One Skill You Simply Must Master
This can change your life in an instant.
With one comment, one phone call, or one meeting, our lives are never the same.
That’s what just happened to me.
In a moment, it clicked.
I’m a part of a writing challenge for the month of November, hosted by Tim Denning. It cost me way too much money, so I’m determined to get everything out of it I can.
Today, I had a small group video call with 4 other writers. When I joined, Gary was talking. A lot. In fact, he didn’t stop talking for quite some time. Gary didn’t stop talking because he was incredibly excited about one of his adventures in product building. He had released it, only to have it underperform. He said he was reworking it.
I liked Gary immediately.
It’s not every day I see someone around twice my age that passionate.
Later on in the call, the question went around the group “What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing in this writing journey?”
Gary went first.
I braced myself for his energetic enthusiasm.
But it didn’t come. It was like a different Gary was talking. It looked like he had a 50lb backpack on. He shared how he had been facing writer’s block. Stuck. Unable to get thoughts on the page. Depressed. Hopeless even. After a few more seconds, he ended by saying he wanted to listen to us, in hopes it would rub off on him.
In a split second, I saw exactly what was needed to happen.
ADAPT ADAPT ADAPT
If you’ve ever watched American football, you’ve probably seen a player perform a spin move. They are memorizing to watch. They run almost completely into the opponent and in a split second, they look like they will be tackled. But then, at the last second, they spin, redirecting all their momentum off and around the opponent.
In that split second, there are a few options. You can plow over the opponent, get tackled, or spin and propel yourself around them. The best players know how to adapt, incredibly fast. They are not the most skilled physically, but they are insanely fast at adapting. In a millisecond they take in all the feedback, identify the weakness, and perform accordingly.
These are the best players, on the field and in life.
Your ability to adapt is the most important skill you can ever learn.
15 minutes later, Gary looked like a free man. Tears were shed. Hopelessness was gone. Stuck? Not even close. It was one of the most powerful transformations I’ve seen and I was honored to be a part of it.
All I did was expose a weakness in his opponent (writing) that he hadn’t seen before. With one tiny tweak, he discovered a flood of ideas and inspiration. He needed to spin instead of charge. I’m so proud of him for making the adjustment. He adapted.
We must adapt faster
My whole life I’ve been trained to adapt faster and faster. The speed at which you can receive feedback and change your approach will directly determine how successful you will be. In any area. Volleyball, business, relationships, it doesn’t matter. We must learn to adapt faster. When something isn’t working, break it apart, analyze it, and adapt accordingly. Keep changing your approach until it works. We’ll talk about how to do this a bit later.
Think about it like this. There’s a piano player who plays a song but hits one note wrong. Immediately his ears give him feedback saying that he hit the note wrong. Now, his ability to take that feedback and adjust accordingly will directly correspond to his ability to learn a piano song. If he cannot adapt, no matter how much he “knows” it’s wrong, he’ll keep playing the wrong note. This also illustrates the power of outside perspectives. Someone may hear you’re “playing” a wrong note because they know the song better than you.
In business, if you don’t adapt from the feedback received, you die.
Does anyone like being in a relationship with someone who can’t adapt? Like, they act surprised every time the fridge door is left open? No, we hate that. After 10 times of telling them to take the garbage out on Thursday morning, you would like to expect them to change their behavior.
In your own life, it’s perhaps the most important. Can you adapt to the changes around you? When you realize you're wrong about something, how fast do you change?
You can outperform almost anyone simply by adapting faster. They might be smarter than you, bigger than you, richer than you, but it doesn’t matter. Your ability to adapt defines everything about you. It means the difference between failing 5 times, vs failing 2 times. It means the difference in learning something in 10 months, vs in 4 months. That’s a bit deal.
Let’s learn how to do this better.
How to adapt faster
This comes down to 2 things.
Observation
Response
Observation
This is where you step back and look at what isn’t working. But don’t stop here. We all do this pretty naturally. We also have to look at when something like this hasn’t worked for us in the past, as well as when something like this has worked in the past.
I’ll use Gary as an example for this one. He observed that the way he was feeling was directly blocking his writing. You can only force yourself to write about things you hate for so long.
Has there been a time in the past when you experienced this blockage, but found a way through?
What was a specific time in the past when you experienced total flow and excitement while writing?
Because I was an outside viewer, I already knew the answer to the last one. I saw the state change right away. I noticed what he was talking about earlier and how excited he was about it as well as a wealth of untapped potential through stories.
All we are doing is taking the action, (writing) and comparing a time when it was effortless, to now, when it’s blocked. Then we are analyzing to figure out what the difference is. What were you doing then, that you aren’t doing now? Or vice versa. Whatever obstacle it is, think of it as an opponent. Look for the weaknesses it may have.
Here’s another take on it. How we feel dictates our ability to be creative, with say, writing. We can analyze what makes you feel excited and energized, then look at how we can marry that to the current moment/topic. If stories from your past experience fire you up, how can we take those stories and plug them into writing?
Response
After identifying we have to decide what we will do with that information. Obviously, what we were doing wasn’t working, so we have to change something. How will we adapt and adjust our approach? What do we do with the “weakness” that we have exposed in the obstacle/opponent?
The most important part is we can’t stay in observation. Observation is incredibly important, otherwise, we don’t know what to change, which means, we don’t change. We have to move to the response, which essentially, is action. We have to make the change.
I did this recently with my YouTube channel. I observed a pattern in videos that performed well, I adjusted, and now I’m taking advantage of it to reach more people. It’s only a few words different in the title, but it made all the difference.
We rarely have to throw everything out and start over. Often it takes a little adjustment. Here’s another important part. The adjustment can’t be the same thing in different colors. We can trick ourselves into thinking we are “changing our approach” when really we are doing the same thing it just looks a little different.
“No matter what, resolve to never stop changing your approach until you succeed” - Tony Robbins
How to speed up your ability to adapt
Pretty simple.
Do it a lot.
Do it when you don’t have to.
Surround yourself with people who help you do it.
Model how they do it.
I recommend starting with the little things. Tiny habits and behaviors are a great way to adapt and build in the practice.
For most people, the observation stage is the hardest to speed up. It takes time to learn how to detach from the situation and see it from an outside perspective.
But it’s worth learning.