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Justin Kan

16 Nov, 23 tweets, 4 min read

If you constantly complain that you are not good at XYZ, it means you don’t care enough.

You can get good at anything you want to.

Here’s how I went from being cripplingly shy, to being able to speak in front of ten thousand people:

@paultoo

One of my mentors and early investors in justintv, @paultoo (inventor of gmail), told me this:

“It's not about your Y intercept. It's about what your slope is.”

In other words, it's not about where you start; it's about how fast you're growing - your rate of progression is what really determines your ultimate outcome.

Here are some examples of the skills I have levelled up over the years:

Public Speaking

I often get comments praising my confidence and speaking ability. I’ve been able to speak in front of large crowds with no notes or preparation, and lead impromptu meetings with ease.

I wasn’t born like that - I used to be incredibly shy.

Like everything else, I had to go through the process of learning by putting myself out there into uncomfortable situations and improving.

Exposure therapy is one of the greatest things you can do for yourself if you want to improve at a particular skill.

I attended Toastmasters meetings, and I would have so much anxiety before I spoke on stage. I’d hate my previous self for putting myself in that situation.

But over time, I learned to accept it and be comfortable with it. With time, I was able to overcome my fear and develop into a strong public speaker.

Programming

When we started justintv, I had very limited technical skill. A lot of my friends had started learning how to program from a very young age and were light years ahead of me.

@eshear

I had learnt the basics of programming from a Threecom and my physics major at college.

Founding my first company, Kiko (a web-calendar app) with my friend @eshear forced me to learn more about programming.

I was googling JavaScript tutorials, and teaching myself how to cobble something together that resembled a calendar.

I knew next to nothing and taught myself the basics and figured stuff out by looking online - no special school required. The good news is that there are a LOT more resources available now compared to back then - so no excuses!

Management and leadership skills

I was a terrible manager when I first started out.

Unlike most people who start companies with at least a couple years of working experience, we had absolutely zero experience.

We didn’t do one-on-ones with our team members, we didn’t do performance reviews, we didn’t understand anything about goal-setting or developing a work culture.

This was all stuff that we figured out on-the-fly.

One thing that helped me improve was getting management and CEO coaches, and learning from people who were a couple steps ahead of me.

Seek mentors who are one or two steps ahead. You don’t need to go to the CEO of eBay - just talk to someone who remembers what it was like at your stage of the process.

Fitness

I used to hate working out but I knew that it would benefit me in the long term. I was determined to create a habit that I could fulfill every day.

That included finding things that were both easy, and that I loved to do. It’s really about finding your joy, and that comes from exploration.

There really is no excuse that you can’t workout for 5 minutes a day - I broke both my arms in an accident and was still doing squats every day.

Hold yourself accountable, and make your habits easy by increasing their attractiveness and lowering the barrier for completion.

The overall point is that I’m still not an expert at any of these skills - far from it.

What I want to emphasize is that I started from not that great of a place, and i’ve learned to work my way up to a level that I’m happy with.

It’s also about developing the mindset that there is nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it.

I figured out an infrastructure or framework for me to make incremental progress. Commit yourself and if you stick to it, you can be good at whatever you want.