… The work went slowly at first, both because Michelangelo was inexperienced with the medium and because the unusual size and configuration of the surface created unique problems. For example, he discovered about a third of the way through the project that the need to keep such large areas moist enough to paint meant the plaster would often get moldy before it dried. He ripped out a huge area of the work that had been damaged by mold, and asked one of his assistants, Jacopo Torni, known as L’Indaco, an experienced fresco painter, for a solution. L’Indaco created a more mold-resistant plaster formula, which Michelangelo used for the remainder of the job (and which, in fact, subsequently became the standard for Italian fresco-painting)…
CHAPTER 7
Willingness to Be Bad First: The Trap of Competence
We Hate This
By the time we get to be adults, we’re good at some stuff. And we really love that. Remember in chapter 2, when I talked about our inborn human drive toward mastery? We want deeply to be good at things. Nearly everyone wants to feel expert at something, and we take great pride in relying on and demonstrating our expertise. I’ve discovered, for instance, that you can be at a party and never have to say anything about yourself at all if you simply ask other people questions about stuff they’re interested in and are expert at doing (or think they are). As we’ve discussed, there’s a very good side to this drive toward mastery—it has kept the human race moving forward in every realm of skill and knowledge since the dawn of time.
The dark side of this drive of ours is that we want so much to be good, and we see being good at things as such a valuable accomplishment and so central to our adult identity, that it really upsets us to be not-good. Most of us, as adults, deeply dislike and strongly resist the novice state, that clumsy, helpless feeling of not understanding and not being able to do something. To make this more personal, think of the last time you were in this situation. Perhaps someone was showing you a complex process at work that was new to you and that you needed to use in your job. Or maybe you had to learn a program (like our friend Ron, the librarian) to do a task you’d always done manually. Perhaps your boss said to you, “We have to find new ways to market our product. I know you haven’t worked on this before, but I’m assigning it to you…” If you reflect on how you felt as you were trying to learn the new skill: making mistakes, having to do things over, not getting why something wasn’t working and not even knowing what to ask to get clear—I suspect you felt some combination of embarrassment, frustration, boredom, anxiety, and impatience. It’s the uncomfortable emotional soup most of us find ourselves in when we’re required to acquire a new skill.
As I noted in chapter 1, it used to be much, much more possible to go through life without having to confront and move past this resistance to novice-ness as an adult. Until forty or fifty years ago, most people learned the skills and knowledge they needed for their job or career as young people, and then just kept doing that throughout their lives, perhaps occasionally making slight changes or improvements. And even those few people who had to expand their knowledge base more dramatically did so gradually, over many years. For instance, a young man might come into his father’s business directly out of school at age sixteen; by the time the father retired or died twenty-five years later, the now-middle-aged son had probably learned enough over all those years to take over the business.
Now, unless you can somehow create for yourself a magical little nineteenth-century job universe that stays the same throughout your working life, you’re going to have to go back to being a novice over and over and over again as the expansion of knowledge continues to accelerate, and the capabilities and careers enabled by that new knowledge multiply with mind-numbing rapidity.
In other words—though you may be tired of hearing me say it by now—getting good at being bad first is the most essential and powerful future-proofing tool you can have. So let’s talk about how to do it.
Expert at Being Novices
In the early 2000s, a guy named Peter Skillman invented a collaboration exercise that has come to be called the Marshmallow Challenge. Here’s how it works: a group of four people are given twenty pieces of spaghetti, a meter of tape, a meter of string, and a marshmallow. They have eighteen minutes to create the tallest freestanding structure possible that will support the marshmallow. After doing this exercise with more than five hundred people over a five-year period, here’s what he discovered. Groups of engineers and architects did very well, and groups of business school students consistently did very poorly. No big surprises there. But what group did the best, you might ask, in terms of completing the tallest structures within the allotted time?
That’s right. Five- and six-year-olds consistently outperformed business school students, engineers, and even architects in doing this activity. While looking for answers about why this should be so, Skillman noticed three things. First, the kids didn’t waste time on “status transactions,” that is, deciding who should lead the effort—they just started building. Second, they tried lots of things that ended up not working, rather than trying to just do one thing that would be “right.” Finally, they asked for more spaghetti—not a single adult group asked for more materials.
