#28 You're Lying - FIRE University

【What I've been up to】

Hi, Reader,

How was your week?
Last weekend I was in Taipei again
for the opening of Mr. Voice's new studio,
and to record some episodes.

I've noticed people in Taipei love to walk,
and in Taipei I love walking too.
My hotel was a 10-minute walk from the metro,
so anywhere within 15 minutes
I'd walk or take a YouBike.

That doesn't work in Kaohsiung.
In Kaohsiung, if it's more than a 3-minute walk, I ride my scooter,
because getting around by scooter there is just so convenient!

Compared with Taipei, people in Kaohsiung don't walk much.
That's a north–south difference I've noticed —
have you noticed it too?

Are you a walker or a rider?

Now, on to today's topic.

【You're lying】

Last Saturday at the Mr. Voice opening,
the teacher Chen Wei-Yu told a story
that really struck me,
so I want to share it with you today.

A student of his, a performer, told him:
“I've been singing for twenty or thirty years,
and I still get nervous.”

Wei-Yu: “I know. It's because you're lying.”

Student: “What do you mean?”

Wei-Yu: “You're not perfect,
but on stage you try hard to pretend you are.
You're giving something you don't have.
Of course you're nervous — you're lying.”

That's the end of the story.
Afterwards I kept thinking about that line:

“You're not perfect,
but you're pretending to be.”

There's no such trait as “perfect”

No one is perfect,
so whatever I do, it won't be perfect.

It reminded me of when I first started the show.
I wanted it to match the perfect version in my head,
so I spent 10 hours
making a 10-minute episode,
and wrote a script of more than 10,000 characters,
all for a perfect first episode.

In the end I deleted that episode,
because it was painful to listen to —
miles away from the perfect version I'd imagined.
And reading from a script, I stopped being myself;
I didn't enjoy making it.

Then, by chance, I heard Brother Hao's show.
He said he'd never made a podcast before,
but he wanted to make 100 episodes before deciding whether to continue.

He didn't set any KPIs;
his only KPI was the number of episodes.
After 10 episodes,
he was better than he'd been at 9.

Once he'd recorded 100,
he could go back and listen to episode 1
and hear how far he'd come.

That gave me strength.
From then on I told myself:
no more scripts, no more reading;
drop the label of “perfect,” just get it done.
I told myself: done is better than perfect.

Allowing myself to be not good enough

The Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita says:
“It is better to live your own life imperfectly
than to imitate someone else's perfectly.”

I stopped pretending to be perfect.
I don't edit out coughs, slips or stammers in my recordings.
I want you to know this is how I talk —
this is the real me.

I started allowing myself to mumble,
allowing myself to pause and think,
allowing myself not to be as eloquent as others.
I allowed myself to be not good enough.

When I thought that way, a small miracle happened.
I stopped getting nervous when recording,
because I wasn't trying to package myself.
What I gave was the real me,
so I enjoyed it more and more; the more I enjoyed it, the longer I kept going,
and keeping going is how you get good.

People who don't like you will leave; people who like you will stay

Once, in a podcasting community,
Captain Lu, host of 好女人的情場攻略,
said that when he started his show,
he deliberately made it rough.
People who didn't like it would leave,
and the ones who stayed
really liked him — true fans.

I know he was half joking,
but there's truth in it too.

Naval says:
“No one can compete with you
on being you.”

So I always tell friends who want to build a personal brand:
if you're going to build a brand, be real.
Don't package yourself; don't pretend.

Think about it: if you package yourself
and the brand succeeds, but you're miserable doing it,
you'll end up having to choose between tearing it down and starting over,
or carrying on with the act, miserable.

But if you're genuinely yourself,
even if the brand doesn't succeed, you'll have enjoyed it,
gained what you needed to grow,
and been happy the whole way.

And if the brand does succeed,
you can happily keep going.
Whichever way it turns out,
being your real self is the right path.

Pretending to be perfect is exhausting,
because it's a play that never wraps.
But being your real self —
stammering and stumbling now and then —
lets you live with real confidence.

Because only when you stop acting
can the people who truly like you see you.

May we all put down the burden of perfection
and live as our most real selves :)

Doug

This week's episode

#73 | Is time management a scam? What you can manage is your attention (Four Thousand Weeks #1)

Even 80 years is only about 4,000 weeks. Why time feels faster as we age, why Keynes's prediction of leisure never came true, Parkinson's law, and why some things matter precisely because they are inconvenient.

Read the full show notes in English › (the episode is in Mandarin Chinese)

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