Today I’m going to share with you a great concept I originally learned from my friend Kevin Wilke. It’s what he calls the 4 most deadly words.

These 4 words are so deadly in fact, that using them almost guarantees you won’t be as successful as you would like to be.

The scary thing is that you probably think them all the time without even noticing - which is really bad because that means you have habit of thinking this particular way.

And those 4 words are…

“I already know that”

You may have just caught yourself thinking that right after you read those 4 words. Now that is super deadly!

What makes them so deadly?

Because the moment you start thinking you know everything already, your mind closes - even to new ideas you don’t know.

This makes it practically impossible to learn new things, and to expand your awareness and achieve greater success and breakthroughs.

This way of thinking will keep you stuck where you are currently in life. It will hold you back, and might even cause your failure. Consider this: Your current way of thinking has gotten you the results you now have. So to get different results, you must change the way you think about things.

Don’t operate from an ego based mindset. Don’t close yourself off from learning and growing because you would rather think you’re smart and know everything already. They let their ego keep them trapped.

There’s a saying I really like that goes like this: “You can be right, or you can be happy”. Now of course, we’d all rather be right AND happy, but the point is that people can be so stubborn at wanting to be right (even if they’re WRONG), that it keeps them from growing and succeeding. I know people who are like this and they continue to get the same results, nothing ever changes.

I was that same way for quite a long time. Rather than open my mind to the possibility that there may be more for me to learn, I would instead search for some sort of proof that justified what I already believed. I hate to think of all the time I wasted trying to prove my point when I could have been learning.

Sure I got to be “right”. But it certainly didn’t make me successful or happy. I just got to bask in the miserable glory of being right, and not being open to different mindsets and ideas that would have improved my life a lot faster.

These days, I’m always looking to learn. I make sure never to say or think the phrase “I already know that”, and as a result end up learning more than I ever expected.

Now you may be asking, what about things I already do know?

Good question. Let me ask YOU a question now.

Do you really already KNOW it? Do you know it in and out? More importantly, do you DO it and LIVE it every single day?

Or is the reality that you just heard about it or read about it somewhere?

There’s a HUGE difference between learning something and truly knowing it.

Knowing something means doing it, not just thinking it or learning about it.

The reality is that, no matter how much you think you know about something, there is ALWAYS a possibility to learn new things. Especially when it comes to personal growth.

There are several personal growth books I read again and again, because each time I read one of them I get something different out of it than I did before.
Why?

Because each time I read it I have a different perspective. I’m at a different stage in my life, so I see things in a completely different light.

It’s amazing how you can read or hear what seems to be the same information multiple times and each time get something new out of it. This happens all the time.

Whenever I approach a situation or begin to read/watch/hear something and those deadly words pop into my mind, I immediately catch myself and ask “What can I learn from this?”

This forces my mind to not only be open to learning new things, but actually be looking for ideas I may not have picked up the first time around.

It feels really great to walk away from something knowing more than I did before. Feels much better than thinking I already knew everything they were talking about.

If you look at anyone who is successful for the long term, you’ll notice their desire to constantly be learning new things. Successful people don’t have the “I already know that” mindset. But that mindset is certainly common among poor and unsuccessful people.

Anything can be a learning experience if you choose it to be.