Struggling on Purpose with Seth Godin

Hey, this is Trevor. Before we get started, I want to tell you about something that we just launched. It's called the Leading Learners Toolkit. It's basically everything you need to teach the science of better learning to your team, to your group. This is the best thing that I've ever made. If you want your team to be more adaptable, agile, more resilient, better learners, the toolkit is the way. There's a facilitator's guide, there's a workbook, and there's ten beautifully designed lessons. I think you're going to love it. Go to LeadingLearners.io for more information. I'm Trevor. I'm Alex. Welcome to the Learner Lab podcast presented by TrainUgly.com. Each week, something new that can help us learn. Let's go! Let's start this podcast off like all good podcast should start. How's that? With a video. What are you seeing Alex? It helps the audience. There's a man, a skateboarder, and a leather jacket, and he's falling a lot. He looks like he's trying to do a trick. He's like going up this ramp, trying to switch skateboards in mid-air and land it, and it is not going well. I think he's on like his seventh miss now. Also fun fact, not wearing a t-shirt. Or a helmet. But he's got a leather jacket. Which, oh yeah, he's not happy about this. He says he's found it. Here we go. One more attempt. Got him. He did it. Switching skateboards in mid-air, no crashing, no shirt. His name is Jerry. Jack will drop the link in the show notes. So what can we learn from a video like that? Perseverance is what I learned from that link. Yeah, for sure. I think it's, to me, it's like a great reminder of the learning process. So let's break down what happens. First, crashes a bunch of times. In the end, we get sort of the visible aha moment. We can see it in his face. It clicks. He goes, I found it. And that's something that we've all experienced before. Like, every single one of us, no matter what we do, we've been in that situation where we're trying something a bunch of times and then it clicks. Which means something that we all know, but sometimes we forget is that the aha moment can't happen without the crashes. You need those 20 missed attempts at first. And who knows how many it's going to take, but you could make the argument every single crash led him to, I found it. Now that's what learning looks like and sounds like, no matter what we're trying to learn. That's exactly how we learn to walk, ride a bike, shoot a basketball, do algebra, make a podcast, communicate with people. It's exactly like, no matter what. But the skill we're trying to build, the process we move through is always the same. In fact, there's an iron cloud rule of learning, one of the biggest truths of learning. We're always going to be bad first period and of sentence. There's no way around this rule. Like, if we want to get better at something, learn a new skill, we're always going to struggle it first. And it's sort of from the struggle that we grow. I would bet every single person listening to this pod right now has something they want to get better at. Now, it would be awesome. It'd be fun and convenient if we could just skip the struggle step and get good at whatever we want. We sure way to being perfect. Awesome. But that's not how learning works. We have to earn our skills. We have to earn our growth from the struggle step. Can't land the skateboard without a few crashes. Can't get good at something unless we're willing to be bad first. One of my favorite people on earth is Dave Chang, the chef. And on his podcast, he's made this statement. He goes, you can't make good kimchi unless you're willing to make some bad kimchi. It's so true. It's so true for everything. It's impossible to get good unless we're willing to be bad. If you're listening to this podcast, you have done this hundreds of times. Everyone listening is really good at a lot of things. We just don't realize all of the struggle that we put in beforehand. Yeah. It's like, okay, we're all super skilled. We're ridiculously good at a lot of things. And for the majority of those skills, we weren't born with them. Right. Think about things as simple as walking. Yeah. Right. You built that skill. Yeah. Riding a bike. Built that skill. Communicating with others. Built that skill. Driving a car. All of these things. We built these skills through practice and struggle and experimentation by doing exactly what Jerry did. So so many times we watch a video like Jerry, the skateboarder, and like we're in all of that. But the truth is, we do these things every day. Let's go to one of our favorite people on earth, one of the most I've ever seen. Yeah, seriously, our idol. I think kind of summarizes this up pretty well. The people who are good at learning say, I like the feeling of not knowing yet. The same way that people are good at skiing, say, I like the feeling of being just a little bit out of control. That's how you get good at skiing. And that's how you get good at math. The difficulty