Omar Usman – The Dip Seth Godin 3 Things I Learned

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.