Here’s What I Learned From Picasso
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 30th, 2023
Get ready for a wild ride as I spill the beans on my investing, coaching, and online course journey.
So here’s the deal…I made a rookie mistake early on. I focused too much on innovation before mastering the basics. Sound familiar?
Let me break it down with a guitar story. I ignored my instructor’s grip advice, thinking I knew better.
Big mistake. It led to wrist pain and zero progress. Lesson learned…trust the system being taught, especially when you’re a beginner.
Truth is replication beats innovation at the start…Picasso and Bob Dylan didn’t become legends overnight.
They spent years replicating masters before finding their unique style. Same goes for any system in business, fitness, or whatever field you’re in.
Forget the idea that you need to be unique all the time…most of us overestimate our uniqueness and underestimate established systems.
Any system, when followed precisely, can yield great results. Master the fundamentals first, then adapt later.
Approach learning with a beginner’s mindset. So, leave your ego and past experiences behind.
Embrace established systems, replicate them, and watch the magic happen.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“It’s only after you’ve mastered the rules that you can start to break the rules.'”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
Over the years, I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on coaching, on online courses, just educational materials in general. And I would say that the vast majority of those investments have been very lucrative. They’ve been very worthwhile. I’ve learned a ton. And I’ve been able to apply those learnings both to my personal life, to my health, my my businesses, to make more money. And so I’m a very, very big fan of coaching and online courses. However, with that said, in the early years, I used to spend a lot of money on those things, but not get as much ROI out of them as I would have liked. And it was in reflecting on why it is that I’ve spent so much money, why was it that I was spending all this money but not getting the results that I wanted? Was it the quality of the coaches? Was it the quality of the courses? And on the one hand, it’s very easy to point to those things and say, oh, this system didn’t work.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:57]:
This coach, they didn’t work that course. The thing that they taught me, it didn’t work for me. Right? And one of the things I started to realize well, there’s actually a lot of things that I realized, and I did a different video on this a while back or a different podcast episode, talking about some of the five lessons that I learned from spending so much money on coaching and courses and why I didn’t get as much value out of them as I could have. And once I changed those five things, I really started to accelerate my learning and the rate of my progress. But in particular, if I had to distill it down to one primary concept, it would be this. It was that I was trying to innovate before I could replicate. And so what I mean by that is it is very much the case for all of us, I believe. When we go to work with a coach and a course or whatever, we’re trying to learn a new thing.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:50]:
That we go into it with this mindset that I’m a special butterfly little snowflake. That I have to find a way to take this information and apply it to my context. And I’m special and unique. And therefore there is no cookie cutter solution that’s going to work for everybody and it needs to be adapted to me. And so what ends up happening is you start to work with a coach and they have a system, they have a process that they are trying to teach you. And this isn’t just about building a business, making money. This isn’t just about losing weight and getting fit or building muscle. This isn’t just about learning to play the trumpet.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:23]:
It’s all of this. Like in all of these things, you go to a teacher, a coach who has been doing this for a while, and they have a process, a system that they’re going to teach you. And they know if you execute that system, it works. But that’s the key if you execute the system. And so what I find is that the vast majority of people, I would say 98%, if we wanted to get, like, throw out a really crazy number, 98% of people who are working with a coach or taking a course, they will inevitably fail. And it’s not because the system doesn’t work, but because they immediately start trying to tweak the system to do it their own way. And this is why so few people succeed, is because when you start trying to tweak a system to find a solution that fits your particular needs when you’re a beginner, is that you don’t know all the reasons why that way doesn’t work or this way doesn’t work. You don’t quite understand because you don’t have all the years of expertise that your coach or your instructor has of why they are teaching you to do this in a particular way.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:24]:
And a really good example of this is I used to take guitar lessons. And in the beginning, my instructor tried to teach me a way of holding the guitar that just felt really unnatural, really foreign to my body. I really hated it and I didn’t like it, didn’t feel cool either. And so I adopted my grip to fit my particular body style, what I thought was just overall a better fit for me. And he told me, he’s like, Listen, that’s going to limit you. In the long run, it’s fine for now, but in the long run that’s going to limit you. And I was like, you know what? I don’t care. It doesn’t matter, don’t believe it, whatever.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:57]:
This is better for me because your way doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel right. What do I know about feeling right when it comes to playing guitar, right? Like, I didn’t have a clue what it meant for it to feel right. And so I went with what felt right to me, but it was technically wrong and it ended up causing big issues down the road, issues with the ergonomics of my wrist starting to hurt and not being able to play anymore. And eventually I had to adopt his style anyway, so I came full circle all the way back around, but it could have saved me so much time and trouble and headache if I had just listened from the beginning. And instead of trying to do it my way, I focused on learning what he was trying to teach me. And this is why I think it’s really important that we learn to replicate the systems being taught to us before we try to innovate, before we try to iterate and make it our own. And I tweeted about this the other day, and what’s really interesting is that so many people took to the comments and they said things to the sort of, you know, what we’re all special, we’re unique.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:58]:
We have to find things that are in alignment with our values and our systems and our core beliefs. And all this stuff really coming down to justifying why they didn’t believe that they could just take the system that somebody else who has built it over years of hard work and experience, why they can’t just take that system and plop it into them. And what I find is that we believe we are way more special than we really are and that most systems, whether it’s building a business, losing weight, whatever it is that if we just took it and applied it as it’s being taught. And we didn’t try to change anything. If we just did exactly to the t what was being prescribed, it would almost definitely work. Because one of the things I’ve really come to believe over the years is that this is from having read hundreds and hundreds of books on business and frameworks and things like that, is that it does not matter which book or which framework you choose to apply. If you apply it with intention and consistency, any system, any framework can be effective. That’s the hard truth.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:00]:
That’s a weird thing to admit as being, like, a systems guy, but truthfully, any system applied is going to work better than no system applied. And so, all that aside, I think a lot about Picasso and Bob Dylan on this concept of replicating before you innovate, because a lot of people believe they just start replicating. They have to find their own way, like it has to suit me. And what is so interesting, if you think about Picasso, this dude, he spent years mastering and being able to replicate the styles of the masters who had come before him. And he was a fantastic impressionist painter before he started to learn his own voice, before he was able to have enough experience to be able to take the parts of the masters and say, this is the part that serves me, that serves my voice, and this is the part that doesn’t. And it took years, years before he started diving into the styles that we now know him for. And so you’re no Picasso, most likely, or at least you’re no different than Picasso. And in the same way, Bob Dylan did the same thing before he became like, this storytelling, folk musician legend, he spent decades becoming a connoisseur of folk music.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:17]:
He dove into it and he understood it at the deepest primal levels. He could replicate the masters, he could play in any style before he started really diving and developing his own voice. And so all that’s to say is that regardless of what you’re trying to learn, what you’re trying to do, there is so much value in first just trying to replicate what has come before you. And the way that you do that is you go to your teachers, these experienced mentors, people who are further down the path trying to teach you what they’ve learned through the school of hard knocks. You take those lessons, you master them, and then only then, once you’ve learned the rules, can you then start to discard the rules, right? It’s only after you’ve mastered the rules that you can start to break the rules. And this is a really interesting thing that I’ve personally learned in rock climbing when I was teaching young rock climbers. I would say this is how you need to learn how to do it. It might not be right for your body, but you need to learn how to do it this way before we can build up into your own particular style.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:21]:
And at some point in the young climbers trajectory, we’d get to the point where I was like, okay, those things that you learned about the foundation fundamentals, okay, we’re going to discard them now because they don’t suit you and your body. And so first step is to understand the fundamentals. And then only after a long period of time of mastering those fundamentals can you then say this part of the fundamental do not serve you in your particular geometry, right? But a lot of people, they want to just jump straight to that thing and they don’t understand the wide base of knowledge behind it. And so what ends up happening is they have a very, very shallow understanding of technique and foundational abilities that they end up reaching, hitting this glass ceiling through which they’ll never break through because they just don’t have the depth of understanding required. And so I wanted to share that with you guys because I think it’s a lesson that we all have to learn over and over and over. I personally have to do this when I work with a new coach. I go into a new domain or a domain that I’m trying to build an experience on, if I already know marketing really well, if I already know copywriting, if I already know digital media, if I already know these things and I go to try and learn it from somebody else, I have to park my ego at the door. I have to come into it as though I’m a beginner, right, and not bring in all the years of experience and the baggage that I have.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:52]:
And I think that is what distinguishes true masters from amateurs, is that the masters always have this beginner’s mindset coming in and saying, what can I learn from this experience or from this person or from this new technique instead of carrying and putting their own baggage on top of it. So I hope this brings you guys a little bit of value. If it did, make sure that you do me this really big favor. You go leave a review or rating on Spotify or itunes, wherever you’re listening to this. If you’re watching on itunes, make sure you hit the subscribe button and drop a comment down below because I love talking to you guys. It’s really cool. So let’s make this a two way conversation. And as always, I appreciate the hell out of you being here.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:32]:
I’ll catch you back here tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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