comes from the fact that if you are not open to living with the tension of being stupid, you can't possibly learn it. I call it thirstiness. If you are thirsty, it means that you are willing to feel stupid. You are willing to try. You are willing to expose yourself to the unknown in order to see what your desires are to get to the next level. Honestly, this episode should be that video on loop for 20 minutes. Because what he is saying is so true. If you want to grow, you have to be willing to struggle. And I think there are two sides of this. We have to be able to step into those situations as a novice. I don't know this skill, like Jerry, the initial jump. Yes. And it works on the other side of defense. Even when I'm good at stuff, I still have to find ways to push out of the comfort zone and struggle in order to grow. Because as we all know, it's not just that first leap. Exactly. It's a continual process. It's in order to grow, we have to struggle. The way we think about it is a lot of the listeners have probably heard this. It's the jungle tiger versus zoo tiger sort of metaphor that we use. Is that a metaphor analogy? I think we said it's an allegory, but never heard of that word, but whatever it is, this is an explanation of comfort zones. It's like, okay, compare a tiger living in the zoo with one in the jungle. OK, zoo tiger, easy life. Definitely no struggle happens in the zoo. Who's brought to it? Jungle tiger, really hard life, and a ton of struggle. Obviously, the jungle tiger learns way more than the zoo tiger. Now this is an easy kind of exercise that a kindergartener can understand, but there's so much science that supports us. Like, literally Darwin did this study where they compared brains of animals in the zoo with wild animal brains and the wild animal brains were 30% bigger. And he just published a study also where they looked at the brains of monkeys while they were training them. Once the monkeys started to figure out what was happening and they were getting comfortable with the whole practice, their learning centers and their brains started to shut down. And then when they started to introduce uncertainty back into the process, those learning centers lit up again. This message is sort of blown up. A lot of people are talking about jungle tigers and zoo tigers. It's a good framework for this. Yet, sometimes the core of the message is lost. This has nothing to do with aggression or big leaps out of our comfort zone. It's usually the small choices. At its core, choosing to jungle tiger is any time we do the right thing, the better thing or maybe more difficult or uncomfortable thing over the easy comfortable option. We're kind of choosing discomfort because we know it leads to growth. Exactly. Like, asking a question in a group, that's jungle tiger. Having a difficult conversation, jungle tiger, because it's more difficult to do that than to avoid those conversations. Yeah, and those aren't huge leaps. No. They're the small things, but they're still difficult to do and they still help us grow. Absolutely. Working on a project out of our comfort zone, trying out for a team, applying for a job. These are all things that everyone does all the time. The argument is, when we do stuff like that, we grow more than if we don't. Honestly, this sounds a lot like the desirable difficulties material we talked about in episode 2. Exactly. Remember the flash cards example, right? So if we're studying for a test and we have all these flash cards in there in order, that's pretty comfortable when we're getting them. We're getting quizzed on stuff that we know what comes next. But if we really want to learn the material, we should shuffle those cards up. We're going to grow more because it's a bit more uncomfortable, right? Yeah, it's going to be harder to shuffle than to not shuffle. But we will grow more. And that's illustrating the point. This isn't like grand leaps out of the comfort zone. It's these small little choices we make to struggle or not struggle to grow or to stay where we're at. So everyone listening, we've done our fair share of jungle tiring, but if we're going to be real, everyone listening, we've done a lot of zoo-tagging as well. And look, we're not saying you need to spend all of your time out there in the jungle, being uncomfortable. Absolutely. What we're saying is that if we want to be learners and we want to grow at something, there's a skill we want to get better at. We should work to spend more time in the jungle and pushing the boundaries of our comfort zone. And perhaps like the biggest reason that we don't spend more time in the jungle is it will always involve more struggle to jungle tiger than to zoo tiger and struggling is not very fun, right? Not fun and it's hard. There's other reasons like our fixed mindset and our stories could keep us in the zoo. We talked about that in episode six. Fear is at play here. It all kind of sifts back to struggle. It's like that is the price of admission we have to pay