This brings up a highly nuanced and crucial distinction: you can want something and be 100% committed to that thing without needing it. This is the c… - Benjamin P. Hardy

If you can get your head in that game, and actually believe you can “compete” at that level, you’ll see the “experts” work from a different angle. You’ll stop worshipping your heroes and their work. Instead, you’ll begin studying them. What exactly are these people doing differently? How was their work crafted and marketed? Where are the holes you could easily improve upon? What aren’t they doing and why? Rather than consuming your hero’s work as a spectator, you should see it as a tennis ball being sent over the net toward you. Your job now is to respond by sending something back even better.

To quote Adam Grant in Think Again: To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity . . . My past self was Mr. Facts — I was too fixated on knowing. Now I’m more interested in finding out what I don’t know. As Bridgewater founder, Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the past year.”36

An experience only becomes valuable and useful once you’ve transformed it into a GAIN.