe is the right way to do something or the way it's worked for you in the past or just whatever technical master you have.

[00:05:52] And you adopt that at the expense of being flexible enough or open enough to the answer or to find a better way of doing something. And that's a really hard paradox to work your way out of because it's not like you're going to stop trying to get better. You don't want to remain a beginner forever. That's the idea is to not be in that stage.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:6:10] In fact, people get mad about other people thinking that they're in that stage. And if you don't believe me, call tech support. And when they say, “Sir, please check and see if the computer is plugged in”, and just tell me that you don't get angry. But here's the problem. The reason that that thing is on their checklist of stuff is because there's a certain percentage of people that go, “You're right, it wasn't even plugged in. Thanks for the help.” Right? But that's the sort of the beginner mindset that you have to have. I had a computer problem a while back in law school a long time ago and they said, “Did you scan for spyware?” And I said, “It's not that, it's something else.” So I went to level three tech support a million times and the guy finally went, “I give up, let's just start all the steps from the beginning and we'll scan for spyware.” And I said, “We don't need to do that.” And he goes, “Let's just do everything because I give up otherwise. Scan for spyware -- had a little bit of spyware”, and he goes, “That's your problem. It's causing your wi-fi driver to fail every time the computer goes and standby.” And I went, “I'm a dumb ass. I skipped that step because I thought what could this possibly be?” So the more experienced we are, the more tempting it is to actually skip over the beginner phase because of in part ego. But the other part is we're just so damn sure that these beginner level solutions don't apply to us.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:07:19]  And at the same time there, there are insights that you get from being a beginner that are really useful. Even if it doesn't feel super comfortable or great to be on that stage, there are things that we're able to do or that we feel free to do or try or fail to do correctly in that beginner phase of any project or craft or whatever that you sort of move away from when you get better. I've noticed that with writing, like that's a technical skill that you get better at the more you do it. And there are conventions in ways of telling a story or communicating a point that are just so established and they work, right? Like there's a good way to write a news feature article.

[00:08:02] There's a good way to open a movie there. There are these tropes or conventions that are effective and they stick around because they're so good. So part of getting good at that craft is learning all of those conventions and then finding like, “Oh, I need to do a scene where the guy who's going to break into the safe has to convince the older guy who breaks into the safe to come and help him on like one last job.” [inaudible][00:08:26] we've seen in so many movies, there was a way to do that scene. That probably works because so many people have done it. Let's put aside the fact that we're all tired of seeing that movie, right? There are things like that where there's just a rich tradition that tells you how to do it and you can do it that way.

[00:08:42]  But in conforming to the accepted wisdom or the history of doing something, you might completely look over a way to do that scene that's never been done before that could actually make that scene so much better or more interesting. Or you might find that you don't even have to write that scene or you know, write the article in that way or whatever the piece of writing happens to be. So to really thrive, it sometimes seems like we need less experience, less training, less expertise. It's almost as if we need to remain beginners even as we get better. So the question is, is that possible? How is that possible? How can we get better and not stagnate? And how can we become experts without becoming, you know, rigid or narrow-minded.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:27]  If we become great, we can sort of stop growing by going, “All right, I've got all the conventions, I've got all the technique, and we stop relying on our insight and our intuition and we start relying on these systems that have worked before.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:09:39] Exactly. Totally. So the idea is to do both. And I think we're so eager to stopping amateurs, stopping beginners that we just overlook how powerful it is to be a beginner. And that's what I would love to talk about today because all we hear about is how to get better and get out of that phase. But I think if we stick around and embrace it, there's some really good stuff to learn for any field, any craft.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:01]  Right, let's talk about how to get worse. Wait, no.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:10:04] Yeah. Can we title the Deep Dive? How to get worse and still  kick ass.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:10] Yes, maybe we'll look into that.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:10:12] How do we become better without being an expert who can't see something that a beginner would? That's a really interesting question. So the title though? Yeah, it's a little long. We'll workshop at that one.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:20] Workshop that, yes.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:10:22] So you know what's funny, actually you and I were talking about this before we began the show. The word amateur is actually kind of interesting. It comes from the French word amateur –

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:31] Which is how you say amateur.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:10:32] Isn't that incredible? It comes from the pretentious pronunciation of the exact same word. Yeah. It actually comes from the Latin word amator which means lover. Right? So in its earliest usage at its core, amateur really means somebody who has like a fondness or a liking for something. Not somebody who's bad at something or who has never done it before, but someone who does it because they love it. So that's something I thought that was so interesting because like we just completely missed the idea that in the idea of being a beginner is doing something because you enjoy it and like playing with that thing, whether it's a new job or a craft or a sport, not because you want to become Andre Agassi, but because you just love hitting a ball over the net and any expert,