in order to grow. Are we willing to do that or not? Now look, just like with desirable difficulties, there's ways to make things way too difficult to where we don't grow. Just like there's ways that we can struggle a ton and not grow. Right, but that's not the goal here, right? We don't want to make it too hard for us, right? We want the right amount of struggle. One way to think about this is if you want to get better at playing basketball, you want to play with people better than you, right? Yes, that's going to be helpful. But you don't want to go play against like LeBron or something. LeBron, John. So you're going to play one on one with LeBron because you're not really going to. Yeah, we're, we're calibrating this. Right. It's like, this isn't just a binary thing. It's like, oh, struggle a lot. It's that's how you grow. It's, we have to struggle to grow. And there's like the right amount. It's just like the right amount of weight to help me get stronger. Right. And there's, there's a lot of self awareness in that, right? Like knowing how much you need that's still going to push you out of your comfort zone. But it's not going to challenge you too much that you're not going to grow. Right. It's like finding ways to venture out of our comfort zone, being down to struggle. So we've kind of touched on this idea on if we want to learn a new skill, there's some struggle we have to go through to do that. Is that initial struggle, right? We have to sit through the valley of being bad. Yeah, like, stay patient. Yeah, like you said, it's sort of the price of admission. Yes. But it doesn't end there. If we want to keep growing at any skill, we have to keep struggling. We have to keep pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone, finding ways to jungle tiger. Because if the goal is to grow, that's how it's done. Right. Okay, no one's saying we need to spend 24/7 in the jungle. It's if we want to grow, now we got to figure out how to jungle tiger. Let's look at both sides of the fence through a story. Okay. A few years ago, over the holidays, I was hanging out with a family friend. His name is, we'll call him Fred. Okay. And also Fred is six. We were just like sitting on the couch like real bored and I decided to show off. I showed him this trick. It's called quarter snatching. You put a quarter on your elbow, swing your hand down and try to catch it. Okay. Looks pretty cool, but to be real, it's pretty easy to do. Terrific way to impress a six year old. Right. So I did this a few times and Fred legit that I was magic. He's like, oh my goodness. You have to show me how to do this. So I showed him a couple more. He decided he wanted to try. So puts the quarter on his arm, swings his hand down, completely misses. Okay. No big deal for his tribe. Of course, I didn't catch it back on the arm. Attempt number two, swings the hand down, smacks the quarter across the room. Okay. Rannon got it back on the arm. One more time. Attempt three missed again. There was no fourth attempt. He goes, well, that's dumb and went back to the couch. Which tiger is he choosing to be in this scenario? He's definitely being a zoo tiger. Back to the zoo. We were in the jungle. We were trying something new. Three misses. This doesn't feel good. I'm back to my comfort zone. The couch. The couch is the comfort zone. The comfort zone is the zoo. And this is a six year old illustrating the point. This is a universal thing. We have all done that. Now some people might be laughing at him, but we all do this all the time. All the time. All the time. So many times we try something like this. We see a skill that we want to learn. Like say we want to learn how to play guitar. We go pick up a guitar, try it three times and we're like, wow, overwhelming. Really tough. Because that's where we're met with the wall of struggle. When we learn after effects or Photoshop, you first open it up and it's like, oh my goodness. And we have to be willing to kind of sit in that. And if we're not, it's impossible to figure it out. More often than not, what do we do? We retreat to the couch to our comfort zone. All of us do it. Way back in the day before a train ugly was even a thing. We all started with basketball camps and we would go in the summer and do like a weeklong basketball camp with high school teams. And we're working with a team that was really, really good in the state. And on their team was one of the best players in the state. We'll call him Jason. Now stick with me. I promise we're going somewhere, but we got to add some details. So add some context. We were doing a drill called the one-on-one ladder. And so the basic idea is you play one-on-one for 90 seconds against someone. If you win that game, you move up a court. If you lose, you move down a court. The goal is to climb to the top of the ladder by winning. Whoever finishes at the top court wins. And this player named Jason was like six inches taller than everyone. It was a pretty good advantage. So basically what he