This is the Worst Advice I’ve Heard in a Long time
The Amplified Impact Podcast
May 16th, 2023
I’m going to talk about some seriously bad advice I came across on the internet.
The advice came from a guy I follow on social media who has hundreds of thousands of followers. While I usually like his content, this piece of advice was a real bummer.
Basically, the advice said that if you have to force yourself to create something, you should go create something else.
At first glance, this might sound like good advice…after all, if you’re struggling to create something, maybe it’s just not for you, right?
Wrong. Creating anything…whether it’s a book, a painting, a video, or anything else…is always difficult.
And if you go into it with the expectation that it should feel easy, you’re setting yourself up for failure.
The truth is, the best creators, artists, and designers know that creating is always going to be difficult. They don’t expect it to be easy, and they don’t give up when it gets hard…I used to be like this too.
But the truth is, if you want to create something great, you have to be willing to put in the work. It’s not going to be easy, but that’s okay.
If you’re struggling to create something…keep pushing through, even when it’s hard.
Remember that creating is always going to be a challenge, but that’s what makes it so rewarding when you finally succeed.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“And in my experience, the ones who ultimately get to that place of mastery where the gap between their taste in the art and their ability to produce that art, it only comes as a result of years of grinding and very, very hard work.” – Anthony Vicino
LEAVE A REVIEW if you liked this episode!!
Let’s Connect On Social Media!
instagram.com/theanthonyvicino
Join an exclusive community of peak performers at Beyond the Apex University learning how to build a business, invest in real estate, and develop hyperfocus.
Learn More About Investing With Anthony
Invictus Capital: www.invictusmultifamily.com
Multifamily Investing Made Simple Podcast
Passive Investing Made Simple Book: www.thepassiveinvestingbook.com
Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino [00:00:00]:
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. Today I’m gonna share with you maybe one of the worst pieces of advice I’ve literally ever seen shared on the Internet. Okay, maybe that’s a little bit of hyperbole, but the truth is, I was born in the 80s, which means I’ve been around since pretty much the beginning of what we consider the commercialized Internet. So I’ve seen a lot of shit shared on the interwebs, and this one is is up there in terms of advice that I’ve seen that immediately grabbed my eye and I said, oh, I don’t agree with that. Not only do I not agree with it, but I think that this perspective can be very detrimental if you buy into it. And the truth of the matter is, I think a lot of people do buy into this piece of this piece of advice already. They just don’t even think about it. They don’t question it.
Anthony Vicino [00:00:47]:
And this piece of advice, it comes from an account from a guy that I actually follow on Twitter, on Instagram. He’s got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers. He’s actually a really great guy. I like a lot of his content, how he says. I like the message around it. I think this was a whiff. I can see where it was going, and I can see where the intention was directed. However, I don’t think that this is good advice that we should follow, and I think we should be very careful about, I don’t know, sharing this kind of perspective on how work gets done.
Anthony Vicino [00:01:22]:
Just so you guys know, this is not the worst piece of advice I’ve literally ever seen. It’s a piece of advice that I strongly disagree with, and I think that it does a lot of damage to creators, to builders, to entrepreneurs, to people who are out there trying to pursue some endeavor, some creative endeavor that is, by its very nature, very difficult. And so the piece of advice was this. If you’re forcing yourself to create it, then go create something else. Best creators, artists, designers, they’re not disciplined to turn it on. They’re disciplined to turn it off. Now, that sounds good, right? Like, if you’re forcing yourself, then maybe you should go do something else, right? The whole chase, your passion, if you do what you love, then you’ll never work a day in your life. That whole thing.
Anthony Vicino [00:02:07]:
And the whole idea here is, if the act of creating is difficult for you, then maybe that’s not the right thing for you. You should go pursue the thing that you can just lose yourself when and hours go by in the blink of an eye, and this thing just pours out. And in my experience, this is fundamentally wrong. The best creators, artists, designers, no, it’s not about being disciplined. Turn it on or turn it off. They recognize that creating anything is difficult to bring anything from the world of imagination and pull it into reality, whether that’s a book, it’s a blog, it’s a video, it’s a painting, it’s a whatever, a widget, whatever that is. Like the act of creating and pulling through the veil of reality from the world of ideation and into this thing that this physical manifestation that we call life that is always difficult, it will always be a struggle, it will always be a challenge when you set out to create something that has never been created before. And when you go into it with the expectation that you should love every single minute of it, or that it should feel easy as a result, you’re going to give up.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:21]:
Because you will inevitably get to that point where it gets difficult. It will get difficult. That’s just the reality. And that’s not to say it’s right or it’s wrong, it just is. And it’s detrimental because so many people, so many creators, artists, designers, whoever, they buy into this, this idea that it should feel easy. And they take it then as a sign that they’re doing it wrong when it doesn’t feel easy. And so they give up and they move on and they dabble. They’re constant dabblers.