[00:11:16]  actually I bet Andre Agassi would probably say something similar that the trade-off with being at that level, competing at that level and being that good at something is the joy of just showing up because you really enjoyed the game of it. That's another trade-off is that our expertise and our fun or our love seem to be a trade-off. There seems to be like you exchange one for the other, so that's another thing that I think we have to talk about is like how do you hang onto both of those things. You in particular are really in an interesting position to comment on that because you've been doing podcasting for so long, but when you show up in the studio, I can still hear in your voice and in the way you prepare that you're deeply interested, like you're having fun and in those moments when you're still learning, I feel like you're still hanging onto that beginner's playfulness and hopefully doing both. That's what's interesting is how do you do both of those?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:04] Yeah, I think part of the key for me has been, with even the reboot aside, doing the show is always fun and I'm always trying to get better at it. There's never a time where I'm like, “All right, I just got to knock out this show.” You know, me and Jason or anybody here on the team is always working on some particular skills. I have all these notes all over my studio that are like, “Oh, let’s start with this different kind of question or try doing this instead.” And sometimes I forget to practice certain skills, but I'm always trying to start something else. And if I listen to someone's new show or usually I get interviewed by somebody who's new, I will often go, “Ooh, I like this thing that they're doing”, that they came up with themselves or found somewhere else. And I'll often adopt that for the Jordan Harbinger Show and then, and it's kind of fun. They don't know. No, they don't know. And it's funny because there’s this some guy who's had a show for like six months and they're like, “Oh, this is this thing that I do that's different.” And I'm like, “Oh, I'm totally using that.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:13:00] But that's so cool that you can still see it that way, right? Like, I feel like another aspect of this expertise trade-off is that you kind of overlook what you might be able to learn from somebody who's new, not just in yourself when you're new, but in other people. It's like, “Oh, they didn't know that you shouldn't start a show that way, but because they don't have an idea in their heads of how a show should begin, they totally opened with this really organic, like off the cuff comment or something that totally got me hooked, so why can't I do that? Like, why can't that be a way to do it?” That's really interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:32] Yeah, exactly. There'll be somebody who's like, “Oh, the first thing that I do is me and the guests, we both jump up and down and say silly words”, and I'm like, this is the dumbest thing ever. So I did it and I'm like, “Oh, okay. I'm not going to have my guests do this, but I like doing this.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:13:45] Right. You pick something up.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:46] Yeah. And I'm just like, “Oh, this works out really well.  It was like an improv thing, you know? You jump up and down and do silly words”, and then I find myself getting back to the microphone and being more playful and fun and silly and I just thought, “Wow, you know, usually I make a whole pot of coffee for this kind of mood and I now I can cure it jumping up and down.” And I learned that from a show host that I don't even think is doing the show anymore, probably 13 episodes and so I got more from them than they ever got from me.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:14:11] Well that's actually an interesting thing to think about is like the reasons we stick with something and when we stopped doing it because I think most of us drop off in a craft in the beginning phase because it's daunting and it's hard and you don't know how hard it's going to be until you start to actually do it. No matter how many blog posts you read or how many whatever for dummies books you read, like until you sit down to actually do something, you just don't realize how like rich the tradition around it is and how much it requires to be great.