was doing, he was winning every game by just backing people in. Each shoot, miss, shoot, miss, eventually make it, and no one could stop it because he's just way taller than everyone. So we ran through this and he kept finishing at the top. What we realized is like, oh, this isn't really helping him get better. If we use the language we've established, it's like this is a very zoo-tiger drill. He's very comfortable. Yes, he's finishing at the top, but he's not really struggling. So the coach is an eye-invented kind of like a manipulation to the drill to hopefully make it better for Jason. So he said, okay, this time same game, but we're going to play one shot one on one. There's no rebounding. Like if you miss, it's automatically the defender's ball. So now we can't just sit there and make buckets. Right. So it's kind of going to throw him into the jungle a bit. He can't just depend on the putbacks. He has to focus on making a good move and making the first shot. He finished at the bottom court. We did it again. Jason finished at the bottom again. He freaked out. Kick the water fountain and left the gym and never returned. Now, look, I'm not trying to shame him because I didn't know any of this stuff. Now if it happened, we could have had a really, really good conversation about this. So this is my bad that he left because I just kind of threw him out there. I didn't give him a purpose or why behind it or any of the underlying science. I have a couple questions for you. I know like I'm the basketball guy in this team, but okay, which drill would be better for Jason if he's trying to become a better player? The second drill. Why? Because he's struggling there. It's not as easy for him. It's kind of out of his comfort zone. He has to focus on doing something that he's maybe not as good at. So drill one easier. He's going to finish at the top drill to better. One involved struggle. One did not. Now, I think whether we know basketball or not, we'd agree with what you said. Yeah, the second drill is better. So why did he leave? Because he wasn't looking good anymore. Yeah. And that is kind of like this big distinction we have to make. It's like looking good and getting better are two different things that usually don't happen at the same time. Right. Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to look good. We should. We should be able to put it on the line and compete like Jerry the skateboarder. Guess what? He wanted to land the trick and maybe impress his friends, but he was down to do the things to help him grow. So Jason was so obsessed with looking good that it actually robbed him of the learning opportunities. Let's just be real. Like the looking good thing. There's nothing wrong with that. We shouldn't feel shame about that. It's like outcomes and performance matters and everything we do in life. Like in business and school and sports, that matters. And it's okay to want those and care about those. And choosing to train ugly and jungle tiger, we're not asking people to sacrifice their long term performance. The real sacrifice we need to make to become a better learner is in our comfort level backstage. So what I mean by that, no one was asking him to sacrifice his points per game, his starting position on the team. Like all those are safe. Right. It's just in the practice. It's we're practicing and it's the summertime. And during this drill, can you sacrifice your comfort? And the cool thing is if you do that and do that more, all those outcomes that you do care about, we're going to see more of that. This isn't a choice between performance and learning. This is a choice between our comfort level during practice. We all have this backstage time. That's where we're trying to jungle tiger. And then by all means, when it's game time, put your best foot forward. I think there's another point that this story illustrates, right? So Jason was pretty good at basketball. He was really good at basketball. He put in that initial work, that initial struggle. He practiced and struggled and got good. But once he got good, he sort of plateaued and just kind of stayed in the comfort zone, right? He's taller than everyone. He can just sit there and keep shooting him up and then rebound and then putting him back in there. If he doesn't start struggling more, he's not going to grow beyond that level. Exactly. In this scenario, looking good became more important than getting better. The whole goal with the pod is to help people become better learners. And I think this is such an important piece. It's like understanding that in almost every learning situation we face, there's a simple choice to jungle or zoo tiger, to struggle or not struggle, to grow or not. And we get to make that choice like every single day. The cool thing is, once we understand the value of these desirable difficulties, the value of the struggle, we can choose to do that more. Now there's no blueprint to that. But the idea is like finding ways to get better reps, finding ways