Transcription
Why is it the more you think about your projects, the less you actually do? You plan, you strategize, you bought the books, took the courses, and you still have nothing to show. It can often feel like this. You're trapped inside your own intelligence and knowledge. This is definitely a place I used to feel like. And the smarter you are, the more trapped you become. So, in this video, I'm going to do a breakdown of what the intelligence trap is, why most, but not all, self-help tools secretly make your whole problem worse, how your survival instinct is is keeping you stuck, and how an industry is massively profiting from your hesitation.
But first, so why despite having all that intelligence and all the tools at your disposal, it still can't make you act. If we rewind a little bit, you've been taught that if you just learn enough and plan enough, progress will eventually follow because knowledge equals power, right? Well, why can't you make anything happen? This is how I like to think about things. You have an idea, you get knowledge, you take some action, and you get progress. The problem is you can't help but focus on the wrong thing. And this really plagued me for a very, very long time.
The simplest version I found was to was to create this new concept. It's like you have two people inside your head, the strategist and the performer. Now, I've actually talked about this in a previous video, so I'd highly recommend going to watch it. Hopefully, I'll I'll link it up here somewhere, but I'll give you a bit of a refresher. And um for those who haven't seen this before, the strategist loves thinking, analyzing, and planning. And the performer is the one who actually has to show up and do the work. Strategist finds things intellectually stimulating, and it's really fun to do. The performer is the one who finds things extremely hard, very uncomfortable and experiences lots of fear and doubt.
The way I like to imagine things is this strategist over time gets extremely competent and it just keeps improving and the more knowledge you consume the more you do. When you were younger the performer would just try things right when you were a baby you would just try and walk and you would see what happens. You don't read and learn about how to walk. They didn't overthink and education over time rewarded the performer. They learned to analyze versus act and this was really encouraged. The strategist excelled in this environment because all of the resources are designed for a strategist. The performer over time just atrophied.
So every new idea the strategist takes charge because they've become really powerful. They love planning 10 steps ahead and they really enjoy complexity. like they feel pride when they're looking at their plans. Now, this is something I used to experience really badly, which is why I really associate with this. The performer on the other hand gets extremely overwhelmed. They often experience par analysis paralysis. They had experience loss of confidence and lots of self-doubt. The smarter the strategist gets, the more you feed them and the harder it is to move the performer.
So what happens is as you reach the edge, so you can imagine you're trying to start a project, you will start to avoid because it's scary. This is the performer. Remember the result is you end up doing all of these things to avoid. Are you familiar with this? And have you read this book? Um, drop a note in the comments if you have read this book. You'll get stuck in the knowledge acquisition stage. You'll have shiny object syndrome. So you'll keep getting distracted by new projects. You'll try and per uh perfect your plans. And you'll ever be forever building portfolio projects or adding things to your resume or CV. You'll look for perfect job descriptions, but you'll never actually reach out, constantly perfecting your work, but never shipping anything.
Now, when I'm coaching, this is something I would always hear. I need to take one more course. The strategist never doesn't know when to stop. Now, I've seen this everywhere and I've worked with hundreds of people uh onetoone, so I hear these reports live. Back to the strategist. They like to make complex plans that look good on paper. They have no empathy for the performer and what the performer actually has to endure. They love planning with big goals in mind. And they get really frustrated with the performer. Often results in punishment of the performer. The performer on the other hand, they get overwhelmed by complex plans. They often will try but it gets they get really stressed out and they will make errors due to the difficulty and they get really frustrated and avoid the plan altogether. They end up on YouTube and doom scrolling. It's you can imagine it's actually not a very nice experience for the performer.
So I really want you to imagine these two characters are inside your head. This is the strategist tendencies. Um, they're here with lots of knowledge, very capable. Your performer is down here really struggling with taking action and all that all that happens is you want to seek more and more knowledge. You'll buy more courses and books. It is like feasting on McDonald's. Just like fast food, it feels comforting in the moment, hollow and empty shortly after. But we know we need to take action. And I know you know this. So why can't you stop it?
