Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 4 - You Have to See it to Be it

The main idea of this information is that in order to achieve something, we need to see others who have already achieved it. The example of the flea in a jar illustrates how limitations and barriers are formed in our minds based on what we have seen or experienced. The story of Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier shows that by seeing someone else accomplish something, it breaks the psychological barrier for others to do it as well. The importance of broadening our horizons, seeking out mentors, and challenging our own mental limitations is emphasized. It is also mentioned that many successful people are ordinary individuals who faced doubts and fears but still pursued their dreams. Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Challenge with Chiyo Podcast. And today we're talking about seeing it to be it. Seeing it to be, a B-E, it. In other words, you cannot be something that you have never seen. And the best way to illustrate this is with the concept of a flea in a jar. It's a very well-known experiment, but I first came across it in Steve Harvey's book, Think Like a Success, Act Like a Success. And when I came across that book, I must be honest, at that point, I didn't know Steve Harvey had written any book, let alone two. And he says a lot of funny and inspiring things in this book. But what I felt was the biggest idea for me, the one that I resonated with the most, was this experiment with the flea in a jar. And this is how the experiment goes. A flea is born with the ability to jump up to 150 times its own height. That's the equivalent of a 1.8 meter tall human being jumping over a building that's 146 meters high. It is remarkable, right? But an interesting thing will happen when you put a flea in a jar and you close the lid. The flea will attempt to jump as high as it knows how until it hits its head on the top of the jar on the closed lid. When it hits its head, the flea will adjust its jump so that it stops just below the height at which it hits its head. In other words, it will stop attempting to jump up to 150 times its own height. What's even more interesting is what happens when two fleas inside a jar have babies. The babies are born with the natural ability to jump up to 150 times their own height. However, because they never see their parents jumping that high, they never attempt it and they never do it, even when they're taken out of the jar. That blew my mind. Steve then goes on to draw a parallel between the behavior of those fleas and the behavior of people. When we grow up and we never see a person do certain things, we dare not dream of doing those things. Often our age, our race, our sex, gender, economic background, unconsciously limit our ability to imagine what it is we can actually do. In other words, to imagine what our capacity truly is. And when you understand that, you understand why it is so important to broaden your horizons. Why it's so important to see what the other half looks like, to visit neighborhoods that are not like your neighborhood, to talk to people who are not like you, to experience things that are outside of your norm. Because doing that is what gives you a framework within which to dream. You see, when you go on Instagram, when you go and look at aspirational things, when you make a Pinterest board, what you are doing is giving yourself space and removing the lid so that you know how high you can truly jump when your jar doesn't have a lid. This is why people like mentors and sponsors are important, but more mentors, because they are people who show you what it is like to jump. And when you see those people jump, and when you talk to them, and when you relate to them, then you start to believe that you too can jump 150 times your body height. So what's very important or what I've just touched on is the psychological barrier. And there's another well-known story that illustrates the same barrier. I'm sure you've heard the expression, the four-minute mile. And here's where it comes from. At the beginning of the 50s and before the 50s, the common belief on Earth was that a man could not run a mile under four minutes. There were tests and anatomical equations, and they all conclusively proved, in air quotes, that the human body was not capable of running that fast. In May of 1954, along came Roger Bannister, and he conclusively disproved this theory by running a mile in three minutes and 59 seconds. Since then, many more people have run the mile in under four minutes, including high school kids. Why were so many people suddenly able to run a four-minute mile after years and years and years of the firm belief that it couldn't be done? The theory is that Roger Bannister, by showing it could be done, broke the psychological barrier in other people's minds, thereby allowing them to do it too. In more colorful language, he showed the other fleas what they were actually capable of. It's crazy, right, to think that we are physically limited by our mental limitations. Let that sink in. You are physically limited by your mental limitations. If your mind cannot believe that you can do something, your body will not be able to do it. And this was recently proved to me, personally, when I tried out something called the 12-week year. It was a bit of a social experiment on myself. I'd read the book by Brian Moran and Michael Lemington, and they said that we can do so much more than we think we can do. And when we give ourselves a year to do stuff, all we do is we delay for the year, and then we rush to try and finish things in November and December. And I looked back over the years, and I thought, these people might be onto something, right? So I'm going to try out something. I've always said to myself, I'm going to learn to run 100 kilometers in a month. I'm going to figure it out. And once or twice I've done it, but it's been with great effort and usually with a lot of running in the last week or two weeks of the month. And it's been hard, hard. And it normally wears me out. So the few times I've managed to do it, it wears me out so completely that the following month, I hardly do anything. And so I decided to try their way of doing it. And here's what was important. They gave me a mental framework to reference in getting it done. It's very important because it makes these things so much easier to do and so much more doable. So now I put this framework. They've told me that it can be done. They've given me examples of people who've done it. Then they tell me how those people do it. And let me tell you, between April, May and June, between April and June of this year, I ran 300 kilometers, 100 kilometers in every month for three months straight. If I wanted to run 100 kilometers this month, I have no doubt I could. I could do it. It is mind blowing. It is absolutely mind blowing what happens when the barrier that you've created in your own mind, your limitation that you've created in your own mind is shown to you and thereby frees you. And then you realize that you are actually far more capable than what you imagined. According to Steve, fear is an inevitable part of the journey. Seeking out experiences, like-minded people and already successful people that broaden your vision will fuel your passion and belief in your dreams enough to go for it despite the fear. There's a little quote from Tina Fey that I quite like. You can't be that kid standing at the top of the water slide overthinking it every time. You have to go down the chute. And I found that really, really inspiring. So there's a book by Adam Grant called The Originals. And what I like about that book is it references all these remarkable people and shows you that these people are really just the person next door. You want to think about it in terms of the way the heroes of our generation and generations gone by have been portrayed in social media and in media and on TV. There's something about the way that they're portrayed in media, these people, that makes you feel like they are a different type of person, like maybe they fell from Krypton. But truly, they didn't. And I'll tell you how I came to this understanding. I came to it via Adam Grant's Originals. And Adam Grant states that the idea that in order to win or to be original and original, you must be made of the right stuff, in air quotes, is so deeply ingrained in our cultural psyche that we're barely even conscious of it. We celebrate heroes like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., who possessed enough conviction to risk their lives for the morals that they held very dear. And we idolize icons like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for having the audacity to drop out of school and go broke, holding up in garages to weld their technological visions into existence. You see, when we think of people like these, we never for a second imagine that they might be just like us. I mean, how could I be like Bill Gates, right? Surely, they're iconoclasts, rebels, fearless, revolutionaries of some sort. It makes sense. We can't imagine that they're not cut from some special kind of cloth that is specially fearless, right? That they're ordinary people like us who suffer the same doubts and the same fears and trepidations that we do. That they're ordinary people who are also afraid. That they really are a flea just like us, with the ability to jump 150 times their body height because they have seen it. And the fact that we don't see them as relatable becomes the jar that we are in. But here's what will surprise you. After inventing the first Apple computer, Steve Wozniak, who started Apple Inc. with Steve Jobs in 1976, continued to work full-time in his engineering job with Hewlett-Packard until 1977. Grammy Award winner John Legend released his first album in 2000, but continued working as a management consultant until 2002. He worked for his employer during the day and performed at night. Bill Gates, contrary to popular belief, he didn't just drop out of school. After successfully selling a program he had written in his sophomore year, he still stayed in school for an additional year. Thereafter, he didn't just drop out. He organized some backup money to live on, then applied for a leave of absence from school. After it was granted, he then gave his ideas a fair shake, knowing he had hedged his bets. Abraham Lincoln, whose natural inclination was actually to avoid conflict and to please others from his journals, agonized for six months about whether to free the slaves. He worried about what it would cost him, what it would cost the country, and whether it would start a war. He feared he would lose support. He signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but he was afraid. Martin Luther King Jr. just wanted to be a pastor. He didn't even particularly want to give the speech, you know, the one that we all know. He didn't volunteer for it. Shocking, right? And yet, what would history be without it? Grant gives all these examples, but they all boil down to one thing. Originality and its consequent success are not reserved for some special people, some extreme risk-takers. It is reserved for those who, despite their fear, weigh their options, mitigate their risks as best as they can, allow themselves to learn the lay of the land they wish to venture into, plan carefully, and then cautiously begin. The people who exercise their conscious will to plan and to try. And here's an interesting statistic. Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33% lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you're risk-averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your idea, it's likely that your business will be built to last. If you're a free-wheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. In other words, despite both being brilliant scientists, it is more likely that the skeptical probe all the holes in the idea Tony Stark than the fearless and brash, let's give it a bash, Dr. Bruce Banner, who is likely to figure out the answer to saving the world. You know, you know. It turns out that the titans of history are just ordinary people who, despite having the same workaday fears you and I have, became extraordinary. So, as one great thinker put it, it's W.E.B. Dubois, he was one of you, and yet he became Abraham Lincoln, close quotes. The idea is that you and I can be ordinary and afraid and still do extraordinary things. You can step out of your jar and jump as high as you are able to dream. And it is really up to you to go out there and broaden your ability to dream by allowing yourself to see what the world has to offer. One of the ways in which I allowed myself to see what the world has to offer was having a year of yes experience. I got that from Shonda Rhimes' book, Year of Yes. I said yes to everything. Things I normally wouldn't say yes to and things that I normally would say yes to, I tried all of it. I traveled, I ate, I tasted, I drank, and what I got from all of that was a much clearer understanding of what I like and what I don't like, where my boundaries are and where they are not, but more importantly, just how big the world is and how many options are in it. And the fact that so much of it is mine for the taking, if I know about it, plan for it, and reach for it, it's crazy. It's crazy how simple it is, how straightforward it is, and yet so many of us miss out on it purely because being in the jar is the only experience that we know. I'm taking a deep breath because I want to stop, but I feel like my passion is still way up there. So I'm going to make one more example, and that example comes from a book I referenced in yesterday's newsletter. It's The Millionaire Next Door. So The Millionaire Next Door was written by a couple of people who studied millionaires, lots of millionaires, and what they found was the majority of millionaires become wealthy slowly over a long time. The reason they called it The Millionaire Next Door is because majority of them are people who are living next door to you and I, and they don't particularly appear to be the millionaires that they are. So there are instances of sudden windfalls and lottery wins and overnight success, etc., etc., but those tend to be the exception rather than the rule. They're just publicized more. The truth is that the typical path to wealth involves consistent saving, disciplined spending habits, and long-term investing. So if you don't believe me, you will have heard of someone called Ronald Reed, or you haven't heard of someone called Ronald Reed, and I'm about to tell you about him. Reed was a retired gas station attendant and janitor in Vermont, and I love telling people about him. He passed away in 2015. Nothing about his life or death was extraordinary. In fact, he had safety pins. He would hold his coat together with safety pins. He was famous in his small town, so everybody knew that he was frugal. He would keep every last cent. The thing is, when he passed away, it was revealed that his estate was worth $8 million, $8 million. He had no special windfall. He just saved the money that he had, taught himself how to invest, and quietly invested a little bit here and a little bit there, hedged his bets, and he made a little bit more money every year over the years and cumulatively made $8 million, which he left the majority of to a couple of charities. It's crazy. Reed, like many millionaires in the millionaire next door, accumulated their wealth purely by spending less than they make and steadily growing the difference, diligently saving and strategically investing over a long period. Wealth does not typically just amass. People don't typically amass wealth over a period of a year or two years. There is no magic. There is no magic. There is no magic. There is no magic. There is no magic. There is no magic. 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