to get feedback, looking for different models and different concepts. All these things will challenge us. All these things will create struggle and all these things can help us grow. I've seen so many cool examples of this in our workshops. So let's just go through a few. And I think putting some examples on the table is going to help everyone. One. One of the most successful college football coaches of the century went in and I was working with his team. And they did this thing that was so interesting in every single team meeting. Anytime a coach was presenting to the team, they actually hired education professors from the university to come sit in on those meetings and give feedback to the coaches about how they were presenting the material to the players. Wow. Think about that. Not the most comfortable thing to do. No, it's kind of the opposite of the struggle. It involves some struggle, but it's brilliant. It was a useful skill. How we present material to our team. Let's bring in an expert to help us get better at it. So that's not really a huge leap that they're making. No, it's not this grand jump out of into the jungle. Right. They're just bringing some people in to give them extra feedback. on it's a very useful skill and a creative way to practice. And I think that we can find ways to incorporate that sort of idea into our own practices. Right. If there's a skill that we're trying to get better at, we can bring other people who are experts in that to come and just watch our process, see how we're doing with it. Honestly, there's probably someone in your building that's really good at something you want to be good at. Yeah. And you can find ways to just seek them out and ask for some feedback on your own process. Absolutely. We maybe we don't all have the resources to hire professors from the education department, but someone around us is probably good. We can go observe. We could get feedback from them. I think a great example of this whole process is like you and these after effects videos that you're making. So years ago, I was like, dude, you should get good at this. It's a super power. It's a lot of fun. The videos. And it's been so cool to watch you do it. And I would imagine like, when you first opened the program, it was like, oh my goodness. It's pretty overwhelming, but you made your first video. And of course, it wasn't that good. Right. You made one. And how many of you made since then? Like 15 or 15 or so. And the last few were like really, really good. I think one, you were willing to sit through the valley of bad. Right. That initial part to like make the first video or even just kind of learn the tools of the software. And then every single video I can see you trying new techniques, learning from new people, experimenting with different things. And that's why every single video is better than the last. Are you the best after effects person in the world? No. But you continue to get better each time because you're finding ways to put yourself into the jungle. I did some work in a school district outside of Dallas. And during a few of our brain firms, this teacher was like outlining some of her fears and sort of limiting beliefs like we talked about in episode six. And she said, my biggest fear in life is parent teacher conferences because here comes the story. I am terrible at interacting with strangers. So again, kind of like our stories and fear work together. Right. And so she like put that on the table. This was a few years ago. Well, I actually got to go back to the school. And during the workshop, she like shot her hand up. She's like, I've been a jungle tiger. And she had a huge smile on her face. And I was like, all right, tell like I could remember her from few years ago. And it ends up over the last few summers. She signed up to be an Uber driver. That is awesome. Now, of course, this little side hustle, bringing in some money. But she did it to specifically practice this skill. She realized this is like a low stakes way to get some reps. Every person that gets in the car is this kind of a stranger. It's a new low stakes rep to practice the interaction. Right. We know was it comfortable? No, absolutely not. But it's helping her get better at this skill. So the thread so far is just like, okay, what is the skill I want to get better at? How can I step out of my comfort zone to get better reps or better feedback? Another great example. I've done quite a bit of work with this auditing company. And during one of our brainstorms, when we were talking about jungle tiger, zoo tiger, a woman got up and she's like, I think I zoo-tiger a lot. But that doesn't mean I don't do anything. She's like, I'm constantly working. But I only work on the things in my comfort zone. She's like, my comfort zone is made of numbers and accounting. Like, that's what I do. And she's like, if I think of the books that I read, the conferences I go to, the conversations I have in her own little world. Yeah, there are all about like numbers