by Pat Flynn
Praise for How to Be Better at Almost Everything
“There is a moment, early in the book, where Pat discusses freedom. This insight stopped me in my tracks: it is a nuanced point that we should discuss at table with our family, from the podiums of the classroom, and from the pulpits at church. Yes, Pat includes to-do lists and discussions from Aristotle, Aquinas, and C. S. Lewis, but I like his forceful argument for appreciating and embracing generalism that springs from an understanding of freedom. This book is an easy read and a must-read. So much of this book is easily adopted into one’s life and I will be saying a small prayer/mantra each time I enter my home, hoping everyone will read this book. “
—Dan John, author of Never Let Go
“As a business owner in the competitive market of martial arts and fitness studios, understanding and applying the principles behind generalism has been a game changer for the health and growth of my business. What Pat presents in this book represents a paradigm shift in the way we all should be approaching our businesses and lives. It’s not about killing yourself trying to be the best. It’s about putting the puzzle pieces together, getting better at what you need to get better at, and offering something valuable and unique to the marketplace. This book is the ultimate handbook on how to do just that.”
—Som Sikdar, CEO of Dragon Gym Martial Arts and Fitness
“When I first read How to Get Better at Almost Everything, I felt both excited and sad: excited that I woke up to how effective generalism—skill stacking—can be to make myself more marketable; and sad that I lived my entire life believing that specialization was the key to success. This book is a great life lesson in how to achieve your goals by learning to be good at multiple skills instead of killing yourself trying to master one.”
—Jon Reed, president of YourOnlineVideoCoach.com
This book is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information about personal business development. Neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services by publishing this book. If any such assistance is required, the services of a qualified professional should be sought. The author and publisher will not be responsible for any liability, loss, or risk incurred as a result of the use and application of any information contained in this book.
Copyright © 2019 by Pat Flynn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
BenBella Books, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Flynn, Pat (Online business consultant), author.
Title: How to be better at almost everything : learn anything quickly, stack your skills, dominate / Pat Flynn.
Description: Dallas, TX : BenBella Books, Inc., [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018039499 (print) | LCCN 2018048816 (ebook) | ISBN 9781946885692 (electronic) | ISBN 9781946885418 (trade cloth :alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Expertise. | Ability.
Classification: LCC BF378.E94 (ebook) | LCC BF378.E94 F734 2019 (print) | DDC 153.9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039499
Editing by Leah Wilson, Hayley Lerner, and Scott Calamar
Copyediting by Jennifer Greenstein
Proofreading by Kimberly Broderick and Greg Teague
Text design and composition by Silver Feather Design
Cover design by Ty Nowicki
Printed by Lake Book Manufacturing
Distributed to the trade by Two Rivers Distribution, an Ingram brand www.tworiversdistribution.com
Special discounts for bulk sales (minimum of 25 copies) are available. Please contact [email protected].
This book is dedicated to my grandfather, John Jones, and my grandmother, Jacqueline Jones—aka “D-Dop” and “D-Dom.”
CONTENTS
Introduction:
Why Skill Stacking > Specialization
CHAPTER 1:When Great Is the Enemy of Good
CHAPTER 2:Gaining Your Freedom for Excellence (And the Right to Choose . . . Wrongly If Necessary)
CHAPTER 3:Becoming an Expert Generalist: Five Key Principles
CHAPTER 4:How to Practice Better and Improve Faster
CHAPTER 5:Where to Begin: Metaskills
CHAPTER 6:Skills You May Be Interested In (But May Not Need)
CHAPTER 7:Skills You May Need (But May Not Be Interested In)
Conclusion: Remember, Life Is Best with a Sense of Perspective
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Profiles in Generalism
About the Author
INTRODUCTION: WHY SKILL STACKING > SPECIALIZATION
You don’t have to be the best in the world to get ahead. You don’t need to be number one to see the limelight, strike it rich, or find meaning in life. You only need to be good or great—or at least fairly competent—at a few things and then combine those things to foster that uttermost creative quality within yourself. Specialization—a goal that has been instilled into most of us from an early age—is a snare that has entrapped people for long enough. This book is about to put an end to that.
I don’t intend to teach you, step-by-step, some new way of starting a business. I want to teach you, one step at a time, a new way of learning and acquiring skills that you can use (if you so choose) to start a business, and thus give you a much better chance of not finding but creating success. People can take businesses away from you, and so can a bad economy. But no one can rob you of skills, unless they rob you of life, which just wouldn’t be very nice. You don’t need to be born with special DNA for this book to work. You only need to be willing to learn.
