Leave your ego at the door

Story time:

(A good one)

Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman approached him.

She pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?”

Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. He handed it back to her.

“That will be worth one million dollars.”

“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman protested, “it only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.”

“My good woman,” Picasso smiled, “it took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.”

So, what to think here?

That Picasso is a perverse man roaming the streets of Italy, painting pictures of women and telling them how good he is?

Sure…

But let’s see past that for a minute.

You see, very few practice 30 years to do a masterpiece in 30 minutes.

Mostly because it’s a pain in the ass, but also because it takes:

Patience

Conviction

Dedication

Riding out ups and downs

Risking that you won’t be able to do a true masterpiece at the end of your 30 years

Missing out on other shiny opportunities (you know, it’s alway more fun to jump on something new then keep on doing the same old thing)

So very few do it.

But…

Let’s stop here for a minute and look at this from another angle.

Because few people actually have something they care about enough to practice for 30 years.

(You know, they go to work, they watch TV, they drive their kids to football practice, they read a book once in a while.)

They live a normal life.

But here’s what most people do: they think they have skills that they don’t necessarily have.

Leading a team, sales, coding, parenting, cooking…

Most people get stuck thinking they are better than they really are.

A stupid trap getting you nowhere…

But how to get out of it?

From my perspective it’s a matter of a simple mindset shift: Rather than thinking you have skills, think of yourself as constantly refining your skills.

Meaning: when people think of themselves as skilled, they stop learning.

“Don’t tell me what to do, I know this”

But if you’re constantly refining your skills, that process never ends.

So, go find someone who’s good at the thing, and study how they do it.

And remember to leave your ego at the door.

Who knows, you might end up the next Picasso.

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