and accounting. And the way she, she explained this was pretty cool. She goes, rather than sharpening my spear a little bit more, maybe I should go to the jungle and add a new weapon. And now, first of all, I was like, okay, I'm stealing that forever. That was brilliant. And I kind of pushed her on it like, okay, what would that look like? And I've actually been in touch and a lot of the people in the company are doing this now. They're signing up for improv classes and they're reading books in like storytelling and communication. Their thinking was, we all have all this knowledge appear about numbers and accounting. But if we can't communicate that to someone, it doesn't do us much good. So again, let's just break down what they're doing. In going to the improv class, is that going to be very comfortable? No. Absolutely very uncomfortable. Anything going to a few of these classes and reading a few books, are they going to be experts in communication? Probably not. Are they going to be better at their job? Certainly, without a doubt. With almost everything that we encounter, we have a choice of, I can either zoo tiger here or jungle tiger, right? I can either stay in my comfort zone or try to force myself out a little bit. And that's really what the auditor is doing, right? My comfort zone here is the numbers world. I'm good at that. I'm comfortable here. I'm sharpening my saw, right? But I have the opportunity with every other encounter to expand that comfort zone and try new things. And that's what the improv is for. 100%. And like we said, we don't want this to come across as like, oh, it's easy. Just jungle tiger. It's like, no, it's hard and scary. And we're also like realistic. It's like, look, we're not jungle tiger in every single challenge we're faced with. And the reason we use this sort of allegory, hey, learning, it's because it's easy to remember like a question we can always ask ourselves is like which tiger am I being now? Right. And it's something that we can control. It's sort of like I almost think of it in a flow chart, right? Yeah, it's like, here's some opportunity that came to me. It's like, am I trying to get better at this skill? If yes, I need to have a little discomfort here. I need to have some struggle in order to pay the price of admission. Yeah. Are you ready for a call back? Yes. You forgot about this guy. Fred. Oh, where did we leave Fred? That was the coin flipping guy. Yeah, we told a lot of we told a lot of stories, but Fred is our six year old friend. And where did we leave him? He gave up on the third try went back to the couch, come back to the crunch. What happened next was pretty cool. Went to the couch, took out my laptop. I showed him the skateboarding video. The same one we watched at the beginning of the episode. Everything's coming full, sir. He watched Jerry the skateboarder crash, fall and eventually land it. As soon as the video is over, Fred went and got the quarter, put it back on his arm, swung his hand down and caught it. Wait, did he actually catch it that time? No, just kidding. He didn't catch it. Just seeing if you're on your toes there. Of course he missed. Like, again, that's not how learning works. He missed, of course, but this time he tried for four minutes, 50 or 60 attempts. And one three attempts not enough, round two, after 50 or 60 tries, he was catching it. Then he's doing two arms at once. Then he's stacking quarters and catching the entire stack. It couldn't have been a bigger shift. Question I want to ask you and the audiences, what did the video do for him? It showed him that struggle is an essential part of the process. It was a reminder, right? It was a reminder. It wasn't like a hype up video of like inspirational quotes and someone running up a mountain with rocky music in the background. It was someone actually learning how to choose a skill. And it was a reminder because he knows this, just like we all know this. It was a reminder that to get good, we have to struggle. We tell people it's okay to make mistakes when the truth is it's necessary. And watching Jerry do that was a reminder to him, which helped him get off the couch out of the zoo back into the jungle. And in this scenario, the whole difference for him was four minutes. All he needed was four minutes in the jungle to learn the skill. Obviously, the skills that we're trying to learn here take longer than four minutes, but the tactics remain the same. Only way to catch the quarter is to be willing to drop a few. And if we're not, it's impossible to get good at the skill. Jungle Tigering is identifying a place that we want to grow, a skill that's useful and important to us, and finding ways to step into the wild to get the reps, to struggle, to get the feedback and basically do the things that help us grow. It's not always fun, but that's a choice that we can all make more often. Thanks so much for listening. Remember if you have any questions or comments, feel free to call our hotline at 805-635-845-9.