If you’re looking for a mega-inspirational story, you won’t find that in much of what I’m about to tell you. But if you’d like to read about a person who came to earth without any special inborn ability, someone who overcame a lifelong battle with neuroses and went on to acquire skills anyway, someone who turned sharply away from the conventional trajectory in life toward building a line of successful businesses—becoming a writer, a musician, a black belt, a B-level fitness celebrity, and a whole lot of other seemingly unrelated but pretty cool things that all merged dynamically into one another—then you’ll probably want to read this.
This book is about generalism. Our goal is to become better than most people at most things, even if we aren’t the best at any one skill. Why do we want to do this? Well, the first thing I would say is that, at the very least, being a generalist makes you a lot less boring to be around. To be great at many things is, frankly, a quality that very few people have. Most people are somewhat OK at one or two things and then either completely incompetent or downright terrible at everything else; they typically can’t even do simple things like keeping a houseplant alive. Not that I would know myself how difficult that is, since the only plant I ever owned was stolen by my college roommate, who thought it was marijuana of some kind—only the joke was on him because that’s not what it was. It was just a totally regular plant that my mom got me. And I knew my roommate was the person who stole it because one day it just magically appeared on his side of the room. Would you look at that? I thought. I wonder what’s going on here. So I said, “Yo, dude, did you steal my plant or what?” Then he told me to relax, so I was
like, Whatever man, that plant isn’t what you think. And then I got over it. Because that’s how life is: you get over things. Lesson number one.
Second, if you have any interest in running or starting a business, then being able to stack a variety of skills is a thousand times more powerful than trying to be the best at just one. We call this skill stacking: combining skills in a unique and useful way, which gives you more breadth and versatility than someone who specializes in one thing. This is something I plan to teach a lot about, so please make yourself comfortable.
Finally, because happiness, as the philosophers will tell us (philosophers like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, anyway—I’m not talking about the hedonists here), involves engaging in and enjoying a genuinely good activity, it seems our fulfillment is found not in what we accumulate but rather in what we endeavor to do. In other words, skills are good because they give us something good to engage in, and we all need that.
So to put it all together, this book is about becoming good or great at many things and at least fairly competent at (almost) everything else, and then learning to combine abilities to form a competitive advantage while at the same time finding total and complete fulfilment in life. Not too heavy of an assignment, right? The secret to all of it? Skill stacking. (Yay!) The enemy? Specialization. (Boo!)
Mostly, I want to teach you how to get better at getting better at things—the skill of acquiring skill so you can build a reputation and a thriving business (if you so choose) with all the skills you never had and never thought you needed to have. The problem, as I see it, is that since most self-help books these days are about topics like finding confidence when you’re semi-overweight or marketing yourself on social media, nobody’s thought to teach you these inclusive skills. And while I’m all for finding confidence when you’re semi-overweight (I used to be one such person; we’ll talk about that in a bit) and marketing yourself on social media, those types of skills have little to do with being happy and successful on the most fundamental level.
Happiness is a skill; business is a skill. I’m going to teach you how to get the skills you need and then how to combine those skills to find your competitive streak and creative spirit. Am I a super creative person? Well, I should like to think I’m at least somewhat creative. I draw things, I record music, and I write. I even entered a video game tournament once. I didn’t do half bad. I won the first round, anyway. But the reason I’m creative (if I’m creative at all) is that I’m a generalist. I’m somebody who got good at many things and then found a way to pull them together to come up with ideas for (and this always sounds somewhat self-aggrandizing when I say it like this) making money and, even more important, having a pretty fun time doing it. I only say “pretty fun” because there were one or two times that didn’t go quite as well as I had hoped. I’ll get over it. (You know what, it is hard being me. Thank you for saying that. No, really. It means more than you know. Here, let’s sit and maintain eye contact.)
So this is the way this book will work: First (I like numbering things; it keeps me organized), I’ll talk about generalism, the principles behind it, and why I think this philosophy can help you (or anyone) find success and happiness by doing the things you love and making money from them. Doesn’t that sound nice? I think that sounds nice. Second, I’ll talk about skill stacking and why it’s more effective for being an entrepreneur (and human) than specialization, or trying to be “the best” at just one thing. Third, I’ll talk about how to get better at anything that interests you through a series of principles that makes learning new skills forty million times easier; I’ll also share with you the skills I think (almost) every person needs to start getting ahead both financially and figuratively. And don’t worry: it’s not like any of these skills take all that long to develop. It’s just that most people never think to develop them. Finally, we’ll talk about how to actually build a skill stack and put all your newfound talents to work in attaining the good life—ah yes, the good life—because it wouldn’t be a self-help book without talking about that.
