25/04/2024
"I feel like I don’t know anything. I didn't know how much I didn't know about the world," I told my mentor.
He said, "The good thing about that is, now that you know you don't know, now you can learn."
My ego was crushed.
The artist Marina Abramović has said that "the moment we begin to believe in our own greatness, that we kill our ability to be truly creative."
Aristotle famously wrote, "The more you know, the more you realise you don't know."
Socrates said, "that nobody knew anything, and that he was only wiser than others because he was the only person who recognised his own ignorance. "
Here's the first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.
So to avoid, I'll let you know what I'm learning.
"1. Adopt the beginner’s mindset. “It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows,” Epictetus says. When we let ego tell us that we have arrived and figured it all out, it prevents us from learning.
2. Focus on the effort — not the outcome. With any creative endeavour at some point what we made leaves our hands.
3. Choose purpose over passion and aspiration. Passion runs hot and burns out and aspiration is just purely dreaming, while people with purpose — think of it as passion combined with reason — are more dedicated and have control over their direction.
4. Shun the comfort of talking and face the work. We talk endlessly on social media getting validation and attention with fake internet points avoiding the uncertainty of doing the difficult and frightening work required of any creative endeavour. As creatives we need to shut up and get to work. To face the void — despite the pain of doing so.
6. Stop telling yourself a story — there is no grand narrative. When you achieve any sort of success you might think that success in the future is just the natural and expected next part of the story. This is a straightforward path to failure — by getting too cocky and overconfident.
7. Let go of control. The poisonous need to control everything and micromanage is usually revealed with success. Ego starts saying: it all must be done my way — even little things, even inconsequential things.
8. Stop playing the image game — focus on a higher purpose. Will you choose to fall in love with the image of how success looks like or will you focus on a higher purpose? Will you pick obsessing over your title, number of fans, size of paycheck or on real, tangible accomplishment?
9. Focus on the effort — not the results. This is so important it is appearing twice. If you can accept that you control only the effort that goes in and not the results which come out, you will be mastering your ego. All work leaves our hands at some point. Ego wants to control everything — but it cannot control other people or their reactions. Focus on your end of the equation, leave them to theirs."