Anthony Vicino [00:03:54]:
And I was like this for many, many years where I would pick a thing up, I would get through that first initial motivation phase where I’m very motivated to learn the thing, to do the thing. It’s a lot of fun. And in the beginning, you’re learning very quickly because you’re starting as an idiot. So when I started playing tennis, like the first couple of months were awesome because every time I sit down to play, I was showing marked improvement. I’d be like, oh man, this time I’m hitting the ball way better. I can see the improvement. But over time, as you improve, that starts to level off. That improvement curve levels off and it gets to the point where as you approach mastery, it’s an asymptote, which means it starts to level out, but never quite reaches mastery, right? And so you’re starting to fight this game of inches instead of fighting for miles.
Anthony Vicino [00:04:41]:
So in the beginning, it’s very easy to make that quick, fast progress. And then as you get better and better, it just doesn’t. And it’s the same with any act of creation. There is a period where it’s fun and it’s sexy and it’s interesting, it’s intriguing, and you’re learning all these new cool things and then the gains start to slow. And this is where most people stop. This is where most people give up because they take what this advice is sharing, which is to say it should feel easy, and if you’re forcing yourself, then you’re doing it wrong. And they take that as gospel and they think, there’s something wrong with me, there’s something wrong with this thing, and therefore it’s wrong. And they move on to the next thing and they just keep doing this perpetual dabbling and they never become competent or masterful or even remotely good at the thing because they just give up far, far too soon.
Anthony Vicino [00:05:28]:
IRA Glass has this essay that he put out a number of years ago called The Gap. I think it’s called the gap. Yeah, it’s probably called the gap. And what he shared was the thing that gets most of us as creators into the act of creating is we look to others. We see paintings or writings or videos or movies and we think like, that’s amazing. That’s really great. And we have this taste, this ability to recognize quality because we become a connoisseur of this thing, this medium that we fall in love with. And so for years before most people pick up the paintbrush, before they pick up the pen, they’ve been consuming other people’s writings, other people’s stories, other people’s paintings.
Anthony Vicino [00:06:15]:
And at a certain point they might think, I want to do that too. And so they’ll start down that path and it’s very, very difficult because in the beginning you suck. You suck a lot, and yet you still have this killer taste for what quality looks like because you’ve been consuming it, you’re connoisseur. And that just exacerbates how big the gap is between how good you are and what good actually is. And in the beginning it’s easy to overlook that and say, you know what? I’m a beginner. I suck it’s okay. And we give ourselves permission to suck and we give ourselves permission to continue forward regardless. But then there always comes this murky middle point for a lot of us where we think we should be making progress faster.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:01]:
We think it’s no longer reasonable for us to continue sucking as much as we have up to this point. And yet that gap of quality, of what we know is good, it still remains and we’re just not closing the gap as fast as we want to. And most people give up there because the gap isn’t closing how they want. And in my experience, the ones who ultimately get to that place of mastery where the gap between their taste in the art and their ability to produce that art, it only comes as a result of years of grinding and very, very hard work. And it will feel difficult, and I share that with you because this is difficult for me, sitting down and doing a podcast. It is still difficult. Like you guys don’t see how much hemming and hawing I go through before I turn on the camera, trying to decide what do I want to talk about? And then how many takes I go through in the beginning. Until I get into the flow and I feel okay.
Anthony Vicino [00:07:51]:
I understand what I want to talk about and how I want to talk about it, how many edits there are that just fall to the wayside. And this is just one medium, this is just the podcast. But it’s the same thing when I’m writing the newsletter. That thing takes me hours every single week to put together. So if you guys haven’t subscribed to that, you should do it. We put a ton of freaking work into that. Just go to Anthonyvacino.com newsletter. You can sign up for the hyper focused entrepreneur.
