The Curse of Mastery – Why Professionals Actually Struggle with Innovation and Joy

this is the curse of 10,000 hours Gladwell made this whole 10 10,000 hour things that you have to achieve 10,000 hours before you can achieve Mastery and we all are in quote unquote pursuit of the 10,000 hours but what we forget and I firmly believe that everything is balanced everything in the world is balanced for every Advantage you have in the world there's a disadvantage that comes with whatever that thing is always the world is always balanced and nature pours a vacuum and so there's a downside to the 10,000 hours you talk to lots of people who have Mastery you'll find the same pattern is only one of a few things W him is one of them like it was so exciting when the Ste learning curve was Steep and I've met directors and producers and VCS and entrepreneurs and they're so good at what they do they're considered the best in their industry and they're out there they know how to make money they know how to make movies they know how to write books what like bang bang bang and if you get them on a quiet night when they're a little bit tired probably a glass of whiskey or two in them yeah they will absolutely all admit that they're bored out of their skulls because there's nothing exciting about what they're doing anyway more it's just wrote just because it's become second nature because it's 10,000 hours they have so much Mastery it's not exciting it's the excitement of gaining 10,000 hours it's actually more enjoyable for the human being I meet these really really senior successful people that privately admit that they're bored I wonder how Steph Curry does it I wonder how those like those professional basketball players when they're just like the top of their game how they stay motivated like Kobe was really good at this if you saw the Last Dance Michael Jordan created narratives that were fake yeah that's right he was making up he was making up he Wasing he was making enemies yeah but he was also he was not this great infinite minded guy that we all thought he was he was the consumate finite player he was the best finite player in the world where he would produce conflict that didn't exist to make himself so angry that he was going to take you down wow I mean it was that was crazy that was it was crazy Insight right and I do think they get bored as well and I think it's just like the next ring and the next become the winning most this or the winning most team or like they just keep setting finite goals and that's exciting for the short term but do they have long-term Joy I don't know you know so boredom is one thing that I think a lot of people when you reach 10,000 hours I think the other thing is you find yourself like when you're a hammer every problem's a nail and when you have Mastery of something you see the whole world through that one lens and I think it creates a a closeness to new and you see this a lot you see very successful CEOs entrepreneurs that Miss significant changes in in technology for example like the number of CEOs who didn't see the internet as a thing right I mean yeah you go back look at those old quotes and they're hilarious bomber who like shittle over the iPhone like it'll never be a thing because people no one's going to spend that amount of money on a phone right you're smarter than that but the problem is it's not because he's dumb yeah and it's not because he's blind and it's not because he's stupid it's because when you have mastered something and you've been doing that thing the same way for 30 years to the point where it's made you rich and famous and the top of the organization it is very very hard to see the world through any other lens than that lens and whether you know it or not you've created a Walled Garden for yourself when I was at Google when I landed inside and I was assigned to their social products team and I was running mobile for GOOG plus which ended up failing well done I was only listen I I bounced I was speaking of leaving jobs quickly I was there for like four months and then I I went to Google Ventures and just became an investor I I knew there was no future there but yeah that was horrible but one of the things I realized is we go in there and I I'd go into these product meetings and there was like 30 people in the room and I'd start talking about just what we were doing that was novel and different and that just wasn't feature parody with Facebook and it was like they were so of the mindset of like we're Google we can do anything we have scale they didn't even use anyone else's tools they didn't play with any other they were never installing other apps of other competitors they weren't like they weren't playing they lost all of that they had their free lunches they had their soccer campuses they had their they even had a halfpipe on Google's campus which I wrote which was actually pretty awesome but it was like you're so surrounded by just like-minded people you don't think to play and there's no Discovery yeah and so I think that's what happened with bomber and others when you're just like you don't get a chance to actually get out there and be a real person that's the thing and that's the thing that made you successful in the first place was the the open-mindedness and the childlike wonder you're 100% right and this is the curse of the 10,000 hour which is why publishing didn't invent the e-reader Amazon invented the e-reader not Publishers right very confusing why is it that Netflix made streaming a thing and not the movie and TV industry how did you guys miss that you could have but you didn't right right and you can't blame companies or Industries because companies and industries don't make decisions it's human beings with who have achieved Mastery who are now running organizations who are decision-making positions who literally cannot perceive the world outside