Skillman and others have used this experiment to understand what children can teach us about the importance of collaboration and prototyping in innovation. I looked at the outcome through a different lens: rather than focusing on what the kids did that yielded better results, I started thinking about why they behaved differently in the first place. And it occurred to me that everything they did—just getting in and messing around versus worrying about who was the most expert; trying a bunch of different things versus trying to get it right the first time; breaking the (nonexistent, as it turned out) rules by asking for more material—all of these behaviors were possible because they weren’t worried about being bad first. As it turns out, someone else noticed the same thing. In her book, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success, Megan McArdle noted that, “The engineers had years of schooling and work experience to teach them how to build sound structures. But the kindergartners had something even more powerful: they were not afraid of failure. By trying and failing, they learned what didn’t work—which, it turned out, was all the knowledge they needed to figure out what did.”1
Just as most little children are much better than most adults at being curious, they are also better at being novices. It’s what they’re used to, every moment of the day. The world is new to them, and they’re figuring it out—they don’t put the expectation on themselves that they have to be experts, to know everything already. At the same time, they believe that they’ll be able to get better (at least those who have been raised in reasonably loving, non-punitive households), because their entire life to date has been an unbroken string of getting better at things. Here’s a kid’s world: I didn’t know how to talk; now I do. I didn’t know how to put on my clothes; now I do. I didn’t know how to catch a ball, ride a bike, sing a song, cut with scissors, count to twenty, close the door, remember my colors; now I do.
And because they’re accepting not-knowing and believing they’ll get better, rather than taking up their mental energy with being embarrassed about being not-good and worrying about whether they’ll be able to get better, they have the mental bandwidth to use the related knowledge they already have to speed up their learning process. (For example, lots of the kids’ marshmallow structures looked like things they were already familiar with: animals, spiders, houses.)
Adults who retain their ability to be novices, their willingness to be bad first, take the same approach. Michelangelo acknowledged not only to himself, but to those around him, that he didn’t consider himself a painter, and had only a theoretical basis in fresco—that he was “not-good” at the core skills required. At the same time, he had deep faith in his ability to learn the needed skills—as he noted in a letter to a former student, “Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.” And once he was engaged in the project, he drew upon all his related skills and experience as a sculptor, anatomist, and architect to speed his learning.
With that as the blueprint, here’s how to reclaim your ability to be an excellent novice.
To become willing to be bad first:
Fully accept being not-good
Believe in your ability to get good
“Bridge” from what you’re already good at
And, as you might have suspected, our willingness (or unwillingness) to be bad first lives mostly in the same place as do our neutral self-awareness and endless curiosity: it’s all about how you talk to yourself. So in this chapter, you’ll learn to take your newly honed skills in managing your self-talk and apply them to becoming great at being bad.
Fully accept being not-good. When we have to do something new, especially in front of others, and we make some inevitable mistakes, our self-talk tends to go something like this: Oh my god, I’m such a loser—I hope nobody saw me do that… I’ll just say I did it on purpose. This is awful. I hate it. Now I look like an idiot. Not at all helpful and deeply uncomfortable. In this chapter, we’ll focus on transforming our enormously unproductive self-talk in these situations into accurate, believable self-talk organized around the understanding that being bad at things that you’re doing for the first time is acceptable and, in fact, inevitable.
Believe in your ability to get good. Once you’re no longer resisting your initial “badness,” you need to assert to yourself that you’re capable of moving beyond that novice state, of getting good at whatever it is you’re trying to learn. Doing this (again, it lives in your self-talk) allows you to build on your initial acceptance of your novice state to catalyze forward movement into learning. Fortunately, almost everyone has a lifetime of getting better at things to reference in support of this. You’ll learn how to balance your new “acceptance of not-good” self-talk with “self-belief” self-talk—so that, like the kindergarteners in the Marshmallow Challenge, your mind and emotions are free to solve the learning challenges before you.