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[00:16:33] All Varidesk products are made to last. You could say that again about this one especially, it is simple setup. Uou can move it once you assemble it. That's important. Again, seems like a throw-away line going to be important down the line. You want to be able to move this thing and you can try Varidesk products including the new Pro Desk 60 Electric risk-free for 30 days with free shipping to you and free returns, if you need to do that. Learn more at varidesk.com/forbes, that's V A R I D E S K.com/forbes. I think if you're constantly trying to become amazing at something, your goal and you don't want to be an amateur because you see it as undesirable. Then once you find that becoming an expert is going to take 10 years instead of 10 weeks and being an amateur sucks because there's no great status attached to it. That's when people start going, “To hell with this.” So if we maybe  unglorify -- I don't think that's a word, but I don't care -- the expert phase and we shine a little bit of sunshine on the amateur phase, then maybe it'll help people stick with things a little bit longer knowing that there's no shame in being an amateur or beginner in the first place.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:17:46] Absolutely. People don't talk about that, so we don't have many good working examples of beginnings and amateur stages being interesting. Like we glorify the expertise of it, but we don't talk about Serena Williams 20 years ago where she was trying to get incrementally better at playing amazing tennis. You talk about Serena Williams in the last 10 years, right? Like winning championships year after year. That is what is sexy and exciting. The other thing is not sexy or exciting, but it's necessary to get there. So that's funny. Like we really do have some shame and some feelings about struggling and you struggle in that phase so we don't really glorify it. I don't know if we have to glorify it, but to appreciate that it's a stage every single expert has to go through is really important.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:36] Nobody wants to be a beginner because we view it as, or an amateur because we view it as amateurish or low status in a certain way. And that is not necessarily true or it shouldn't. It shouldn't be. So amateurism not only a fruitful slash exciting stage in our early development, but necessary to our development in general that you have to go through it. Yes. But it can be profound. So let's talk about some of the unexpected benefits of being an amateur, how to harness these benefits and of course, how to keep that beginner's mindset alive throughout whatever craft throughout your whole life.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:19:13] Well, I think you've already touched on one of the biggest ones, which is number one, there's no avoiding it. The only way out is through. So I think most of us ended up discovering that one way or the other if you stick with it. But we still kind of wish that we weren't amateurs or we wish we didn't have to be beginners to get good. And even while we're in that phase where mentally trying to do the acrobatics to not feel like beginners, right? Like we're already being like, “Oh no, I'm getting better at this, I'm starting to get pretty good.” Or if you make mistakes later in your process, you try to hide them.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:46] Yeah, you sweep them under the rug.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:19:47] Right. Because you don't want to confront the fact that you might still have some things to learn, right? Like that's I think everybody has done that at some point. So the first thing is that there's really no avoiding it. And every single great person, every expert has been exactly where you are if you're in the beginning phase. But the other is that we almost have to be beginners. We have to be amateurs in order to be deluded enough to believe that we could become great. Because if you knew how hard it is to get really good at something, if you knew that it's going to take you 10 years to be able to produce a kickass podcast, it's really highly doubtful that you're going to sit down and record a podcast three times a week for 10 years.

Jordan Harbinger: [00: 20:33] Yeah. It's a pain and especially when you start to think you're good at it and then you look back, hindsight and you go, “Wow, I still sucked even then”, you know, I look at my seven year anniversary episode with Robert Greene on the old show and that was when I went, “I'm finally starting to get the hang of this.”  Seven years in and now you know, starting the Jordan Harbinger Show, now I'm like, “You know, I've got a pretty good foundation here to start a new show and then I think in five more years, three more years, I'm going to be like, can you believe that? We thought we were good at this in 2018 we were garbage. What were we thinking? This is terrible.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:21:13] The crazy thing about that is that if you're doing your job and getting better and better, you will always feel that way, which is kind of crazy.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:21] It's a little depressing, but it doesn't have to be. It's not really depressing. It's a little bit, I guess it's a little silly really because of course you're supposed to always be proud of where you're at when you're there, which is fine. I'm proud of where we're at right now, but it is kind of, it's like fashion. You look back at your cool stuff from 1994 and you go, “What? What the hell?” But then if you could see a video of yourself walking around with your flannel tied around your waist and your corduroy jacket, you'd be like, “I'm a bad mofo. I look fly.” Yup, that's right. Well I'm going to go to the Nirvana show and this is going to be in, maybe not in 94, this is going to be amazing.” You know I'm going to look right at home.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:22:02] So the flip side of that is yeah, you kind of have to be naive enough to just stick with something to commit to it because if you knew more you wouldn't do it in the first place. That applies to almost everybody and I've had moments where, I remember when I was starting to commit professionally to writing, when I would sit down with writers who are a few years ahead and I think a couple of them said a version of that to me where like you don't know the ride you're in for like it is going to be, think about as hard as you think writing can be, which I already knew. I'm like, this is the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. They're like, multiply that by 10 or 20 and then add like five years to everything you think it's going to take. You know what I mean? I'm like, “Okay. I mean sure I hear that that's what you went through or that a lot of people went through or that it was difficult.” Like I'm ready for something that's hard, but someone trying to like intellectually communicate to you what it's going to be before you're there will never mean as much as you going through it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:02] Yeah, of course. And if you're anything like me, you think, “I don't know, I’m probably going to be good at this right away.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:23:06] There's that too.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:09] I’m pretty smart.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:23:10] Yeah, of course. You think you're exempt from how it pretty much goes for everybody. So amateurism is definitely not only a necessary stage, but it's necessary in this deeper sense of it. You wouldn't even begin if you weren't an amateur. But it's also necessary to fully appreciate how hard it is to appreciate the complexity of what it is you're trying to do because if you began podcasting and you were pretty strong right out of the gate, that might be really cool. I guess some people do have that natural talent. It's probably pretty rare, but the trade-off in that is not appreciating the craft and the nuance of it. Like you see this with a lot of people who are naturally gifted, they still have to work really hard to become amazing, but in the beginning they might miss, “Oh, this is like a really complicated, interesting craft that I'm trying to master. Like I might have a gift for it, but I don't even know what really goes into becoming amazing.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:05] I actually recently had an experience like this. I had some people say to mutual friends that they didn't really see what was so hard about what we did on the show because all we really had to do is sit down and have conversations. They were more like, “Yeah, once you learn how to set up the microphones and everything, you just have to have a conversation.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:24:24] You just keep talking to them.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:05] Yeah, you pretty much just talk into them. And I thought, “Wow, I would be insulted if that weren't such like a kind of dumb analysis of any skill at all.” Like it's kind of like thinking a race car driver just turns left all the time and puts their foot on the gas and that's all there is.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:24:40] Totally, and guns it and tries to get around people.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:43] Right. And they're like, why is this a sport? This is really easy.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:24:45] This is real life Mario cart.  What's the big deal?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:47] What’s the big deal? Exactly. And then those same people started a show and it surprisingly was not that good. And then I heard from those same mutual friends that they were quite surprised at how difficult it was. And these mutual friends were relaying this story to me in a way that was kind of funny because these same mutual friends also had a show and they were relaying the idea that they too thought in the beginning that how hard can it be to run a show and then they started one and they went, “Oh, all of these things that look so easy when experienced people do them are because that person has done this thousands of times and makes it look easy.” Somebody who's a professional speaker for example, can go up there and give a talk and people think, “Well, if I didn't have stage freight, I could do that.”

