Omar Usman – The Dip Seth Godin 3 Things I Learned
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The speaker discusses three key factors for winning a big win: sticking with the right stuff, finding a niche where one has a unique value add, and narrowing down experiences to achieve long-term success. They emphasize the importance of strategic quitting and continuous improvement, and emphasize the need to work harder to attain a certain level of success. The speaker also highlights the benefits of learning from a dip and gaining mastery through hard work, and the challenges of riding out a dip and the importance of having a clear goal to achieve success.
AI: Summary ©
In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book, The Dip by Seth
Godin.
This is a book about
quitting the wrong stuff, sticking with the right
stuff, and having the guts to do one
or the other. It's really a book about
making sure you don't fall into the trap
of mediocrity
and having the impatience that's needed to get
rid of mediocrity and the patience to avoid
that problem in the first place.
So the first thing I learned is that
winners win big
winners win and winners win big.
The person that's in 1st place
or has usually a disproportionate
advantage to everybody else.
Think about when you go to a new
town or a new city
and you want to try the best steak
restaurant. You go and you look on Yelp,
you look at other places to find the
best.
And that one that's the highest rated
gets the most amount of attention
exponentially more than even the restaurant that's maybe
2nd place or 3rd place, not to mention
all the 100 of other restaurants.
It's the same when you're on Amazon
and you need a kitchen gadget or something
for the house. You go and you look
it up, and you tend to automatically buy
the one with the most amount of 5
star reviews. We don't tend to do a
lot of research. We don't tend to do
a lot of digging.
We want to simply go and get the
best. So the one that's at the top
has a disproportionate
advantage
to getting compound results. This is especially important
to understand when we have infinite choice when
it comes to nearly everything,
whether that's podcasts,
videos, books, businesses, services.
There's infinite choice with everything, and so that
creates a scarcity for the one that's at
the top. One thing that that means for
us is that
mass appeal, mass market, those types of things
are much more difficult to conquer. But what
we can do is look for micro markets
where we have a niche.
Where is an area where I have a
unique value add that I can be at
the very top? There might it might be
a very specific niche, but I can find
something
where I have the potential to be the
best at something more than anybody else. And
so Seth Godin says, find that one thing.
Quit the other stuff. Quit the stuff where
you're only going to be average or above
average,
and look to make your impact where you
can be the best.
The second thing I learned is that strategic
quitting
is a good strategy.
We've all heard that phrase, quitters never win.
Well, that's not true.
What winners do is they know when to
quit. In fact, they might be serial quitters.
They might be quitting
very constantly at things that they know that
they're not going to be able to be
the best at. What's important is to is
to identify
when you're strategically quitting and when you're quitting
just because something got hard. Most people quit
when something becomes painful instead of riding it
out, and that that's the point of the
dip. Making that decision, though, comes down oftentimes
to short term versus long term planning.
If you're quitting because of short term pain,
that's probably not the right route.
When you quit, think about the long term
object objectives.
That is this thing that I'm working on,
this project that I'm taking on, maybe the
skill that I'm
learning, is it serving me and being the
best at this one long term goal that
I have? If it's not, then I know
that I need to leave it behind. One
thing that's interesting about this concept is that
it it also shows a maturity of thought.
See, when we're younger, for example, we tend
to experiment with a lot of things. So
you take a typical college student. They might
be changing their majors multiple times or volunteering
for all different types of organizations, and that's
great. That's good. We want to get experiences
as many different things as possible.
But at a certain point, you have to
start narrowing those experiences down
and figuring out where you want to gain
mastery.
And mastery requires
quitting and saying no to all of the
other things
so that you can develop the get the
long term win of being a master in
that niche that you've identified.
The third thing I learned is how to
ride out that dip. And you see here
these little these graphics from Seth Godin's book.
And it shows you the
that oftentimes the results,
they come after riding out a dip. We
have a little bit of beginner's luck, so
to speak. We see rapid gains. So the
first time you learn something,
just going from 0 to semi proficient, you
you gain a lot of quick wins. And
so it feels like you're doing great. But
once you get those basics down, there's a
plateau or there's a dip where it gets
much harder,
where the progress comes much slower.
And that's the point where a lot of
people leave and they quit that thing. But
if you can ride that dip, that moment
of difficulty, the moment where things are getting
really tough, and you keep pushing through, and
at this point, you have that resiliency,
then you push through and get to the
other side,
and then you get those exponential that exponential
level of results.
See that beginning is fun, and you have
rapid learning, and then you get to that
hard part. But it's breaking through the hard
part that lets you have mastery. One good
example to think about is weed out classes
in school. When someone is going down the
path of a difficult major, there's sir certain
classes in your 1st or second year that
end up being a weed out, that the
students that can't make it through that class,
they know are not qualified
to go much further down the path. One
thing that Seth one thing that Seth Godin
says is that successful people
don't just ride out the dip. When you
see yourself facing that dip and things getting
difficult,
that's when you have to double down on
your effort and work that much harder in
order to get through the dip. It's not
going to happen automatically.
Once you get through to the other side,
that's when you have mastery. That's when you
become the best. And that's that's where you
attain that level of scarcity.
Because the harder it is to get through
the dip,
the more of a competitive advantage that you
have. The more that you're willing to to
do the work needed to get through that
difficulty,
the less number of people there will be
on the other side. So once you get
to that other side and you gain that
mastery,
you gain all those benefits of being at
the top. There are some pitfalls that we
fall into. Seth Godin highlights 2 of them
here, the cliff
and the cul de sac.
And the cul de sac is a dead
end that keeps you from doing something else.
You're just going in circles. And a cliff
is that thing that you can't quit until
you fall off, meaning that you're just gonna
push, push, push, and there's not going to
be a reward at the end. And the
biggest obstacle to our success is our inability
to quit these curves as soon as possible.
And usually, that happens because
quitting it is going to rock the boat.
It's going to cause some type of difficulty.
So so to avoid
some type of short term pain or short
term hassle,
we we ride it out thinking that we're
being resilient, and patient, and and putting in
the work, when really we're on a journey
to nowhere. So it's important
that you have that end goal in mind
of where you want to go. That's what
enables you to realize
whether the dip is worth riding out, or
whether you're going to keep spinning yourself in
circles.
The hard part is is you're not going
to know
whether it's a dip or a dead end
right off the bat. But the important thing
what and what Seth Godin says, he says,
is not to know the answer, but it's
to constantly be asking that question.
That, okay, things are getting more difficult. What's
going to happen if I make it out
to the other side? Have that awareness of
always be asking yourself that question to gauge
where you're going. So that's it. That's three
things I learned from the book The Dip
by Seth Godin.
Those of you who've been watching my videos
can see that, obviously, I'm trying out a
new format.
This is a little bit easier for me
to do to make videos, and I thought
the visuals might help. Please let me know
in the comments. What do you think? Should
I go back to the old format with
just the talking head, or do you like
this format better? Let me know, and as
always, please share the video, subscribe, all that
good stuff. See you in the next video.