Bridge from what you’re already good at. With this more realistic and supportive self-talk in place, you’ll be better able to access and use any related skills and knowledge that may already be in your experience set, applying what you now know to what you’re just beginning to learn. We’ll focus on how to build this “bridge” from your existing knowledge and skills, while avoiding the trap of thinking new things are more like what you already know than they really are. In fact, you can use your newly enhanced curiosity to keep yourself out of that trap—and I’ll show you how.
How Willingness to Be Bad First Looks
The first time I spoke with Courteney Monroe, I was surprised and impressed at her degree of openness to the novice state. Courteney had just been promoted to CEO of the National Geographic Channels US, and she was telling me that since she’d never been a CEO, she knew she had a lot to learn. She said it without hesitation or embarrassment, as a simple reality. “I’ve never reported to a board of directors,” she noted, “and I’ve never run business functions that I haven’t had experience doing myself. I’m sure I’ll make mistakes—and I want to figure it all out as quickly as possible.”
As we talked, I thought to myself: She’s already accepting being not-good, and she has faith in her ability to get better. The ideal starting point.
And it was. Courteney and I ended up working together with her team to create clear vision and strategy for the organization, and then she engaged me as her executive coach. Throughout our time together, I’ve noticed again and again her unusual ability to accept being bad first. For example, I’ve noticed that when she talks with someone who works for her in an area with which she’s not familiar, she has no hesitation about asking the person “novice” questions. In fact, she’ll say, “I haven’t done that before; can you walk me through how that works?” Or even, “I don’t understand what you’re saying—can you explain it another way?” She doesn’t come across as embarrassed or apologetic, because she isn’t. I know what her self-talk is in these situations, because we’ve talked about it. It’s very accepting: I need to learn this, and I don’t know it. How would I? I’ve never run program production (or finance, or IT) before.
Her balancing self-talk, of belief in herself, sometimes needs a little adjustment (as is true of most of us), but because she has so little resistance to being a novice, she’s been able to quickly take in and integrate the feedback I’ve offered to help her in that realm. The place where I’ve most noticed the power of having that balance is in the way Courteney has learned to deal with her board. As soon as she started balancing her I’m going to be bad at reporting to a board to begin with self-talk with And I know I’ll learn how to do it well, and pretty quickly—she did. Over a remarkably short period of time, she was able to understand each of her key board members and build strong relationships with them that balanced diplomacy and flexibility with clarity and firmness.
I’ve also enjoyed seeing how she’s been able to “bridge” from her previous jobs as head of marketing (at HBO, and then at the Nat Geo Channels). She realized that her skills in leading people, managing a P&L, and understanding and communicating with consumers in a compelling way were all largely transferable—and then she got curious about how those skills would need to be applied differently in this new role. That’s the essence of good bridging: identifying what you already know that can be applied to make your new learning faster or easier, without assuming that what you’ve known or done before is exactly like what you’re learning now.
It’s been fascinating watching the impact of Courteney’s approach on her team and her board as well. They see her as open, confident, non-defensive, and a quick study. Because she doesn’t pretend that she knows things she doesn’t know, her team trusts her—and they know it’s okay to come to her with things they don’t know as well. I’m pointing this out partly because it seems counterintuitive; many of the executives I’ve coached over the years have resisted the idea of “being bad first” because they’re afraid their employees won’t respect them if they make their ignorance or novice-ness public. My experience, though, is that what’s happening in response to Courteney is the norm. When an executive is honest about what he doesn’t know, and then makes an effort to acquire that knowledge as quickly as possible, most employees are impressed with that person’s openness, bravery, and confidence, and want to support his success. (Of course, this assumes that the executive isn’t a novice at everything required to do the job—most employees expect that their boss will have most of the necessary skills and knowledge. They don’t, however, expect the boss to know everything—and in fact most people find it disingenuous and deeply irritating when their bosses pretend that they’re expert in every area.)
I’ve also seen that Courteney’s board members appreciate the way she has invited their insights and experience, rather than trying to act as though she were an expert at being a CEO. And as they’ve seen her take good advantage of those insights to grow into her position, it’s deepened their faith in her ability to run the business well. I also see that her openness to learning gives them a specific confidence that, in this era of especially radical and unpredictable change in the media industry, she’ll be able to see and embrace the “new” quickly enough to keep the business moving in the right direction.