[00:25:36] No, you couldn't. You have to rehearse the crap out of this. This is a performance, but you don't see that because you really, you're such a pre-amateur, if you will, that you don't even see the nuances of any of this. But that's what's great about being an amateur is if you saw the nuances, like you said earlier, we would never try it because we'd go, “Wow, there's 5,000 things I've got to do.” But if you start off through that beginning, once you start to pick up on these nuances, you really start to the first phase, or one of the first phases of learning anything is you start to map out what you need to learn and you go, “Holy crap, is this involved? There's so much more here than I thought. So you have to be naive enough that that doesn't scare you away. And also you have to get in deep enough as an amateur that by the time you see all the things you have to work on, you already like what you're doing enough to continue.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:26:29] Or it's too late to quit, right?  Which is what happens to a lot of us, especially in like creative work, right? Where you're like, “Oh, if I had known that it was going to take 10 years to get good, probably wouldn't have done it. But I'm like six, seven years in, so I guess I'm going to get good at it”, which is actually, it's sort of a tough place to be in, but it's also kind of cool because you realize that you're not even saying your ignorance, we're actually serving you in a way that you just don't even appreciate because you just don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:00] Exactly. I'm waiting for my 15-year realizations where I go, “Man, if I had known it was going to take me 15 years, I thought it was only going to be a mere decade.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:27:04] We should totally do another episode on the 15-year and see how that plays out. So yeah, becoming great were quick and easy. I don't think we would honor the commitment required to succeed. We wouldn't, you know, treasure it. And when it comes to skill, everybody begins at the base of that mountain. Like that's not just necessary. It's essential for appreciating, you know, the task that's before us. But the other big benefits of amateurism or being a beginner is that it really liberates you. It's kind of freeing. Like generally speaking, the more we master techniques and methods, the more we tend to move away from the like exploratory, playful, instinctive place that we're in when we're just grasping our way through the dark, trying to figure something out. It's kind of like Jason fixing the audio where it's like, I don't have in my brain a correct way to do this, so I'm just going to play and see what happens.

[00:27:57] And in that case, it was exactly what it needed. You know, with podcasting or writing or filmmaking or whatever it was, sports, right? You're like, “Well, I don't know the correct way to swing this racket, but I know I want to get the ball over and that I enjoy this. So let me just try it 30 different ways and then start to figure out which one works the best.” So we need both of those places to succeed. We need the intellectual textbook, “correct” way of doing things because there's a reason that knowledge exists. It works. But we also need this more primitive, playful place. And again we keep talking about how you exchange one for the other, but if you know that that is a benefit of being a beginner, being a beginner gets a lot more fun because an expert might not feel as free to try new things, which is where you get a lot of the great ideas and also a lot of the fun.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:28:46] This episode is sponsored in part by HostGator. You've got to have a stable place on the internet you can call home because it's sure as heck not Facebook these days unless you want to get your stuff hoovered up by Cambridge Analytica or somebody else – the Russians perhaps. A new place that you can send people to find you no matter what website is popular this week. In fact, that reminds me, I just had to go and edit an old login for one of those sites. Jason, that was like, “This is going to be everyone's headquarters on the internet. Nobody ever cared about it.” This is why we recommend HostGator's website builder. Get your domain, include your name in it or whatever. Even if you have a company, get your name, even a variation of your name, you can create a professional looking and feature-packed website, includes some of your resume.

