The surprising reason smart people get stuck.

This article was first published in my EPIQ Success newsletter. I'm including it here for your enjoyment. 

 

I invented my own job title once. Amazon paid me to do it.

 

My career arc: Missionary & Evangelist. Pre-sales engineer. Seller. Business development leader. Then Worldwide Head of EPIC, the role I built from nothing that grew into the largest corporate-based EQ community in the world, reaching over 1.5 million people.

 

Five professions. Same person.

 

I didn’t plan that path. Nobody hands you a five-year roadmap from missionary work in the Philippines to leading emotional intelligence at one of the most influential companies on earth. I didn’t graduate from one role into the next. Each jump asked me to strip down whatever had made me competent in the last one and rebuild from scratch, in public, usually while explaining to relatives at Thanksgiving what exactly I did for a living.

 

My friend Chris Yeh has a name for the pattern underneath all of it: infinite learner. He’s the best-selling co-author of Blitzscaling and The Alliance (along with Reid Hoffman), and he gave a TED talk about this topic. He defines an infinite learner as someone who can learn, unlearn, and relearn over and over, so past successes don’t get in the way of future victories. His sharpest line is this: every lesson has an expiration date.

I love that term. But there is a twist that most people don’t notice.

 

At first glance, the key to infinite learning may seem to be addition: read a new book, absorb more information, take another course. But the actual secret–and the hard part–is subtraction. It’s unlearning. Letting go of a belief, a process, or a version of yourself that used to work. This is what keeps highly competent people stuck.

 

Unlearning is a different skill than learning. Almost no one trains for it on purpose. But the key to being an infinite learner is to also be an infinite unlearner.

 

Two different reasons to let something go

 

Not every belief you drop deserves the same explanation, and I think conflating them is why unlearning can feel slippery. There are two categories, and they call for different kinds of honesty.

 

Outdated beliefs served you. Past tense, on purpose. They were accurate for a version of your life that no longer exists. “Say yes to everything” is a great belief for a 24-year-old building a reputation. It’s a terrible belief for a 40-year-old trying to protect the three things that actually matter. The belief wasn’t wrong. Your circumstances changed underneath it.

 

Limiting beliefs never served you. They were never true, not even back then. “I’m not a numbers person.” “I’m bad at public speaking.” “Networking is fake.” Most of these got installed early, usually from one bad experience or one offhand comment from someone who didn’t know what they were talking about, and they’ve been running your decisions ever since, unchecked. You don’t outgrow a limiting belief. You just finally notice it was never useful to begin with.

 

The reason this distinction matters: outdated beliefs deserve a bit of gratitude on the way out. They did their job. Limiting beliefs deserve none. You’re not retiring them, you’re discarding them. You’re correcting a record that was wrong from the start.

 

When good becomes the enemy

 

Here’s something that surprises a lot of people. Competence holds you back too, and it’s sneakier than a “bad” belief because it comes with a trophy attached.

 

What you’re already good at is often the ceiling on what you could become. I say some version of “what got you here won’t get you there” to leaders constantly, but I don’t think I’d fully internalized how literally true it is until I heard about Roger Federer.

 

By 2013, Federer had won 17 Grand Slam titles, more than any man in tennis history. He was 32, an age by which most players are fading or already retired. Instead of protecting that legacy, he swapped the small, old-school racket that had won him all 17 of those majors for a bigger frame built for more power, and he brought in Stefan Edberg, one of the great serve-and-volley players ever, to help him play more aggressively at net.

 

The old game had started losing. His flatter baseline style kept coming up short against Rafael Nadal’s topspin and Novak Djokovic’s return, in finals that used to go his way. He didn’t wait for the two of them to finish him off. He went and got new tools while he was still good enough to win with the old ones. It didn’t pay off right away. He won zero majors that year, and the usual obituaries got written for players in their thirties. Then in 2017, at 35, he beat Nadal in five sets at the Australian Open for his 18th major, ending a title drought of nearly five years. He won two more after that.

 

Jim Collins opens Good to Great with a line that captures exactly what Federer understood at 32: good is the enemy of great. Being really good at something is precisely what makes it so hard to leave, because leaving means voluntarily getting worse before you get better, in front of people who already respect you for the thing you’re walking away from. (I suppose in Federer’s case, you could say that great was the enemy of greater!)

 

This is where I think EQ does the heavy lifting that IQ can’t. Smart people are usually great at defending what they know. That’s what intelligence is for. But defending your expertise and outgrowing it require opposite instincts, and the second one takes something IQ doesn’t supply: the humility and courage to treat your own competence as a replaceable tool rather than an identity.

 

How big is your frying pan?

 

I recently heard Nick Saban, legendary football coach for University of Alabama, tell a story that really resonated with me.

 

He was out fishing with a guy who kept catching these big, beautiful fish and throwing them straight back into the water. He’d only keep the small ones, under nine inches. Saban finally asked him why.

 

The guy said: “Well, I only have a nine-inch frying pan.”

 

Chew on that for a second. The size of the frying pan was the real constraint, not the size of the fish. The guy wasn’t agonizing over the decision either. He’d been doing it so long that a nine-inch limit had stopped feeling like a constraint and started feeling like reality. Saban’s question to his players is the same one I’d ask you: how big is your frying pan? What’s your actual capacity for success, versus the capacity you settled on years ago and never revisited?

 

That’s what outdated beliefs, limiting beliefs, and limiting expertise all have in common. None of them show up with a giant warning sign. They don’t feel like decisions you’re actively making. They feel like the size of the pan you happen to own. The work isn’t catching a bigger fish. It’s noticing you’re still measuring everything against a pan you bought a long time ago, for a very different kitchen.

 

Use this Monday morning

 

I don’t have unlearning fully solved. I’m not sure anyone does. But I’ve started running a short audit, and I’d suggest stealing it:

• What’s a belief that served me two years ago that I’d defend less confidently today? (That’s outdated. Thank it, then let it go.)
• What’s a belief about myself I’ve never actually tested, just always assumed was true? (That’s limiting. It was never useful.)
• What am I good at right now that might be capping how great I could become? (That’s your Roger Federer question. Good is comfortable. Great means rebuilding the game that already works.).)

 

Answering those honestly takes curiosity, humility, and courage. It’s the willingness to discard your current frying pan and get a new one because you don’t want to miss out on all those big, beautiful fish anymore.