I am Only as Good as What I Can Teach

I am only as good as what I can teach as the title says, but that is not completely true. I can do quite a few things that I cannot teach, but in order to consider myself good, I have to be able to teach it. Good in this case is the ability to do a job or task so well that I can break something down to its component parts. This allows me to better deal with one-off situations, and generally be more flexible and adaptive.

Why does any of that matter? It is my strategy to git gud at something. When I force myself to teach I have to break a job or task down into its finer parts as stated above. As I do that, I start to get an idea of exactly how much I don’t know. Just like with any sport or activity, beginners don’t know enough about a situation to be able to tell what makes something good or not, and usually misattribute the wrong skill as the reason for others being better. Maybe it is the right skill they are picking up on, but the differences in being good are too subtle for a newbie to see. I am the same way, but now as I start something new, I always expect to find new things that are important to being better. No matter how long I have been doing something.

Let's use boxing as an analogy. When two boxers are going at it, a lot of attention is paid to how fast someone's fists are, how hard they hit, or how tough their chin is. What some people don’t pay attention to is the footwork. Foot work is very specific in its timing. A boxer always wants to be balanced while moving and dodging, but they also want to keep their feet planted in order to maximize power. In this case, planted feet doesn’t mean standing flat footed, but ensuring that when the boxer hits someone hard all the momentum from the punch continues through the opponent. If their feet aren't solidly touching the ground in the right way, they lose power. Boxers also need good footwork to get inside on their opponents. Mike Tyson was a shorter heavyweight that couldn’t compete with reach, but his feet could get him close enough to someone before they could react and by then it would be too late for his poor opponent. 

When I transitioned to CEO it was hard. Not always because the tasks I had to do were hard, but because I didn’t know what was urgent, and what was not. This caused me to spend lots of time on minor things and not enough time on major issues, and eventually led to me being burned out. When I got burned out, I broke almost all my good habits as I have stated in earlier blogs. The ones that came back quickest were 100% habits I could teach. I knew how to build someone else up, so I could apply that to myself. Because when you can teach something, you can repeat something. That is why I have to be able to teach something before I consider myself good at it, and a big reason I started this blog.