[00:29:27] You're not going to be limited to LinkedIn or whatever. You can choose from over a hundred mobile friendly templates. It'll look great on a phone, a tablet, a desktop, and you can get people paying you money on there. You can throw the SEO plugin on there. That PayPal plugin, it'll be up almost all the time, 99.9% of the time guaranteed. They've got support 24/7 365 and you get 62% off if you're a new user. Go to hostgator.com/jordan right now. That's hostgator.com/Jordan. This episode is also sponsored by SmartMouth. This is one of those sponsors that I love. Look, I know people are saying, “What you use mouthwash every day?” I use it when I need it. That's a thing, but you got to look at the cost benefit of this and having gnarly gross breath. That's a bad thing. If you're at a conference or you're giving a talk or teaching a class, SmartMouth is activated.

[00:30:18] Oral rinse that will get rid of that sulfur gas, that bacteria produced in your mouth for a full 12 hours, so it'll keep you fresh-ish for 12 hours. Definitely better than just the minty coverup. So no sulfur gas, no bad breath. If you want to solve a real problem, you need real science, not just, “Oh, my breath is fresh for the next 35 seconds because of the stuff they threw in the mouthwash.” Nobody wants to be the guy with bad breath. Now you never will. They got these little travel packs. I highly recommend, find it at Walmart, Walgreens, CVS, Target, Amazon, or go to smart mouth.com and they've got new toothpaste next to the Smart Mouth mouthwash at Walmart and Walgreens. You can go to smartmouth.com/jordan for a $2.50 coupon, smartmouth.com/Jordan. I feel like they upgraded us, Jason. They were like, “All right, you're selling enough mouthwash. Let's see how he does with the toothpaste. I got promoted.”

Jason DeFillippo: [00:31:07] That's nice. Yeah, we're moving up in the world. Maybe next week we'll get the floss.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:13] Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Jason. There's a joke in there somewhere.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:31:16] I'll not look a gift horse in the Smart Mouth.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:18] All right. And I knew that that was the low hanging fruit.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:31:22]  Softball.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:23] So of course the paradox if we're still on that really is that the more we master these nuances, these techniques, these methods, the more we have our, this is how it's done set of methodologies. The more we tend to move away from the instinctual, the intuitive, the artistic level of whatever craft it is, the playful, the playfulness of whatever craft it is we're engaged in. That initially got us to kind of begin in the first place. So that unfortunately can have people burn out, but it can also turn a craftsmen. It can kind of dead in the artistic aspect of any craft because you become this sort of machine that plays at the game or does the particular job.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:32:03] Definitely. And also this is tied in with succeeding by the definitions we have of success based on our experience. So, you know, if you're an athlete, there are pretty objective measures of success. You're either trying to like swim faster than the other person or get more points in this game or jump higher than the other person, right? And so when it's that objective, it's very easy to say, I just need to do that. I need to jump this high. And if I don't do all of the steps that my coaches and my peers have taught me as the right way to do it, to get higher over the pole or a swim faster or whatever it is like, then I probably am not going to make it. So one of the best ways to be able to preserve that instinctive, playful place is to temporarily let go of the idea of succeeding or winning in the way that you've come to define it.

