You Quit Too Soon

I showed the class a tomato plant. Not a tomato. A plant. You put the seed in the ground and for ten days nothing happens. Twenty days, nothing. If you want instant gratification you scroll for ten seconds and the dopamine hits. You've been waiting ten days on this seed, bro, and there's nothing there. One month, something comes up. Two months, still no tomato. Six months, you get a tomato.

Then I said the sentence. You think six months should make you rich. That's wrong. If growing a single tomato takes six months, you should not realistically expect six months of this to make you rich or to get you a job for $120,000.

People don't stop because they're weak. They stop because their expectation was wrong from day one.

We have a Moroccan lady. She graduated eight, nine months before this. A mother of two. And her English, I'm not saying she's bad or something, I'm just sharing my experience: when you listened to her, you didn't feel like she would get any interview.

Then she called me. "Kuzzat, I got an interview." A German manufacturing company.

I did not help her the way people imagine a teacher helps, which is by cheating the interview. I analyzed her task. I looked at what they were asking her to do and I told her what I saw in it.

By then I had been talking to her for maybe six months, back and forth, once in a while. Not every day. Once in a while, when she needed something, she asked. When it got difficult she didn't disappear the way people disappear. She showed up again with the next question.

She was carrying two children at home, months of applications with nothing coming back, and the English I described, into a building where other graduates from the same class had already decided the market was closed.

Her English was that weak. So what did the rounds actually test?

Not coding. I told her that on the phone. You know what, this is not about coding. They want to learn how you problem solve, your mindset, whether you're good at teamwork or not. She went in with that. She passed three or four rounds, and she did really well. Now she's getting the offer. She's very grateful. And she never quits. What she has is patience and resilience.

What she had wasn't English and it wasn't a degree. It was resilience, which means waiting for something to happen, and when things got difficult, not quitting and running away.

The people who quit say a sentence like this one. "I applied for a hundred jobs. Nobody called me back. Therefore I'm going to stop." A number, a silence, and a conclusion, and the conclusion arrives at exactly the point where the expectation ran out. When people have the wrong expectation, they show up, and at six months, seven months, they just quit. Their expectation was wrong from the first place. Have a realistic expectation.

So say you did everything. You put the hours in, you watched the videos, you built the project, you applied, and nobody called back.

You did everything they told you for seven months and got nothing back. Who broke the deal?

Nobody. There was no deal. If anyone tells you six months and you're going to be rich, it's not true. I didn't say that in the intro session. I said it takes effort. I said the market is bad. I said the general economy is not good and the interest rate is high. But the knowledge you gain here is going to serve you in the long run, and I said that too.

You don't have a contract from God saying every single thing you do in life is going to make you successful. Show me the contract. Do you have contract? Did God send you contract? There's no such thing. Everything you do, you can fail. But look at it from the other perspective: everything you fail at, you gain tremendous experience from. The only version where nothing comes back is the version where you stop. If you quit, nobody can make you successful. Not me. Not the market. Nobody.

You need to become a baby again, and I mean that as an instruction, not a compliment. I have four kids, and all of them started standing around ten months old. Other kids, I don't know. Twelve months, nine months, eight months. Mine, ten. They stand, and boom, they hit their head. They cry as if the world is ending. Three minutes later they stand up again. They try it again. Head on the floor again. Repeat the process.

Now you. You fell once in an interview, and they treated you like a piece of crap, and you felt miserable, and you still haven't applied again.

The baby is up in three minutes. You're still down. What does the baby have that you don't?

Nothing. It has less. The fall from three minutes ago is gone. No memory at all. God could have designed our brain differently. Some animals run right after they're born. A new horse stands and runs. We could have been like that too. Instead our brain is built so that as a kid, when you fall, you cry as if you're suffering so much, and one minute later everything is gone.

Now imagine one of my kids had your memory, a full working memory of the last fall. Angle, geometry, gravity, all these objects. Strategic analysis and calculation. Last time I got up I hit my head, so I must not fail again. Out of strategic analysis and planning and out of having a fear of failure, ninety-nine percent of the kids will never get up again and walk. We would all be reptiles. Isn't it amazing that God created us in such a way that as a baby you don't remember when you get hurt? That is why you walk.

So go back. Learn from babies. You're going to fail. You're going to go to an interview and they're going to treat you like a piece of crap. Somebody is going to tell you, now you're going to learn coding, the way people say it. We get rejection in life. If you have fear against failure, you will never be able to accomplish anything, exactly like the baby who could remember would never be able to walk.

There's a Chinese proverb, and I'm going to play it down, because my English is not good enough to make it pretty. 笨鸟先飞. Ben niao xian fei. Four words. Stupid. Bird. First. Fly. The stupid bird flies first.

When I came to the United States I looked at the American guys. Tall, blond, blue eyes, names that were easy for everybody to say. And I looked at myself. A little guy from East Turkistan. I didn't speak English. I didn't have a college degree. There were eight million reasons I should fail, and every one of them was an advantage somebody else had over me.

The bird is stupid. It flies first. What does it change about itself to get there first?

Nothing. It doesn't get smarter in the air. When you have disadvantages you don't get to fly better. You leave earlier, and you do more of the thing than the bird that left on time. If somebody sleeps until eight, you wake up at six, or five. That was my whole answer to the tall guys. I was like, okay. I might have to work harder.

Then I found a book. It was called The 10X Rule. I didn't have a lot of choice at the time. I saw good reviews, I bought it, I read it. You don't have to buy it, I'll save you the twenty dollars and the eight days. Assume you have all the disadvantages. You didn't graduate from Yale or MIT or Harvard. Maybe you're an immigrant. Maybe your English is broken. So to turn the disadvantage into an advantage, you don't have to be super genius. You don't have to be high IQ. You don't have to be highly educated. You only need to do one thing, and it's ten times. If your colleague calls ten customers a day, call a hundred. If he sends ten emails, send a hundred. If he learns one way to close a sale, learn ten.

So that's what I did. If the guy next to me read one book, I was going to read ten. Go back to my Amazon purchase history from twenty eleven, twelve, thirteen. It's all books. If he practiced one hour, I practiced ten. If he wrote ten methods, I wrote a hundred. Ten times more, for an extended period of time, until I reached the goal. Then another goal, and ten times on that. Period.