So we're going to talk about part two, the uncertainty trap. And we got five parts here. So when you finally decide to act, your brain starts calculating all the risks. Now if you're pretty intelligent and you like to think about things, you're going to calculate a lot of risks here. You'll have lots of fear, uncertainty, self-doubt, lack of confidence, imposter syndrome, and you'll get overwhelmed. We experience this thing I call the runaway loop. You'll feel uncertain. You'll start consuming more information. It will start to ease, right? Because when you're feeling when you're reading the information, there's a sense of comfort that comes with understanding how to do things. But eventually the feeling will return when you try and do it and you experience all of those emotions again. So you'll do more preparation. But as you learn more, you start to realize there's more stuff you don't know, right? So you end up in this crazy loop. The paradox is the more you know, the less you do. Because of this, you become even more uncertain. And that's how you get that really overwhelming feeling. I used to experience this all the time. And it really it used to really confuse me.
Now, here's the part that nobody actually wants to admit deep down, especially if you're involved in this industry. And I am in this industry. Your paralysis is profitable. Extremely profitable.
So, part three, the industry that profits from your hesitation. While you're stuck trying to figure things out, you you you know you want to take action. You know this already. I don't need to tell you uh uh that you need to do this. Why can't you? This is the this is the kind of second order of thinking here. Well, what happens is you want to consume more knowledge. So, you get drawn by all of this stuff right now. I've been there and I have to really really stop myself from consuming this stuff because it's really really um it's really attractive to your strategist. And what happens is you can't help it. Every how-to video course feeds the strategist, not the performer. I was trapped in this loop like I just said. and you'll end up being up here. You are starving the performer and they end up having a really, really tough time. You need to help them.
So, how does this link to industry profit? Well, think about it. Your strategist is hungry for more. They're always hungry for more. They love this stuff and they're already competent. Remember, what happens when you get good at something? Well, you want to exercise it more. All right? So, that's why you end up here trying to consume more and more knowledge. It actually makes a lot of sense. Like I said, I was caught in this loop for I think well over 10 years. I was buying courses, buying books. I just kept going around in these circles and didn't realize how detrimental it was, which we'll come on to in a bit. It is like junk food. I can promise you. Now, I actually quite like McDonald's, which is a while you're trapped in the loop. An entire industry thrives on this. Creators, courses, and thought leaders, they keep feeding the strategists. They sell the illusion of progress. Now it is not to say that these things are not useful which I will explain in a minute when I I can hear some of you shouting at me saying that no these things are really good. They are but I'll tell you the caveats later. Emotional they give the emotional sugar rush of learning without doing. The market rewards attention not results.
Now I want you to uh pay attention to this image. Can you notice anything particularly interesting about it? What what are the words here that I might be focusing on, right? Best seller or best Yeah. And I like to think about this word. I break it down. Best seller. What does that actually mean? All of this is marked on how many books are sold, not how effective it has been. Why do I say this? It's actually a bit of a um frustrating point of mine because I've worked with hundreds and I've spoken to thousands of people and nearly all of them have this book and other books and when I ask them how effective it's been like how did they get on with chapter 12 they haven't even got past chapter 2 or three and so they don't even know the laws in there and some people who have they don't they can they can regurgitate the laws to me but when I say how effective it is you know people have really struggled to implement this And it and it makes you become this person who is always about to start things. You know, you've got all of these books. I'm about to start implementing my new habits, change my life, change my nutrition, change change my body, change my career. Are these sources of information bad?
