The Dip

Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.

• With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.

• Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

• The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path.

• Cigarettes, it turns out, were redesigned by scientists to be particularly addictive. If you were going to draw a chart of the pleasure of smoking over time, it would look like this:

• It’s a situation where you can’t quit until you fall off, and the whole thing falls apart.

• The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.

• The Dip is the secret to your success. The people who set out to make it through the Dip—the people who invest the time and the energy and the effort to power through the Dip—those are the ones who become the best in the world.

The Dip is the reason you’re here.

• It’s not enough to survive your way through this Dip. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat it like the opportunity that it really is.

• If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.

• Most of the time, if you fail to become the best in the world, it’s either because you planned wrong or because you gave up before you reached your goal.

• When people quit, they are often focused on the short-term benefits. In other words, “If it hurts; stop!”

• Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting.

• You need to remind yourself of life at the other end of the Dip because it’s easier to overcome the pain of yet another unsuccessful cold call if the reality of a successful sales career is more concrete.

• When the pressure is greatest to compromise, to drop out, or to settle, your desire to quit should be at its lowest. The decision to quit is often made in the moment. But that’s exactly the wrong time to make such a critical decision.