Accepting Being Not-Good
As I noted earlier, the core of willingness to be bad first lies in managing your self-talk. If you actually stop and listen to what you’re saying to yourself as you’re trying to learn something new, you’ll notice that the vast majority of it focuses on resisting and bad-mouthing (bad-minding?) yourself about your novice state. For example: Aagh! I’m so clumsy/stupid/slow! Why can’t I figure this out/do this right/get it together? Not only does this not help us learn, it gets in the way of our learning to a fairly dramatic extent. When we talk to ourselves like that, we feel embarrassed, helpless, silly, awkward, anxious—maybe even depressed or hopeless. And those feelings tend to lead to even worse, less helpful self-talk—the kind of insidious self-talk that predicts failure. (I’m such an idiot. Why do I even try? I’ll never be able to learn this… or anything!) In fact, our “non-acceptance” mental monologue generates so much emotional and mental static inside us in the form of negative feelings and a spiral of ever-worsening self-talk that it leaves very little of our brain free to focus on learning whatever is in front of us.
Shifting your resistant and self-castigating self-talk into the self-talk of acceptance can create an immediate positive shift in your emotions and a remarkable sense of mental clarity.
Whenever I’m trying to understand and develop a new way of approaching something, I always use myself as a guinea pig. As I’ve been developing the ANEW model over the past few years, I’ve made efforts in a variety of areas to heighten my aspiration, increase my neutral self-awareness, engage my curiosity, and—hardest for me—be willing to be bad first. As I mentioned in the last chapter, I’ve been learning to spin yarn, partly as a way to explore and practice my ANEW skills. Before my first lesson, I realized this was a great opportunity to practice the self-talk of acceptance. I consciously said to myself, I’m going to be bad at this for a while, because I’ve never done it before. That’s just how it is. It felt almost like setting down a physical weight. Just acknowledging and accepting the reality of my novice-ness made me feel immediately less pressured, more capable, and hopeful.
And then something very exciting happened. Because I was accepting that I simply wouldn’t be good at this first lesson, I found myself behaving very differently than I had in the past in other “first lesson” situations. I had nothing to prove to the teacher or myself, and so I could calmly watch him, try doing what he suggested, notice what wasn’t working, ask him what to do differently, and try it again. By the end of the hour I had the basics, and my teacher, Jamie, actually said, “Wow, you’re learning this really quickly.” I told him about “accepting being bad first,” and he nodded. “That’s so true,” he said. “I was trying to teach someone recently who was a master weaver, and who thought because of that she should be good at spinning right away. She was so frustrated and impatient when she didn’t get it immediately. I kept saying, ‘It’s okay, you’re just starting out, it will get easier.’ But it was almost like it didn’t penetrate. She just kept getting more unhappy with herself—she actually got worse instead of better. By the end of the lesson, she was completely frazzled and even I was feeling frustrated.”
Exactly. When we’re faced with new skills or knowledge, and we talk to ourselves in the common, negative ways, our I’m-a-loser-and-I-shouldn’t-be-bad-at-this self-talk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our minds roil with unhelpful negative messages; we start feeling afraid or angry or embarrassed; and our receptors for new information and sensation close down. We become less and less able to learn, which kicks our negative self-talk into even higher gear (I really am a loser and I’ll never get this).
Let’s stop the madness.
You’ve already started learning and practicing the skill of managing your self-talk, and of becoming a fair witness in the service of increasing your neutral self-awareness. You can apply both of those new capabilities to this challenge.
Here’s how I did it in preparation for my first spinning lesson. I recognized my “anti-being bad” self-talk about it, which was: This is going to be frustrating. I hate not being able to do things. I hope I don’t suck at this too much. I recorded it by writing it down on a piece of paper. As I reviewed it and made the effort to be as fair witness about the situation as possible, I was able to rethink my self-talk to be: I’m going to be bad at this for a while, because I’ve never done it before. That’s just how it is.