This is where it might get a bit controversial because I'm going to talk about the the blind spot. Part four, the survivorship bias of the self-help industry. I bought lots of courses and I still struggled now. I've spent a lot of money on courses and training and all of that stuff over the years. I I think it's not even the money, it's the it's the time, right? It's how many years I lost from doing this stuff. I was really confused because I could not make any progress, especially when I could see it worked for some people. Now, this is where it gets pretty interesting and pretty um pretty complicated. After digging online, I looked up online course completion rates. Now I really urge you to do your research yourself and it was pretty difficult to find this information but the general consensus so it's about 5 to 15% of people complete courses. Think about that. 85 to 95 out of 100 people never even make it to the finish line. Now if you think about people creating these courses now and hands up I have created courses and I've sold them. All of the information is important right? When I look on the back end, I can see these numbers start to come out too. And it's it's pretty heartbreaking actually. It's really hard to find reliable data. Now, I'm kind of not surprised because it's pretty damning to the whole industry. If only five people ever make it to the end. Now, just reflect on your own experience for a moment. How many courses have you actually completed all the way to the end? Now, I have definitely taken some courses. I've still got a course actually that I've still yet to complete. Of those that do complete, how many get results? So if you got five out of like you know 85 to 95 sorry five to 15 out of 100 people that's who complete the course how many actually implement all of the stuff in the course and get the results that they want. I know I know you're shouting at me and you're thinking that it's definitely worked for you in some some circumstances and you know it's worth others. I know that too, right? This is why it's frustrating. And um I know people have had good results from my courses, but what about the rest?
So, we're going to talk about that. Often times, what's happened is that now this is my this is my opinion, right? This is just my take on it. A lot of people, they've they've experienced something and it is worked for them. They genuinely believe they're helping. But there's a critical blind spot here. How similar are they to you? And I'm talking about their character and traits. When would these courses and products work in an ideal situation? Like how can we get that 5% up to 100% or even even anywhere near 50%. I wondered this for so long. I've spent the kind of the last 5 to 10 years really thinking about this and doing lots of testing on this. Now, um I do have a solution later on in this video, but we we'll come on to that in a minute because I want to share this. This is really important. What if you were to flip these two? What if your performer happened to be the skillful one and your strategist was the one who was underdeveloped? It really works for these people, right? There are some people who are really effective at taking action and they just have not have access to the right information. Now, just think about that. What would happen in that situation? Well, when you've got a really good instruction set and you are really good at executing or you don't even have to be great at executing, you just have to have a moderate ability to execute. It really works for those people because what happens is you get this the strategist and the performer working in sync and they get the and it's easier to get the results here. Um, you know, I've really wondered this and I've uh, you know, looking at lots of people's uh, backgrounds. You can see they often already have a fairly competent performer. In these situations, information is genuinely leveraged for them, but you often have a different problem which needs a different solution. This was the problem I had. I was overindexed with the strategist. Um, and I was just really, really, really struggling with having a good performer, right? My performer looked like this. They they just were so terrified. They had no practice. They didn't know how to deal with the emotions. They were so scared of failure and judgment. Like, judgment for me was one of the worst ones to deal with. Um, and I just couldn't find a way through it. And so I just kept consuming more and more information, you know, on YouTube, listening to podcasts. And is this something I hear from clients all the time, like every day, right? We need to really focus on helping this person.
So while creators, authors, and academics are celebrating record profits. Now, if you zoom into these, you will see now this is just a selection, and these are some of the books that I've got. Um, so yeah, I mean, I've added to that, right? Best seller. bestseller, bestseller, bestseller, bestseller. Think about that. Best sellers. And you know, when I'm on um client calls, they're often telling me about what books they have read and how little they've actually read of those books. Sorry, how many books they've bought, which books they've bought, and uh how little they've actually read of them. And um you know, not to mention the fact that they've not even executed any of the things or practiced or trained on any of the things within the books. Now, many are just not getting any of the real outcomes that the books um that the books are really hoping really are aimed at getting. And you know, they often say the same thing. How many times have you heard in and how many how many times have you felt the urge to write a comment in a video where you're saying you're saying the same thing or um this is the same kind of stuff that everyone else says. It kind of is right because there's they're addressing um the content is going out to people who are stuck in the same cycles. So they who keep feeding on this stuff. Now again I have been one of these people. The system isn't designed to create finishers necessarily. It's incentivized and designed to create buyers.