[00:32:59] Sometimes that is something you only need to do for an hour or two. Sometimes you have to do it for days or weeks. Sometimes some of us have to go for years because we're trying to rediscover that earlier stage that we were in, but I remember Andre Agassi talked about that a lot too, right? Like he talked about how winning became like a tyranny, like the tyranny of having to win meant that he wasn't playing organically and instinctively, which is, as we all know, is exactly how great athletes operate. They have their, they have their skills and their abilities so deeply like conditioned and woven into their body that they're free to be reactive and in the moment that applies almost to anything I think. So he used to talk about how he would have to psych himself out of the idea that I need to win this match and just focus on responding to the ball as it came to him. That takes so much mental effort and strength to be able to let go of the thing that you think gives you strike. And it takes a year as a practice, but it's doable.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:02]  It seems like you would get stuck in plateau at a certain point, right? So you can become an expert craftsmen, but you can't really become -- I'm trying not to use some dumb cliche like legendary, hall of fame, dah, dah, dah, dah --  because you know how when someone's new, they're an amateur, whatever. If someone's an expert, they can do something really well, but then there's this layer above that where you see, and you hear announcers talk about this when they're looking at a really great athlete, whether they go, wow, this is not only mastery of the skills involved in this particular sport, but then there's this extra layer of just finesse and artistic mastery that goes into something that you can really only get when you've got the craft down so well then maybe you're not thinking about that anymore and then you can go back to being playful again.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:34:50] Yeah, and it's funny because what's weird about that is you almost have to be so practiced and expert in order to be spontaneous. It's like public speaking, you give talks all the time. I know that a lot of the magic of those talks is, “I know my material so well that I can go on the up on that stage and just have an experience”, and if somebody throws a question from the audience or something happens unexpectedly, or if I forget exactly where I am in the speech, I know my stuff well enough to be able to just enjoy that moment and keep talking as if I'm having a conversation. So that talk is going to be so much better than the perfectly scripted one that you memorize, but you can't have that great talk unless you've done the work of really getting down that material in advance.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:33] Yeah. Because otherwise you have that intuition or that instinct, it gets masked by the rehearsal of the craft, but you can't just go, “Well great, I'm not going to rehearse then”, because then you don't have the craft at all. So you have to sort of blow through this plateau where you've learned the craft and it sort of may be limited some of your instinct and then you have to go ahead and get it back.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:35:55] Yes. And I think what you're starting to talk about now is really interesting, which is trusting yourself and having the faith, which is such like, “Oh, that's such a hard word to talk about because it's so personal and it's very hard to hang your hat on.” But there is a kind of faith that if you do the homework and then allow yourself to be open to whatever happens in the moment, whether it's the way you shoot the ball or the way you give a talk or whatever it is, like trusting that your experience is going to kick in and the way it's supposed to, but your organic reaction is what's going to make it shine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:32] Yes. But experts have to figure out how to sort of detach the technique, the craft, the expertise, and return to that original playful place. But amateurs, they're already there. They're already in there. So they don't have that technique that they need to be liberated from, right? And since they're not tethered to convention, some sort of specific flow, this is how it's going to happen. Like Jason was free -- not that he's an amateur - he's an expert audio editor and producer, but he was, he had never seen this problem before and it was not his department to really fix things like that. He was free to experiment, to mess around with new software, to explore some click random buttons or whatever happened, right? He was also free to fail because if he went, “Well, I couldn't fix this.” My reply was going to be, “Yeah, I don't expect you to. We already give it to the engineer and he did what he could.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:37:22] And that freedom to fail is what is so awesome about being a beginner, because even if you hate being a beginner, even if you're trying to get out of that stage, you can't deny that the stakes of you failing are so much lower and they're lower because you don't have the expectation and the burden and the responsibility that comes with being better. Most of us are trying to get out of that phase so quickly that we don't realize that that's a gift, like a great gift because if you can't fail then you can't learn and that is what every great person is trying to hang onto as it becomes harder and harder to do.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:00] Right. Because as we become successful, failure starts to mean something. So if I started to produce a show and I was like, “Hey, I'm going to start telling jokes in the beginning of each show”, if those jokes aren't any good or even if they are, people might not like that. And then it means something that I did it and it didn't work out. In theory it means something, it could mean something. But if you are starting a new show and you go, “Hey, every new show I start with one of my favorite jokes.” People might just be like, “Yeah, this is how the show works. It's fine.” But I have resistance, even thinking about changing something like that in the show. And don't worry, I don't plan on starting each new show with jokes, but I do change things in the show, and me and Jason often say, “All right, we got to listen to the audience. Let's see how this works.” And other times we change things into the show and we say, “All right, we know the audience is going to complain about this. Don't listen to anything they have to say. We're going to test it for a few months and ignore the feedback.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:38:56] So that's a really good point too, that you have to be willing to risk the failure even when it's no longer convenient. That's hard to do. But if you look at any great company, you usually find out that they have managed to institutionalize the willingness to fail in some way that most customers aren't even aware of. One of the best examples is Pixar. So Pixar makes these incredible movies and adults and children all over the world respond to these movies. They've done insanely well, right? Like obviously we've seen Finding Nemo and we found these incredible movies. What most people don't realize is that Pixar animators and producers and directors and the writers iterate through tens of thousands of different versions of those movies, almost like software. And they do it knowing that most of the attempts that they're making to tell the story are going to be not so great. That's going in,

[00:39:55] They know that. So they're like, “Well we want to tell the story about a fish and we have like a loose idea of how this part of the story is going to go. But does he go through the reeds or does he go over the plastic?” Like they have all these different versions of it, what does he look like or what does he say or you know, there are all these aspects of these movies, but they move through all of those storyboards and what they end up with on the other side is a 90-minute movie that is the product of thousands of mistakes. But they don't think of them as mistakes. They treat them as a necessary part of the process and they just keep it in the development phase. Where you and I don't have to deal with looking at all the iterations so some of us have the benefit,