of the 10,000 hours of Mastery that they've achieved for sure and I'm at that point yeah where I have 10,000 Mastery 10,000 hours of Mastery in one little space it scares the out of me and so if there's one thing I know which is to go be an idiot again I love that I I need to start with four hours I decided okay I'm going to learn about Venture I don't know and understand anything about money right I've never been motivated I'm a money idiot and I'm sitting these meetings and they're all using all this jargon and I am so clueless it is not fun it is not comfortable I feel dumb everybody thinks I'm smart because I I've achieved something they think I know everything about everything right and I I'm trying to be dumb and I'm trying to find what what I'm passionate about that is worth really working hard to not be dumb at the thing that I'm dumb about but to your point earlier I means it's about asking questions that you know don't know the answer to so I I got to know James cars who was the origin Ator of the concept of finite and infinite games before he died Jim cars was a philosopher and theologian he worked at NYU who wrote a book in the mid 1980s called finite and infinite games where he defined these two types of games it's a cooky little philosophy book right he defined these two types of games a finite game is defined as known players fixed rules agreed upon objectives football baseball if there's a winner necessarily you have to have a loser or losers but more important there's always a beginning a middle and an end MH then you have infinite games infinite games are defined as known and unknown players which means you don't necessarily know who all the other players are and new players can join the game at any time the rules are changeable which means every player can play however they want and there's no such thing as winning you can only perpetuate the game the goal is to stay in the game as long as possible right right so life basically business nobody wins business when Circuit City went bankrupt Best Buy didn't win anything right right the game will change forms you don't know who your competitors are necessarily new competitors can join every company can run however they want to run and no one's ever declared the winner of business so this is what cars put out in the world and it dramatically impacted my work I started to realize if you listen to leaders they talk about being number one being the best or beating their competition based on what right based on one what agreed upon metric's objectives and time frames so when you play to win in a game that has no Finish Line turns out you make a lot of stupid decisions and you end up destroying trust cooperation and Innovation M and if you look at most companies today most large companies are not Innovative they just buy smaller and more Innovative companies right the average lifespan of a company I think is 17 years which is abysmal right and you look at the damage that companies are doing because of they're so short short-termist it's all because they have finite mindset in the infinite game of business what cars articulated was a truth that is how the world works and you have to play for the game you're in so I got to know him some and of course when I met him the first time I sat down with him I was like I got to ask how did you come up with this and he was telling me that in the 1970s there were all of these intellectual salons of which he was a part of where they would bring in people from different disciplines like mathematics and philosophy and Engineering to debate and it occurred to him that in all of these discussions they were always talking about winning and losing all of them nobody was talking about playing and then he went home with this problem he had stuck in his mind and he watched his kids and he saw when his kids played pingpong there was always screaming and yelling there was always fighting and there was always accusations of somebody cheating right every time it doesn't change with adults by the way but yeah but when his kids were like playing Lego yeah they would sit there quietly for hours and one of the kids would leave for a little bit and then come back later and the game would the Legos would last for days and they would start and stop and start and stop and there was never any fighting and there was only cooperation and he realized that we're so obsessed with winning and losing that we've forgotten the value of playing and not all games have an end and business should be treated like a game rather than a competition it should be treated like Lego more than baseball and we overuse Sports and wars and War analogies in business all the time we treat it like a game we have launches we have campaigns we have wins we have losses we give bonuses for accomplishment we talk about performance- driven but we never talk about creativity yeah we never talk about joy we never talk about um cooperation or cross-pollination and this is the of great Innovation and great businesses and so you talk about the magic of play yes right one of the problems with 10,000 hours of Mastery or any kind of Mastery is you become so good at something now you want to win every time you're playing because you're the expert right and there's a joy in not worrying about the outcome there's a joy in just playing and so I am looking for few opportunities to play baseball and more opportunities to do Legos

Channel: Kevin Rose

Views: 9,457

Keywords: Kevin Rose, Kevin Rose podcast, Kevin Rose Show, Kevin Rose interview, Kevin Rose Simon Sinek, Simon Sinek, Kevin Rose clips, Expertise paradox, innovation challenges, infinite mindset, creativity in business, embracing failure, leadership philosophy, sustainable success, 10, 000 hours, how to achieve mastery, infinite games, James Carse

Id: __uwqJqif4s

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2024