So, part five, what is the hidden cost of all of this? You might be thinking, oh, I don't mind having a nice bookshelf. You can't see it here, but I've got a bookshelf of uh many of these books, which is kind of like the trophy of uh self-help. Coming back to this, we need to help this person here. Otherwise, they will just keep going and you you end up with this gap, right? So you got a very highly performing strategist and a very um struggling performer over here. No results, nothing to show. This is important. More failures in private. Loss of confidence. This is all of the things that are costing you. Identity is that you feel intelligent but useless. The hidden cost. You lose trust and belief in yourself. This exactly how I felt. We want to get you so you can have both of these people inside you performing well. So the information is relevant but you need to get you need to focus on the right aspect of you. Now if you're watching this and you're in my audience it's likely that your performer is the one who is really underdeveloped. Uh so the question isn't how do I learn more? It's how do I retrain my performer to start executing again. Remember when you were a child you would just execute because you couldn't read. Especially now your brain is defaulting to overpreparation. So that's what we're going to break down next. how to do this. I'm going to call this the performer upgrade framework. How do you rebuild the performer? You can't think your way out of this, right? I got to remind you about this. I see this so much. People trying to intellectualize their way out of the situation. That is the problem. You have to train your way out of this. We need a way to recondition the part of you that actually does the work. It starts with a fundamental truth. Your performer does not need more knowledge. It needs a different environment that will encourage the right type of behaviors. It is like bu rebuilding a muscle. You don't make it stronger by yelling at it or reading its stories. You re you rebuild it by actively using it at the right load so you don't break it. And that's how it gets stronger.
So what does your performer actually need to improve? But first remember what are they likely to experience that is causing all of these problems. So fear, uncertainty, discomfort, doubt, confusion, emotional overwhelm, anxiety and stress. These are not very nice things. Is there any surprise why your performer is trying to get away from this? Hold this in your mind for a moment. Okay, performer needs. What do they need? They need simplicity, safety, or the feeling of safety. They usually need a sense of pressure to perform here. And they need good feedback.
So, we're going to talk about um so I'm going to quickly blast through some of these. Now, I've talked about these in another video. Hopefully, I will link it somewhere here, but go and check my previous video. Simplicity. The strategist loves complexity because they feel clever. The performer, on the contrary, needs very small and very clear steps. Complex plans trigger this hesitation because they're already struggling with lots of stuff already. Remember, there's lots of emotional stuff going on. Safety. This is important. This helps you deal with the fear of failure. Fear, remember, fear of failure keeps the performer in a paralysis state. What we need is controlled exposure to risk. It should feel uncomfortable, but it should be relatively safe. This is what I like to call psychological safety. Now, this is in the personal realm. Check my other videos on this. Um, I'll hopefully put it in the links below so you can you can you can click around and find and find I cover both of these things in previous videos. So, as an example, I'll show you how I did this before. Now, here's a really old picture of me and this is a screenshot um when I was trying to post content. If posting terrifies you, start by taking private videos. I'm so glad I kept these. It was very difficult to find because I didn't I didn't want to ever find them. Um, but they're quite useful now. It's about 10 years later. I would take these private videos in my car and I I would be sweating making these videos. Even though I knew it was just going to me, it was enough to stretch me. And this way you can you can make each rep safe. This helps rebuild the performer's ability to act. Okay.
