Learn new skills, new techniques, new mental models and what not.
The self-help and personal development industry bombards us with a laundry list of things we need to learn. This post however is about the part that is as important but is not given enough due. Unlearning concepts that don’t work because they aren’t grounded in reality.
Unless you unlearn, how can new learning add value? Unless one is starting from the scratch, learning is iterative and incremental.
For something to change, something has to give
For something to grow, something has to give
You close a USD 10Mn deal for your employer that adds USD 2Mn to the bottom line; the partner flies off to Maldives for a week while you are happy with a “Most Valuable Player” award and look forward to your promised promotion after 2 years. How can the partner’s payoff be immediate while your payoff comes 2 years later?
What one needs to realize is that those who are good at manipulation are kind with their words but are ruthless in their actions. Simpletons on the other hand are sometimes harsh with words but nice in their actions. Observe the balance of power in human interactions consciously. If you have to raise your voice or plead your case with your boss/spouse to get what you want, you are not in charge. The person in charge just needs to indirectly hint at something and that will get done.
Unlearning the naïve concept of “Life will eventually give me what I really deserve” took me some time but once I did, I have been a different animal since. In today’s life we rarely get what we deserve, we get what we work for. More importantly we get what we negotiate. When you have a good sense of your own value, your refuse to put up with bullshit and can walk away from deals with no regrets.
A few examples from my own life (once again across domains) on how unlearning some concepts and behaviors has tangibly improved the quality of outcomes.
In my first few months as a salesman, I was taught that the only objective of a first meeting with a prospect was to create enough rapport for the second meeting to happen. Very few deals happen in the very first meeting, do they? End result was a lot of meetings that went nowhere but very few conversions. I would face rejection in the 5thor the 6th meeting and would feel like a total jackass.
Turns out I was being coached wrong.
How do I go about prospecting today? I go to every first meeting with the mindset of polarizing the prospect, “love me or hate me but don’t you dare ignore me”. I establish value through polarizing opinions and then back it up with analysis that the prospect is forced to respect. Trying to establish rapport without establishing value first is meaningless and is the refuge of the incompetent. I deal with rejection within the first or the second meeting itself, my strike rate is much higher than what it was since I proactively weed out false positives early enough.
I learnt of this mindset from the PUA industry (Pick Up Artists). These blokes go around approaching women with a polarization mindset, they deal with a lot of rejection but they also score frequently. It takes balls of steel to invite rejection in an effort to save time. All they are doing is to isolate and focus only on those that are genuinely interested. Just comes down to what you care about the most, emotions or outcomes. In PUA terminology they call it “fuck me or fuck you”
In my first few years as an investor, I was a valuation Nazi who believed that one just could not make money by buying businesses that are already well discovered. I got away with this for a few years since I started serious investing only in 2010, one could pick a Cera, Kajaria, Amara Raja, Greenply at 10-11 TTM PE and give businesses like Page Industries a skip because it was trading at 25 PE. I also stayed away from investing in stories that were clear no brainers but had promoters with interests in construction and real estate companies. I was too young and naïve to understand that Indian promoters typically built-up land banks through legal means over the years and would finally monetize through a formal development vehicle.
These debatable points of view (that were not grounded in reality) started making a difference after the 2014 bull run when every other damn business was trading above 20 PE. I ended up buying decent businesses at 20 PE rather than buy a good business at 30 PE which set me up for underperformance once the 2017 party had ended. I thankfully course corrected through 2018 and 2019, else the March 2020 crash would have taken me to the cleaners.
Valuation needs to incorporate elements of game theory for it to work in the real world. Investing is after all a Keynesian beauty contest, not a simple beauty contest. That said, there is a point beyond which it does not make mathematical sense to buy a business. More on that in this publication.
Classical cigar butt investing and value investing has set investors up for underperformance for almost a decade in India now. When the context changes, your views should change. If a coin keeps landing Heads 70% of the time while probability theory tells you it should be 50%, the smarter ones concludes that the coin is loaded and calls it accordingly rather than rely on classical probability theory they were taught in the 9th standard. Credit to Taleb for this analogy.
One final example from my serious weight training days.
After respectable big gains for the first 12-18 months, my lifts were starting to stagnate through I was continuing to bulk. I was gaining weight but not enough muscle, something had to give. I figured out a few finer aspects of technique, had to do a reset and unlearn a few things I was doing wrong.
I would initiate the deadlift with my back and not use legs enough. The trick to engaging the legs (mostly quads) was to initiate the lift as if I am trying to press the ground down. This way you bring in your legs, then the back kicks in too. Unlearning this took me 30-45 days of conscious effort but I broke past my PR and added 20 Kgs to my 1 rep max on the deadlift.
In the bench press, the trick was to utilize leg drive and also to initiate the lift as if I was trying to press the bench down with my back. This forces the entire body to work as a single kinetic chain that allows you to push more weight. I added 10 Kgs to my 1 rep max here within 3 months.
Taking a step back and letting a few opportunities go (and if needed, a few relationships too) in an effort to unlearn sub-optimal concepts can set us up for the next round of growth.
You cannot do this if you run your life on auto-pilot mode and do not observe things objectively. Question everything based on empirical observations, come to your own conclusions and make the changes you need to. Very few do this. Even the few who do this don’t necessarily do this across all aspects of life. For this reason, we have successful businessmen/CEO’s get taken to the cleaners repeatedly in their personal relationships but they just don’t know why.
Unlearn outdated and irrelevant philosophies, ideas and mental models.
Else they will screw you for decades to come.
