Diffusing the myth of proficiency (part 2)

Just as it’s easy to convince yourself you’re incapable of learning new things, it’s just as easy to deceive yourself by confusing what you need to know to do a thing well.

If, for example, you believe in writer’s block (a common fallacy), it’s easy to believe that to be a great writer you need to feel inspired, to trust the soup, or to nourish your muse.

On the other hand, once you know that writer’s block is a nocebo, you can stop procrastinating and, instead, find ways to get over your fear of producing bad work. Do it long enough and you might learn how to write something worth reading.

Similarly, once you know that professional wrestling is fake (and largely nothing to do with grappling-ability), you can start working on the things that do matter, namely: acting, body-building, and theatrical drama.

And once you know that being a great comedian has less to do with your innate ability to be funny (and more a matter of trial and error), you can get over the delusion that you need to be.

We spend an enormous amount of our working lives working. Honing our skills. Getting better at what we do. Rising the professional ladder, corporate or otherwise.

Learning to first see, and then unlearn, our most faulty assumptions—the one’s we nurture and the one’s we adore—is a astonishingly simple and effective way to jump a ring or two.