Now, I'm going to talk about the next one, which is the main one I want to focus on. pressure. Why do you work better with deadlines? Like, have you actually thought about why you work so much better with deadlines? I mean, I used to work really well with deadlines. I remember going to, you know, exams, you know, the last week before exams going crazy and doing all nighters. And also I was reflecting with a friend recently and we were saying I used to take these three-hour engineering exams where we'd have a pencil and you would be writing like non-stop for 3 hours and you'd have hand cramp at the end. I'm thinking huh that's kind of funny. I was struggling to uh I was complaining about writing for 10 minutes while I was studying whereas in an exam you can do it. Now we'll cover all of the psychological reasons why in a moment. The pressure is the force that pushes you past the friction. Now again looking at this, it is just the right amount. The key here is figuring out the right amount of pressure to overcome that um that avoidance sensation that you're having. Performer will always try and avoid. It's instinctive. Does not want to experience all those bad feelings. We need to reverse the process. So we can do that by applying a type of pressure. We need this override. It is surprisingly difficult especially when you are trying to do it on yourself for your own projects. We need to use things like deadlines, accountability and um social pressure. It must drive a feeling. These are just um so these are just solutions. But what the goal is we're trying to drive feelings. It needs to be more painful to stay there than it is to move. We can use feelings like embarrassment, the fear of missing out on something, um the feeling of being left behind or a fear that is worse than actually trying to uh you know trying to cross this little bridge. We have to figure out whatever actually works for you. Now the the use the interesting thing is nearly everyone already knows the types of pressures that actually work for you. Think about that. Hold on to that for a moment. the need for pressure. The performer will nearly always avoid. Most people try and deny that this actually happens. We don't see results and you just stay in the same loop. A little hint here, think about when people sign up for marathons. How effective is that once they've signed up for it? We'll come at this moment. There are two key factors I like to focus on here. How can you create pressure? Deadlines. Now, you know what deadlines can do for you? work deadlines, client deadlines, project deadlines. Self-imposed deadlines worth a try, but they are nearly always, well, they are often ineffective. Now, we'll talk about why in a moment. You can't trick your own survival instinct. Your brain knows that there's nothing at stake, right? That's why you can just skip your deadline. Social pressure, being accountable to a group when you have to show your progress and proof of work at the end. How might that work? Now we will we will keep building on this external pressure. It is extremely hard to create stakes your brain can take seriously. This is why external pressure works better than internal motivation. Stakes often come naturally when you're working with others. So when you have to deliver for a client, a customer, team, friend, or family, and it actually matters to you, it's it's a lot easier to to show up. the performer wakes up. Why? Because they can sense his real consequence. The variance I often see is because different people have different values. So if you feel like you can never let a client down, you're much more likely to take that. You're going to feel pain if you slip on a deadline for a client. Yeah. Same thing. If you want to make sure that you show up for friends or family and that really matters to you, it will cause you more pain to um to go to be flaky on them or to not show up. On the contrary, if you don't care about that, it won't cause any pain in which case you will continue not showing up. You may be that friend or you may have friends and family members who are like that.
So, back to the marathon. When you've paid for a marathon and are raising money for a charity you care about, you can see that creates this right that a really good environment to make it make it more painful to not do the marathon in your training than to do it. Meanwhile, if you don't do that sign up, you can sometimes struggle to go for a jog around the block. This is something that happened to me and you know all of this already. This is the key. I'm just bringing this front and center of your mind. The mistake a lot of people make though is most people think they can just create it for themselves. They think they can suddenly do this. Remember where your performer is. They think they can set deadlines, but you can miss these with no consequence. You can hide your progress so no one notices. And you only tell people that don't matter. So there's no there's no real stakes there. What happens is you are training yourself that this behavior, not showing up, not doing the work is acceptable. You're training this behavior. So, you're making your performer worse. And remember where your performer is. They're already struggling. They're down here, right? Poor person. Yeah. And meanwhile, you keep fueling the strategist. No results, nothing to show. More failure in private, loss of confidence, identity, intelligent but useless. This is how I felt. Hidden cost is losing trust and belief in yourself. Remember that they need help, not punishment. It's what I like to call kind of practical compassion. It's not self-discipline first then action which is what most people try and do and they read a book about self-discipline first and then hoping the action comes. It is much easier to use external pressure first like stabilizers on a bike and then the selfdiscipline will follow as you get stronger and your performer gets more competent and they can carry themselves. So this is why structured containers work well. That's why challenges, accountability groups, coaching, cohorts always work. It's one of the most interesting effects I've noticed when I'm coaching one-to-one. Obviously, I'm trying to be helpful in structuring what they need to do, but a big component is the fact that they have to show up week after week with work to show because the pain and they, you know, often clients will tell me this. Um, they will feel too embarrassed if they show up and haven't done the work. So they end up doing it and sometimes a late night the night before and I'm thinking that's actually fine because over weeks all of the work gets done. The point here is this creates the environment your performer needs to relearn this motion that they are desperately needing to make progress. The problem is that many people they just don't have an effective environment that is conducive of the performer improving. There's no real visibility. There's no stakes and there's no actual deadlines. If you don't have those things, you're going to you're putting the performer in a really difficult environment to start with. Can you really expect them to perform?
