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Ass-Kicking Email – The mental hack that will cause you to win or fail

Hey,

Today I’m going to share a bit about one mental hack I won’t be
writing an implementation guide on, but is probably more important
than any I’ve written or will write in the future.

—

The Greatest Mental Hack… Attitude

Okay, so maybe it isn’t as sexy-sounding as visceralization or
speed reading, but in all honesty, attitude will determine whether
you succeed or fail more than anything else.

There’s already been so much written about attitude, I’ll save you
the motivational speech. Instead, I’d like to focus on one element,
shared to me by Kalid Azad.

This is the importance of admitting things are difficult.

I know I can sound a bit hand-wavy at times. But the truth is,
learning is often difficult. Fiendishly difficult.

Calculus, foreign languages, memorizing biological terms. This is
difficult stuff. If you’re in university or a difficult high-school
program, you need to congratulate yourself for tackling the subjects
most people fail.

You don’t succeed in these subjects by assuming they will be easy,
or assuming they’ll be easy just because you’ve used metaphors,
speed reading or some other method. Yes, learning tactics can make
you perform better and faster, but they don’t immediately make your
job easier.

Accepting that you’re up against a difficult subject allows you to
harness the focus to really tackle it.

When I started learning French, one of my first admissions was that
I had no idea how a person could learn a foreign language. All that
audio sounded like gibberish, how could someone possible follow it?
There were hundreds of thousand of words to learn, different grammar
constructions, there was a lot of work.

But once I accepted that it was difficult, perhaps very difficult,
I needed to follow that up with another important attitude: it is
doable.

Yes, language learning might be difficult. But people for tens of
thousands of years have learned to speak foreign languages. People
are putting in the effort and succeeding every day. If they can do
it, I can too.

The same is true for whatever you’re learning. Yes, it might be
incredibly difficult and accepting that will focus you to put the
effort in. But also realize that people succeed every day at
learning your subject *because* they put in the effort.

And you can too.