[00:40:32]  this is interesting too and we should be very clear about this. Some crafts you have the benefit of failing privately, writing is one of those crafts like yeah you're going to show people but you can work on a sentence 90 times as I often do in your apartment and you know if it sucks, no one knows but you. If you're a stand-up comic, you really can't do that. You can do your act in your head as many times as you want but you're failing in front of people, which is why standup comedy is one of the most brutal crafts. And if you talk to standup comedians, they often have a really interesting point of view. The ones who stick with it, a really interesting point of view on that beginning phase because it beat them up so much. It desensitize them to bombing. It got them used to failing in public and it can show up in different ways, but a lot of times they have like a really deep appreciation for what it takes to become really good. So the reason we bring this up is just that there is a way, if you can adopt that amateur mindset, that beginner mindset and institutionalize it in your company, in your team, in your life, then there's a role for your amateurism to help you fail your way to becoming awesome.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:41] Yeah, the mistakes are what propels us forward. And I think that's important to remember when we feel like being an amateur is limiting or that we don't have the right technique or there's no, we don't have the benefit of some sort of a right way to do something. And the idea is that even though those limitations of amateurism can be depressing, sometimes you're discouraging those limitations. Those same limitations are also really freeing.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:42:10]  You see this a lot in physics and in science because generations of scientists are trained with the paradigm of science at the time, and it often takes a generation for a new scientific breakthrough to happen because the new scientists aren't tethered to the old world view. Like part of the reason that Einstein developed this theory of relativity is that he was not thinking in Newtonian physics. He wasn't subscribing to a view of the universe that the last generation of physicists were subscribing to. Also, he was wicked smart. He was an iconoclast. He was an outsider as a human being. There are a lot of factors, right? There's a lot of stuff going on, but the fact that he could think of it and have the confidence to think of the universe in a new way is partly because he wasn't burdened by the tyranny of how the world should look or the way we're supposed to do physics.

[00:43:02] He was free to think of it in a totally new way. So that right there, yes, Einstein was not a “beginner” when he developed his theory of relativity, but he definitely had that beginner's mindset. Certainly to the extent that he was willing to throw out what was the conventional way of doing science and come up with a much more powerful explanation for how the universe works. We're not all Einstein, we're not all trying to do that or we're not all physicists. Sorry Jordan. I'm not trying to be Einstein. You clearly are, but we can all relate to how that would apply in our fields and our crafts for sure.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:36] So if we can develop ourselves to the point where further development becomes difficult, then we've got to what undevelop and return to a beginner's mindset that that sort of sense of ignorance, that sense of freedom, playfulness. How do we do that? Because didn't we spend seven to 10 or 11 or 12 years moving forward? Why am I trying to go back and how that, well, now we know why. How am I going to go backwards?

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:44:03]  Well, I think the first one is we've sort of been talking about it, which is that you don't have to think of these two phases as tradeoffs. It's not you're either a beginner or you're an expert. It's that you're a beginner, as you become an expert and as you become an expert, you can always come back, even if it's temporary, even if you're sort of psyching yourself into this mental space, you can return to the beginner's mindset for a period of time. That's what every great person has always done is they said, “Okay, I don't have to give up my world-class technique of hitting this ball over the net to be able to force myself to just respond to each thing in the moment. So that's one thing that's important.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:42] All right, so we want to be both an expert and a beginner simultaneously. That sounds easy. I mean, how the hell do we do that?

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:44:50]  It's not easy. No. If it were easy, I don't think we would be having this conversation. No, but it is doable and we do it. I think number one, by recognizing that being a beginner and being an expert are not tradeoffs and they are not discrete phases. So when we're a beginner, we are building the foundation to later become experts. And when we do become experts, whatever that means, because as you've pointed out, it's a moving goalpost. If you're doing your job, you're always becoming better. But even as you move into your expertise, you can always come back to that beginner's mindset. Even if it's a short term choice. Even if you sort of do it, you're like, “For the next two hours, I'm just going play around. I'm just going to try to tell this story in a way I've never told it I'm going to hit the ball and that way that I've never tried before.” And you can just allow yourself the freedom to be a beginner in a way that doesn't have that high of stakes. I think the first problem we fall into is thinking that it's either one or the other. I'm either a total noob or I'm amazing”, and it's not the case. It's just not the case. And the better we become. And if you look at the best people in their fields, they are doing both simultaneously.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:55]  Yeah, that's true. We're trying to free ourselves from the right way of doing things and find these sort of more exciting, novel new approaches. 99 out of a hundred of which are just going to be garbage.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:46:07] The other thing that's important to do is to embrace our beginner status and our amateurism for the gift that it is, because it offers us these new and unexpected possibilities. We keep talking about how being a beginner allows you to play and to fail. And if you forget that that is really one of the greatest gifts of being an amateur, you miss the, the great experience it is to just be a beginner. Yeah. And that's something that if you stick with whatever you're trying to do and you get really good at it, you're going to wish you could go back to that phase. I think you probably feel that way and you do a really good job of inviting that back in to where you are right now. But as much as you probably don't wish to go back to that seven year anniversary because you've gotten so much better, that was probably a certain innocence and freedom to it that you're like, “Oh that was kind of cool that it was, I felt free to try these things that I might feel, I might think twice about trying today and I have to consciously try to do that now.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:03]  Well, the stakes are different now too. So seven, well I guess now, five years ago I didn't even look at my download stats because it was kind of irrelevant. It was just like, “Well, if people are listening then great. If they're not, then we'll go out of business pretty soon. But I'm sure some people are listening because I'm hearing from people.” And that was important because I could try something new or have a different type of guests or you know, people would say, Hey, maybe you should use better microphones or you not recording the room with hardwood floors using the wrong kind of audio gear. And I was like, “You know, I'd just rather focus on other elements of the show.” And then I was like, “Go get new mics, go get new stuff, get acoustic sound proofing, do more prep.” That stuff has been important and it has been a game changer.

