Freelancing mistakes: What to do when you don’t know what you don’t know

Now let's get into today's video: What to do when you don't know what you don't know. 

It is story time!

I want to give you an example of how this has happened in my own life, and how you can apply the lesson that I learned to your own business…

So, I got a new phone about a year ago, and it was very exciting. It was a huge upgrade from my old iPhone 6s. It was very, very exciting… and after I got my phone, almost immediately I began dropping it.

This was very unusual for me. I never used to drop my old phone. And I think what probably happened is that when I got my new phone, of course I got a new case for it, and I think that the case was just kind of slippery. So my phone kept on dropping out of my hand.

…And instead of going out and buying a new case to fix this problem, I instead continued to accidentally drop my phone on an ongoing basis very, very frequently.

You can guess where this is heading: Within a few months, my fancy new phone had a long crack across the screen.

Let me repeat, this has never happened to me in the past. I never used to drop my phone. I never had cracks on my screen. And I was like, “oh Sagan, what are you doing?” And here's the thing, even though I was continuing to drop my phone and even though I got this crack on my screen from dropping out one too many times, I still didn't do anything about it. 

I didn't buy a new case.

I didn't even get the screen repaired.

Here's what I did: I just rolled my eyes and I assumed it was a manufacturing issue.

I was thinking, “They probably design phones so that they're more easily breakable and then you need to go and fix them or buy a new one.”

That was kind of my mentality. And I was clinging to this idea so stubbornly that I wasn't doing anything about it. I was just blaming the manufacturers, and of course, I was still dropping my phone because I hadn't fixed the problem.

However, just a few weeks ago, it got to the point where I didn't have a choice anymore. I actually did have to do something about it, because my phone fell out of my pocket and the screen cracked again — but this time, there were big shattered bits at a couple of the corners. I was like, “Okay, now I actually need to do something about this!”

So I took my phone into a phone repair store. I explained the situation, and I handed it to the guy across the counter. He took one glance at my phone, probably less than three seconds — it might have been like a half a second that he glanced at it — and then he looks up at me, gives me this look, and then silently removes the clear plastic cover from my screen.

That's right, the actual phone screen wasn't cracked at all. It wasn't shattered at all. It was perfectly fine! 

What had happened is, I had completely forgotten that when I got a new phone last year, the other store that I had gone to had put a hard plastic cover on my screen rather than the usual peelable sticker-style protective cover. So this hard plastic one cracked and got little shattered bits on the side. 

When this repair guy does this, he peels it off very quietly and I see that my screen is actually fine, I just burst out laughing. I was pretty embarrassed that I hadn't even realized it before! But he was very kind and he was very non judgmental about it. And the great news is that now my phone is fixed, and I did buy a much better case; I haven't even dropped it once. So that is great, it's all good. 

Now, the point of this story is twofold: 

Number one, what I want to point out to you is that it took me an unnecessarily long amount of time to take personal responsibility and do something, and that is because of my misplaced assumptions.

I allowed my stubbornness to prevent me from taking very simple action to do something about it. For example, I could have immediately gotten a new case when I realized that my case was slippery and I kept dropping my phone. I could have done that a year ago when I started dropping it, and I didn't.

That would have been a very simple action for me to take, that sort of personal responsibility and figure out a solution to the problem.

The second thing that I want to point out that's really, really important is that expertise matters. 

Let me elaborate on that second point: When I brought my phone to the phone repair guy, I assumed that it was my phone screen that had cracked rather than the protective cover — because that is all I could see.

To me, the problem I perceived was that obviously the phone screen had cracked, so I didn't even think to examine it further. 

There were no other options on the table. 

It was not even an option that the protective screen cover had cracked, right? That was not even a possibility in my mind. I couldn't even think of that.

The "fact" that my phone screen had cracked was in my mind, unequivocally and 100% the only thing that could have happened.

Of course, that wasn't the case — and it only took the phone repair guy literally two seconds to see the difference. He knew immediately that *what I thought was the obvious problem* wasn't actually the issue at all.

And by the way, I had never gone to the store before. This was a new store that I've never been into. So it's not like this was the person who had sold me the phone in the first place, like he was not the one who put this hard plastic protective screen cover on my phone last year. He just knew what the problem was because it is his literal job to know things like this, to be able to recognize the difference between a cracked phone screen versus a cracked, protective cover. 

Different perspectives, and most importantly, expertise, matters a lot. And this is true in all aspects of life and business: What seems like the obvious problem to us often is not the real issue at all, BUT we cannot see past the surface level to even consider the idea that there might be something else going on.

It did not even occur to me that it could possibly be anything besides the screen itself cracking. And this is true for you in your business as well.

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What you think is the problem in your business probably is not the real issue — but you are incapable of seeing the real problem, because it's not your area of expertise. 

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It is not your area of expertise to be able to know what the real problems are, and what you have been struggling with for a year is something that could potentially be resolved within 20 minutes when you have an expert on your side. You are also very likely holding yourself back and getting in your own way due to misplaced assumptions. 

All of this is where I come in: My expertise is in identifying your actual business problems and pinpointing the solutions to those issues.

The work we do together can resolve issues within the space of minutes that you have otherwise been struggling with for months or years. And this is something that my coaching clients tell me all the time, by the way, that they have been struggling with something for months or years and we solved it in a single coaching call or within three minutes on a coaching call.

That is how fast we can deal with these sorts of issues, when you have an expert by your side supporting you and helping you and guiding you!