I noticed Courteney Monroe did the same thing before her first board presentation. She told me that she initially recognized her self-talk as being along the lines of, Oh my god, I hope I don’t screw this up and look completely clueless. And she changed it to, I’ve never done this before, so I know I’ve got a lot to learn about how to do it well. And they know this is my first board meeting.
Now it’s your turn.
If you’re like most people I know, you’ll definitely have to repeat this one—our negative self-talk about being bad is particularly sticky and insidious. I found that I had to remind myself that, I’m going to be bad at this for a while, because I’ve never done it before. That’s just how it is, many times before and during that first spinning lesson, and I’m sure Courteney had to repeat her pre-board meeting “acceptance” self-talk as well. By the way, she told me that when she accepted her board-presentation novice-ness, she experienced the same feelings of relief and hopefulness that I had in approaching my first spinning lesson, and as a result she was much more effective in both her preparation and her delivery than she would have been otherwise.
Believe in Your Ability to Get Good
Too often, even if we are able to shift our initial self-talk when confronted with new learning to some form of accepting not-good, like I’m bad at this right now, and that’s the nature of learning something new, the self-talk that tends to follow immediately is, And I’m going to be bad at it forever. I’ll never get any better. This goes back to that phenomenon we looked at in chapter 5: the fact that it’s often hard for people to be accurate about their current weaknesses because they don’t believe they’ll be able to improve.
In order to explode that very pernicious belief (which Carol Dweck has termed “fixed mindset”), you need only to look at your own life in a fair witness way. If you review your life objectively, you’ll see that you’ve gotten better at literally thousands of things. Think about what you were able to do when you were five years old; think of all the things you can do now. All human beings can learn and grow. Period. So when that voice in your head starts to predict that not only will you be bad first, you’ll be bad always, you can shift that self-talk to assert, completely accurately, that I’ve gotten good at lots of things in my life, and I’ll be able to get better at this.
You can then make your self-talk of self-belief even more powerful by acknowledging specific things that you’ve learned that are like this new thing you’re attempting, or qualities in yourself that you know make you a particularly good learner. For instance, my balancing self-talk in approaching my first spinning lesson was, I’m sure I can learn this. I’ve gotten really good at other crafty things over the past few years, and I’m good at getting curious and figuring out what’s not working when I’m faced with something new. Courteney’s balancing self-talk was, I know I’ll quickly get better at reporting to a board. I’m a good learner, and I’ll be open to all the cues I get about how to deal with them effectively.
Now you get to create this second “balancing” self-talk statement to use in approaching your new learning.
Leveraging Your Internal Fair Witness
Your ability to be a fair witness is key to creating balanced self-talk as you approach new learning. Remember: fair witnesses report, as objectively and accurately as possible, based on their direct experience. I submit to you that your direct experience (and mine, and nearly everyone’s) is that (1) people are not good at things when they first start learning them and (2) each of us has the capability to get significantly better at most things over time.
Are we agreed?
Then, when your mind starts throwing self-talk at you that calls into question these basic truths (i.e., It’s unacceptable to be bad! I bet so-and-so wasn’t bad when he started out! Managers are supposed to know everything! I’ll never be able to learn this!), you can go right back to the fair witness approach we discussed in chapter 5, and ask:
Is my self-talk accurate?
What facts do I have in this area to support or refute it?
If you ask yourself those questions, and really try to be objective in your answers, I’m pretty sure you’ll come out on the side of the angels. And you can make up your own variations of these “fair witness” questions as well. One of my favorites—when I recognize that my interior voice is either rejecting the truth of having to be bad first or promoting the idea that I’ll never get better at something—is simply to ask myself, Really? Is that even true? It’s like splashing my mind with cold water—bracing and energizing at the same time. And it usually cuts right through the unhelpful and unsupportive BS my mind is blathering on about, and allows me to tell myself things that are more accurate and hopeful.
Bridge from What You Already Know
As I said earlier, most adults are good at a bunch of things. So most of us, when we’re approaching learning something new, have done some related learning at some point. This is true even when the learning seems to you entirely different from anything you’ve ever done. For example, someone I know was offered a job, a few years ago, as head of the new social media marketing effort for a nonprofit in her city. Her first reaction was, Why would they want me? I know nothing about social media. But the organization was actually seeing related expertise that she wasn’t seeing. They knew that she was an educator who understood how to introduce others to new ideas, that she was an artist and would look at their communication with a creative eye, and that she had experience building community with a wide variety of people. They felt she could apply all of this expertise in helping them explore and create a strategy for using social media as a means of reaching and engaging their target audience.
