You Can't Count to 11 If You Don't Know It Exists

I play tennis every Wednesday, but today something clicked: I don't know how to hit a slice, and I have no idea how to return one. I haven't played regularly since college, and back then, none of the people I played against knew how to slice either. We never learned it, and because I put my racket away for years, I never caught up.

So how could I expect to play better when I never learned the fundamentals in the first place?

The truth is, I’ve been clinging to what’s familiar. I write my ebooks, I update my website, and on the court, I play the only way I know how.

Today, it hit me like a ton of bricks: I’m avoiding the new. New is uncomfortable. It invites mistakes. Today, I switched up my usual schedule and played with a completely different group of people—and suddenly, my blind spots were impossible to ignore.

You can't seek out what you don't even know exists. If you only know how to count to 10, you won't search for 11 or 12. You'll just keep repeating 1 through 10, trapped inside your own ceiling, unaware that there is an entire world beyond it.

Until today, those tennis moves simply didn't exist in my reality. And when the unknown stays invisible, you end up doing the exact same safe, comfortable routine every single day.

Without that realization, you’re just a ghost going through the motions. But waking up to what you don’t know is what allows you to actually live. But this kind of self-awareness wakes you up—it shatters the routine and forces you to actually live life to the fullest.

How can you expect to get better at anything when you never learned the tools to begin with?