So, I've been working on a secret project to try and create these containers uh in a bit of a group setting. It's called the 20our challenge, and it's designed to help rebuild your performer, and I'm trying to do it in 20 days. So, I will touch on it now because you you might be interested. Um, but it's only going to fit certain types of people. So, it's called the 20our challenge. The idea is to try and rebuild your performer. Now, I've been trying to solve this for, you know, well over 5 years. I've been doing this with my one-to-one clients, and um, it's been really effective, but it's really difficult. So, in this, you'll be joining a group of people who all trying to rebuild their performer. There's live accountability, tracking, and graduation. And I'll show you here. So, we have like a like a deadline. Um, so I built a web app and um, you have this deadline feature. So you see your time ticking down. We track everyone's hours. So everyone has to log in their hours live on a daily basis. Um, it's it's it's pressure. So that's that's the idea. We're creating pressure. So you have to show up. Yeah. We have this kind of progress log. So where people have to post in there. Interestingly, the first time I ran this, um, now I was really nervous about this because I didn't think it I wasn't sure if it was going to work because I'm trying to solve what I think is extremely diff extremely difficult problem that I experienced and I deal with, you know, on a daily basis um with with lots of client work. I'm trying to do this in a more of a group setting. In the first cohort, we managed to get 78% of the participants to finish their projects, right? not just entered the challenge, they actually completed it, they finished what they set out to do. And you have to declare this at the beginning. So, we've created all these kind of psychological tricks to help you execute here. Now, I'm very aware that I am part of this whole industry and this, you know, this is a program, but I'm trying to solve a problem that I think, you know, is becoming a bit of an epidemic here. Anyway, if you go to this, if you go to this landing page, you can check it out. Read it. read the read the testimonials in there and I've got a free assessment so you can see whether or not this would work for you. So you don't have to pay anything for it. Um take this assessment. It's a it's an assessment and application form. If you're interested in joining, we're running the next beta cohort really really soon before I do a full launch. I'm really looking for people who can actually, you know, who have something they really, really want to work on and complete so they can eventually be one of the success stories in here. I feel like I'm tackling something that is nearly impossible, which is crazy cuz you think about the the course completion rate. That is an acceptable industry standard, which I think is unacceptable. 5 to 15% completion rate. Crazy. So, I'm still testing all of this out, but if you're interested and um you want to take part in this, go and check the link in the video below and see whether you can make it onto this next cohort. I do have to do some screening. So, if you if you do the readiness test, you'll get a you'll get a customized report at the end which will tell you what you need to work on and tell you whether you're a good fit for this particular cohort and challenge. Okay.
Now, if you trace all of this back, the hidden pattern is every time you avoid discomfort, your performer gets a little bit weaker. And every time you do face it, even in tiny doses, your confidence starts to compound. That's the real piece people miss. Each time you show up, it's a piece of evidence that your performer is actually capable. They really are. Now, they were when you were a kid, so this is not a crazy thing, but we it's just been pummeled out of us. You're not broken. You're just deconditioned. That's the way I see it. Your strategist, if you're like me, your strategist has been has been training for years and your performer has simply atrophied. If you can start closing this gap, you can start winning. Now, this is what happened to me. Now, I'm not by no means. It took me a long time to make this video as with all my other videos. I'm working really hard to make my performer do better. You don't need more information or training. You need a training ground and an environment that will help you to move forward. So, if you want to check out the beta program, check the link below. I might see you on the other side. Okay, see you in the next video.