On the other hand, I’ve often seen people go too far in the other direction, and assume that new learning is exactly like what they already know. I spent many years working with someone who unconsciously used this approach to hide her fear of being bad. For example, at one point (this was many years ago, when our business was quite small), we were planning to start using accounting software, rather than doing our books manually on Excel spreadsheets. As we were reviewing a demo of the software, she said, somewhat dismissively, “Oh, this is just like what I’ve been doing.” I looked at her, puzzled. “Really?” I responded. “I don’t know much about accounting, but it seems quite different to me.” “No,” she assured me, “it’s pretty much the same.”
Sadly, it took our accountant months to convince her that it was, indeed, different, so that she could actually take advantage of having the software in order to simplify and improve our approach.
In other words, using this tactic of “bridging” in the service of being bad first requires a kind of Goldilocks approach: not too little and not too much, but just right. That is, you don’t want to either underestimate or overestimate the relevance of previous learning when you’re approaching a new area of skill or knowledge. Your biggest ally in finding that sweet spot is your curiosity. Instead of asserting that something you know is or isn’t like the new thing you want to learn, get curious and ask yourself whether or not they are alike, and if so, how.
For example, instead of telling herself that reporting to the board was nothing like anything she’d ever done before (which would have been unnecessarily scary, and not accurate), Courteney asked herself, I wonder what skills I have that are related to what I’ll need to learn in order to report successfully to the board? What immediately came to mind was that she had a lot of experience presenting; she knew how to build a business case for change; and she knew how to elicit and be open to feedback (from years of presenting to and collaborating with groups as a marketing professional). Then she asked herself a second curious question, How are those existing skills similar to and different from what will be required in this new situation? Asking and then reflecting on that question gave her a lot of great information on which to base her preparation for interacting with her board. For example, she realized that simply having learned to be comfortable presenting to groups was going to be a big advantage, and one she could build on in this situation.
At the same time, she saw there was at least one new skill she’d need in dealing with her board: managing the conversation with, in effect, a room full of bosses. She realized it had been much easier, in most of her previous presentations, to simply ask for questions at the end or at specific times during the presentation, but that she was going to have to learn how to have more of a give-and-take with the board without being thrown off track, and help to bring them to consensus or agreement on next steps. As she got curious, she understood that this new responsibility wasn’t just going to require good presentation skills, it would require group facilitation skills, along with a much deeper understanding of her whole business than she had previously had to have.
My colleagues at Proteus and I have found over the years, especially in coaching situations, that if we can help our clients to ask the two curiosity-based questions that Courteney asked herself when entering into an important learning situation—a new, bigger job; increased responsibilities; developing an area or offer that’s new to the organization—they’re much more likely to understand how they can use their existing skills and knowledge well in the new area. (And since we’ve already worked with them to create good, balanced self-talk, they actually have the mental clarity and emotional bandwidth they need to build from what they know.)
Let’s apply this final tactic to your own be bad first challenge.
Your Toolkit Is Full
That’s it. You now have the four basic ANEW tools you need in order to thrive through change, and to acquire new skills and knowledge at the pace required in today’s world. You’ve learned the basics of how to make yourself aspire to learn the things you need to learn; you know how to become more neutrally self-aware—more objective and accurate about your strengths and weaknesses as you approach new learning; you’ve learned some simple secrets for reengaging your own endless curiosity. And now you also know the most important skill for new learning: how to accept and move through the inevitable necessity of being bad first.
You, dear reader, have the core of what you need in order to become a master of mastery. Before we part company, though, I want to provide you with even more support along the way. First, I want to inoculate you against your own particular anti-learning demons—do some mastery troubleshooting, if you will—and then I want to work with you to bring together all the activities you’ve done throughout the book: to apply the ANEW skills to a learning challenge that’s really important to you.
First, let’s slay some of your dragons…