Along the way, we’ll discuss some well-known people who used this philosophy of generalism—case studies, you could say, of those who became good or great at many things to find success and meaning and fulfillment. (You’ll also find more of these, additional opportunities to see generalism in action, in the appendix.) People like George Washington Carver, whom I did a book report on in third grade, just so you know a little about my credentials. For example, George Washington Carver was more than just an innovator with the peanut and the sweet potato. He was also well known for his advocacy of a proper understanding of the relationship between faith and science; in addition, he was a strong, original proponent of environmentalism while, at the same time, offering advice to business leaders and establishing outreach programs. The man did a lot because he was capable of a lot, and he had a huge heart. He was even a competent painter. I’ll also mention several contemporary figures along the way, which is my way of saying people who aren’t quite so, well, dead.
As I said, my goal isn’t to teach you step-by-step some new way of starting a business, because that, I think, would be boring. My goal is to teach you principle by principle how to become better at (almost) everything and then help you figure out what skills you may need to do all the things you want in life.
I get that this book may be saying some peculiar things and that you probably think I’m somewhat peculiar as well, but trust me when I say I’m on to something and that specialization is not the way to go in life. So many people are still so preoccupied with trying to become the best at just one thing, but the greatest opportunities present themselves to those who are preoccupied not with excelling at one skill but with being just good enough at the right combination of abilities.
Perhaps the greatest feature of generalism is that you don’t need to have any sort of genetic head start. You don’t need a perfectly groomed set of eyebrows, or a strong pair of arms, or a fast set of legs; you can just be whoever you are and that’s enough—this philosophy is all very “Mister Rogers.” And since you’re not trying to be the best in the world at one particular thing, you don’t have to be the best in the world at anything. You can just be you and I can just be me, and that’s more than adequate because anybody can get better at (almost) everything. I’m not saying the world doesn’t need specialists like Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps or whoever designs microchips for NASA, but I am saying I was never going to be that good and (not to sound insulting) I doubt you were either, and that’s fine because most people shouldn’t be specialists to begin with. That’s why we have generalism.
It’s not that specialization is unimportant; it’s just that so many people think that it’s way more important than it is or that specializing is the only way to get ahead in life, when they’d be better off focusing on breadth, as much as depth, of skill. Generalism allows people the freedom to become moderately skilled at a number of different things and then to put these skills on top of each other to sneak ahead, because “the competition,” God bless ’em, never thought the game could be played in such a way.
So that’s what we’re going to do. If you’re reading this book you may already know a little bit about me. Or maybe you don’t. But that’s where I’m going to start because, believe it or not, I know a lot about me. And, you’ll see, a lot of it is going to apply to you.
Chapter One
WHEN GREAT IS THE ENEMY OF GOOD
It’s not like the idea of generalism just occurred to me. It’s something I had to figure out after going a long time in the opposite direction. Like many of us, when I was a kid, I thought I should grow up to be the best at something—and for me that something was the guitar. I wanted to be the fastest and most virtuosic guitarist around, so I could become famous, get tattoos, and do drugs and all that. Obviously, this isn’t how things turned out. Here’s why.
First, I have maintained a healthy paranoia regarding substance abuse, because with a family history of addiction problem
s, I know very well what I might end up like. I also maintain an unhealthy fear of needles in general and have way too much of an indecision problem to settle on something as permanent as a tattoo. Plus, I don’t care all that much about becoming famous anymore, for reasons we’ll later get into.
Those, ahem, lofty goals aside, I realized about five years into playing guitar that specialization wasn’t getting me to the places I wanted to go. By the time I was in high school, I was (in my opinion) the best guitarist around, but only a few people enjoyed hearing me play, since I only played stuff that other guitarists wanted to listen to, like sweep-picking guitar solos. (For nonmusicians, an example of sweep picking can be heard quite prominently throughout the work of virtuoso guitarists from the 1980s, like Yngwie Malmsteen; check out “Arpeggios from Hell.”) Because—and this is something every specialist eventually realizes—there comes a point in every skill when you become so good you suddenly lose people on a common level and begin appealing only to other specialists, and that’s when you know you’ve gone too far. Most people in my high school didn’t want to hear virtuosic guitar solos; they just wanted to be asked to the prom by some singer-songwriter kid with a Dave Matthews haircut. So it would have been better if I hadn’t spent so much time perfecting sweep picking and instead had gotten just a little better at singing. This was a clear case of where a skill stack (singing and playing the guitar) was more attractive than specialization (being a solo guitarist), because if the goal was to get attention as a person/musician, it was the generalist (in this case, my “friend” Tom) who was doing so, and not the specialist (me), who might every once in a while impress people with a fiery guitar solo but could not write a catchy melody. And since most people are basically philistines when it comes to this stuff—they don’t care for all that technical mumbo jumbo—they just want a tune they can hum along to.
