Improvement Insights Blog
Overcoming the Frustration Barrier
Learning any new skill requires the tenacity to break through the frustration barrier. What is it and how do you overcome it? Watch now:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and the QI Macros [software].
“One of the things I’ve noticed is sometimes people will download the QI Macros software and then they’d get stuck. Well, we have a tutorial that you can use right in the software and we have an online workshop you can use to practice, but most people have a frustration barrier.
“You have to get through the frustration barrier to get comfortable with things no matter how easy they are to use. When I first developed my first website back in the late 1990s, there was no Dreamweaver or other tools to help you do that easily. No, I was doing it pretty much hard coding HTML. It was hard. I didn’t want to do it but I did anyway. I had to get through that frustration barrier. Now there’s really nice tools like WordPress that’ll help you build websites much more easily.
“Everything keeps getting easier, right? So even if it was tough a year ago or 10 years ago it’s probably [true that] somebody’s figured out how to make it easy, and that’s what I’ve been doing with QI Macros.
“So I want you to be aware that anytime you have to learn something new there’s a frustration barrier, and the best way to [overcome] that is to just go at it, you know? There’s a book called “The First Twenty Hours.” If you just go at it an hour a day for 20 days, guess what? In a very short time you’ll be proficient.
“My first improvement project just took too long, cost too much, and it was too slow and too frustrating. Then I figured out what I needed, what kind of data I needed, and then all of a sudden it got easy. All right? This is what I’m talking about. Sometimes you have to pay the price to make it through the frustration barrier to learn that new thing that you need to know. It may not be about Quality, it may be about your job, it may be about your patience, it may be about your customers, it may be about marketing, sales; whatever it is, there’s a there’s a little price to pay. You have to get through that frustration barrier to get to the other side. You know, I think they said “Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.”
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Get beyond your comfort zone, break through the frustration barrier, pay the price to get to that next level of performance. When you do, it’s going to be making it really easy to create a hassle-free America. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
