Hold on to your seat, and prepare to be riveted by the following true and very personal story:
Two days ago, I meet up with my friend Adrian. Adrian suggests we go out to dinner tonight, just him, me, and my dad. (Adrian is also friends with my dad.)
I say fine.
Adrian and my dad and I text yesterday to confirm the place and time for the dinner. We quickly agree.
But then it turns out Adrian’s wife would like to join also, along with their 3-year old daughter. Oh, and can we move dinner three hours earlier because of his daughter’s bed time?
I’m not thrilled by the idea — the early dinner, the wife, the kid. I honestly tell Adrian the earlier time doesn’t work well because I also have a family lunch to go to in the afternoon.
He says he’ll check with the wife.
Throughout the rest of yesterday, there’s more tussling over WhatsApp. And then finally, in the early evening hours, Adrian decides to go back to the original plan, the original time, and the original company for the dinner.
TA-DAAA! The end.
Now that you’ve read this, I want to apologize. I know this story was only riveting in how stupid it was.
But how else to get the following point across in a way that sticks?
A couple months ago, I bought a book called Suddenly Talented by Sean D’Souza.
Sean you might know — he’s an Internet marketer who’s been in the game since before Google, and I’ve written about him often in this newsletter.
Sean is best known for his unorthodox marketing ideas. But he’s branched out also — to courses and workshops about cartooning, photography, and learning and skill acquisition, which is what Suddenly Talented is about.
I actually haven’t read Sean’s book yet.
But there’s a WhatsApp group for everyone who’s bought the book, where Sean holds court and explains his ideas about how to get good at anything, and quick.
One idea will probably be familiar to you — it’s to get okay with making mistakes, whether you’re drawing, learning a new language, or trying to write a daily email.
But Sean takes it one step further.
In his own workshops, he actually gives his students a mistake quota.
In other words, he tells his students that they have to actively and consciously make a certain number of mistakes before he will let them even attempt to do the thing right.
Result? I don’t know, but I can guess:
1. People loosen up. They realize that a mistake is not as fatal as it might seem in their imagination.
2. People actually learn something, by actively dancing around the “right” thing to do. In the words of Claude Debussy, music is the space between the notes.
“Fine fine,” you might say, “enough with the poetry. Does this really work?”
I don’t know. But it sounded interesting enough to give it a try. That’s why I opened with the pointless and uninteresting story above.
Don’t open your emails like I did.
Or do. Do it to teach yourself that hey, even a terrible email doesn’t really cost me anything, and hey, maybe I’ll even learn something by doing things wrong.
Are you convinced? Are you not convinced? It’s okay either way.
But in case this email triggered something in your brain, you might want to check out my Most Valuable Email training. It comes with a swipe file of 51 interesting ideas, many of which have proven valuable to me and to the people who have gone through MVE, sometimes even paying for the entire course.
If you’d like to find out more: