Your Teachers Lied To You

Your teachers lied to you

The more I play this game, the more I realize how little I actually knew about the world and naive I was.

Here’s a mental reframe that’s helped me and goes well with this edition of Blueprint.

I used to feel bad about being bad at things.

School teaches you that you need to do well in all subjects.

If you get 4 A’s and 1 C:

• You’ll feel bad about the C

• Your parents will get mad about the C

• Your teacher will baby you about the C

• Everyone will tell you to improve the C

But that’s not how the world actually works.

The world rewards specialists, not well-rounded generalists with all A’s.

You’re actually better off become world class (A+++) at one thing and hiring people to do everything else that you’re not world class at. This is another way of framing the “zone of genius” bit from above.

In a school setting, that would mean being a savant at math but getting F’s in history, science, english, spanish, etc.

Schools would never allow this.

I think this is the difference between employees and entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs realize the power in leverage that comes from specializing in 1-2 things and being willing to ignore the rest.

Great employees feel bad when they’re bad at even one thing, so they’ll work to improve and close that gap. They aren’t willing to ignore the bad.

The flip side to this argument is that when you’re at the very beginning, and it’s just you as an entrepreneur, you’re going to need to be the jack-of-all-trades, because you can’t afford to outsource the things you’re bad at.

If you can’t get through the beginning phase, you’ll never make it to the end.

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