Anthony Vicino [00:08:16]:
It’s totally free. But even that thing, the act of creating that, is still incredibly difficult. And I have to convince myself sometimes I have to negotiate with myself to get my ass into the chair to actually do the writing necessary. I want to share that with you guys because I think far too often people buy into this mentality that if you’re forcing yourself to create it, well, maybe you should go do something else and find that thing instead. Truth is, in my experience, passion comes as we experience more and more mastery. Like, the more you learn about the thing, the better you become at the thing. That has a way of spiraling in and of itself, which fosters the love of doing the thing. So the better you get at it, the more you tend to love it.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:04]:
And that’s been my reality with writing in particular, because I’ll tell you the truth, when I was young, my dad, he was paying me ten cents per word to write him short stories. And so I didn’t ever think I was going to be a writer. He saw something in me and was trying to nurture that, and I was like, okay, well, I will write you very, very long short stories so I can maximize how much you’re going to pay me. So they were terrible short stories with a lot of adverbs. But through that process of doing that thing that I never had a passion for, but my dad just recognized I had an innate ability for, through that, I started to identify as a writer. And I started because people were giving me accolades, and they’re saying, oh, you’re very good. You’re a great communicator. I was like, this is cool.
Anthony Vicino [00:09:48]:
It feels great. And I started to identify because my competency was increasing. It was at this threshold, and that started to build passion. Now, I’m a very passionate writer, but the truth is, I did not seek this out. I did not seek to become a writer. I did not seek to become a podcaster or like, what you would air quotes, thought leader. I don’t like that phrase. I don’t really think of myself that way, but I’m just a person who thinks out loud in public, so that’s what I do.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:18]:
I didn’t set off to do those things. They were a manifestation of competency. And so keep that in mind. Whatever you’re trying to learn right now, whatever you’re progressing towards, you’re building your business. Maybe you’re working on some kind of creative endeavor. You’re painting, drawing, writing, whatever it is, just understand. If it’s hard, that means there’s something to learn. There still and there’s growth to be had there and that nothing easy comes.
Anthony Vicino [00:10:46]:
I’m sorry, nothing worth having comes as a result of it being easy. The things that we value most in life are always the result of hard, grinding work. And you don’t have to look any further than that than the fact that when was the last time you just stopped and took a breath and appreciated your breath? Probably didn’t right until I probably mentioned it right here. Unless you’re doing regular breath work, you’re probably not one who takes a deep breath and you’re like, man, that was a really good breath. I really valued that breath. It came really easy. I really value it. But getting your breath back and having a really great deep breath after sprinting 400 yards around the track and you’re, like bent over and you’re huffing and puffing and you’re gasping, that breath is like, well earned and it’s some of the best breathing you’ll ever do in your life.
Anthony Vicino [00:11:39]:
I don’t know if that’s true, but for me it is true. The breath that I have to work for is the one that I appreciate the most. And so just wanted to share that with you guys because this is a mindset thing and mindset dictates our thoughts, which ultimately dictate our actions, which then become our results. And so if you go into it expecting it to be hard but saying, I’m going to stick with it, I’m going to persist regardless because I do hard things. That’s my identity. Then you’re going to find success. But if you go into it thinking it’s going to be easy, then don’t be surprised when you’re proven wrong and you eventually quit. So if you got some value out of this, guys, do me a favor.
Anthony Vicino [00:12:20]:
Just make sure to share it with somebody else. It could be a friend. If you hated this, then maybe share it with an enemy. But either way, guys, I appreciate you taking some time being here. I’ll catch you tomorrow. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
This Week On YouTube
These 3 Daily Habits Made Me A Millionaire in 3 Years
Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help you:
1. Unleash your hyperfocused mind to dominate life, business, and everything in between? Here’s how:
→ The Hyperfocused Masterclass: the exact system I used to overcome ADHD, write 12 books, build 4 businesses, and acquire $70M of real estate.
There are a handful of spaces left in The Hyperfocus Masterclass for those who want to snag the early bird preorder special discount of $49.
Email anthony@anthonyvicino.com to let me know you want on the waitlist.
2. Learn to passively invest in commercial real estate with better returns, less risk, and zeo hassle.
→ Invictus Capital: my real estate private equity firm.
→ Multifamily Investing Made Simple: Top Apple Podcast.
→ Passive Investing Made Simple: Amazon Best Selling Book with 100 5 star reviews.
3. Want more like this? Check out these 3 popular articles from the vault:
