Last week, I wrote about my good friend Jason, and how he reached unthought-of heights approaching bowling from an entirely new perspective.

So often, people admire someone who has achieved great success, accomplished the unthinkable, but think that there is no way they could never do the same. This stems back to the culture of “no” I’ve already talked about. We need to stop saying no to ourselves before we even know where we might be able to go. 

But let me tell you another little secret: In the beginning, we all started in the same place. Before we were great, we all had to learn. A lot.

We learned from our wins. But we learned more from losing and getting things wrong. We made a lot of mistakes before we had any successes. We had to ask for help and ask questions. And we learned to embrace what we don’t know rather than being ashamed of it. We can’t expect to know everything. And when we acknowledge what we don’t know, we can seek the answers. The more we seek, the more we can grow. We just keep learning. The end goal is not knowing everything. The aim is just to keep learning.

I’m still learning every day, on and off the lanes. That’s life. 

I was having this conversation with my son last spring. He was 9 at the time, and he was working on something for school and I sensed his frustration. As I was explaining the answer I could see his frustration grow. I was confused. Why was he getting more frustrated learning what I was teaching? Then I realized the answer. He felt bad he didn’t get it before I explained it. But the thing was, he hadn’t been taught it yet. So why would he get so upset over something he wasn’t even supposed to know yet?

I told him not to worry and said, “you’re not born just knowing things. You learn them. You learn them from experiences and from other people. So right now, this is part of the learning.”

Basically, there’s a cycle to learning, I told him. When you are exposed to something you don’t know, it’s no reason to be ashamed or scared. You just look at where you can find understanding behind it, where you can find the answer… and then you go for it. And through it, you learn not only from the answer but from the searching for it too. And that’s how we mature through anything in life actually.

We grow and mature through experiences, in life, in our career, everywhere.

There isn’t any reason for us to feel bad about something we haven’’t had the opportunity to learn yet.

When I told my son that, he appreciated this perspective and it changed his way of thinking. He has always been very eager to learn already, and now he realizes that when we don’t know something it is just another learning opportunity. He doesn’t feel bad anymore and actually is excited about what he is about to learn (and how he is going to learn it). 

I encounter this a lot with my bowlers too. There are times where I’ll teach them something and then they’ll be like, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that.” And I tell them, “don’t be, I’m supposed to teach it to you. You’re not expected to know it yet.”

In my own bowling career, I realized early on that I needed great coaches to help me get where I wanted to go. As self driven as I was, I recognized and embraced that I needed guidance. I realized that I didn’t know at all. I mentioned already that when I first decided to go to Nebraska, that first year I had a lot of learning to do.  In the beginning, I did okay but not great. 

When I started out at Nebraska, I was young and had so much to learn to level up for collegiate bowling. But I was very open to getting help from those who knew more than me. I surrounded myself with those who could teach me what I needed to know. And when I didn’t know something, I embraced it. It steered me forward to learn even more. And that is what enabled me to go on and win on a high level.

For everything that you could possibly ever want to know, there’s a way to seek it out and learn it. There’s a difference between not knowing the answer and not seeking it out.

I say this about a lot of things, but…again, you get to choose. That’s so empowering when you take that seriously.

You get to choose to seek the answers and embrace what you don’t know, rather than passively accepting that you simply don’t know something. But making the choice to go forward means putting in the work, and… well, let’s face it, that’s where most people just come up with excuses or don’t prioritize the learning. So they don’t reach their true potential.

You know the choices I’ve made. And that I always make, nearly every day, no matter the topic. What’s the next thing you’re setting yourself up to learn?