[00:47:44]  But if I had put all that pressure on myself in the beginning of the show, then just thinking about doing a podcast, doing an interview would have been exhausting because it's like, “Oh, I've got to get the right kind of this, I got to get the right kind of that”, and it just causes so much inertia that it becomes a problem. So you really have to be driven by what you want to achieve, not what you've already done in a lot of the ways. So you can use the amateurism as motivation, but you really shouldn't look at it as a weakness. You should look at as a gift in a lot of ways, right? Like if you like running, don't join a track and field to competitive team unless you're already an athlete and you can fit into that kind of rubric. Otherwise you're just going to go,”Wow, this sucks.”

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:48:27] It's funny because if you think about it, there's no getting around that beginner phase, right? Like we've talked about it as a gift. We've talked about it as an important phase, but if it's just truly unavoidable, if it's necessary, then why not try to enjoy it,

[00:48:43]  like you might as well embrace that phase for what it is because nobody is exempt from it and the best way to embrace it is to say, “Okay, I don't know everything right now. I have a lot to learn.” Great. There's freedom in that and it's also in the purest sense of the term. It's humbling. It's a great humility because it kind of sets you back to that innocent beginning stage where you say, “I am in this place where I am not burdened by the requirement to be great 100% of the time. I have nothing to prove. I have no body of work to defend. I have no random panel of judges or customers, clients or critics who are waiting for what I'm about to produce to decide if it's good or bad.” That is such a wonderful place to be in. If we can just take a step back and be like, “That's a great problem to have and I hope I get to have that at some point in the future, but right now I'm just going to be in this explore, play and enjoy it because there's no getting around it. And I know one day I'm going to miss the freedom I have right now, so let's make the most of it.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:49:46] Yeah, and on that note, I think it's a great place to wrap because honestly I feel like through the rebirth of the show we're able to get back some of that amateurism and that playfulness and instead of going, “Oh no, we're starting at the beginning”, we say, “Actually, let's use this as an opportunity, a forced opportunity to mess with the format, explore different types of guests, take a different type of tack on a lot of subjects that maybe we'd covered in the past and in a different way, attack a different demographic at different market, create different products.” I mean, these are all opportunities that a month ago I was thinking, “Oh my God, I've got to rebuild all this stuff”, and then after thinking about it a little bit more clearly, I go, “I don't want to rebuild 80% of this. I want to do it differently.” But that was only available from a new beginning and you don't necessarily have to get your butt kicked to start a new beginning. You just have to be open to the opportunity of having one.

Gabriel Mizrahi: [00:50:41] That was well said.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:43]  So I love doing these Deep Dives. I think this topic is important. This is one of the reasons why producer Jason and I get coaching for freaking everything. You always want to keep that beginner's mind. We always want to keep that beginner's mind and it can be hard sometimes, but what makes it easier when you have a coach, you have somebody above you on the totem pole at least in that particular area and it's easy to then knock yourself down a couple pegs or a good coach will do it for you. Great big thank you to Gabriel Mizrahi. He's going to be back all the time. He is a regular contributor here as head of editorial. We're going to be doing these Deep Dives pretty much every single month at least once. So if you enjoy this, don't forget to thank Gabe on Twitter. That will all be linked up in the show notes for this episode, which can be found at JordanHarbinger.com/podcast.  Also tweet at me your number one takeaway from Gabe. I'm @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard from Gabe and I today, make sure you go grab the worksheets also in the show notes at JordanHarbinger.com/podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DeFillippo. Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogarty. Booking, back office and last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:51:52] Please throw us a review in iTunes if you indeed use that to listen to the show. Make sure you have a unique nickname, otherwise it won't post. It won't tell you why. Instructions and all this and how to make it work -- JordanHarbinger.com/subscribe.  So share the show with those you love and even those you don't. We've got lots more like this in the pipeline. We're excited to bring it to you and in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time.