I am a snob.  I hate to admit it. I’m a snob.

This not the usual ‘I have better taste than they do’ or the ‘I am smarter than they are.’

No, this is much more insidious.  It sneaks up on you so slowly that you don’t even know it’s happening.

What is it, you ask? Well, it goes by many names – age, experience, smart, educated. It’s the thing that let’s you say ‘I know that already.’

‘I know that already’ closes the door to opportunities and learning faster than a toupee in a hurricane. It gives you permission to skip through sections, skimming the surface of the author’s work.

The sneaky way of these words showed themselves to me when I was thinking about goals in December one year. It’s my practice to review what I’ve done and set new goals for the next year. My inbox was flooded with offers for courses to help me accomplish those goals. Usually, I delete them. I am 65 years old. Been there, done that.

This year, one of those e-mails was from Tim Grahl. If you don’t know Tim, he is the #1 expert on book marketing. His blog “booklaunch.com” is filled with amazing information. He’s launched a multitude of best sellers over the years. This guy knows what he’s talking about.

His e-mail told me about his time-management course called “The Productive Writer.” I almost deleted it. After all, I had done a multitude of these with mixed results. Here’s the thing though – even with all of the time management training, I was having trouble getting my writing stuff done. I left the e-mail in my inbox. Something about it kept drawing me back. Eventually, I signed up.

As soon as I started, I knew this was different than any other time management course that I had taken and ultimately failed. My first ‘aha’ snobbery moment arrived. Tim had found a way to tailor time management to creative people and the way we work. It’s the first program that I am still using three months after I finished it.

The “Aha” floodgates had been opened and they didn’t close after the course. New things that I was trying had a gazillion moments of “I know that already” attached to them. That’s when I realized that I had turned into a snob. I was discounting information because I had seen it and lived it already and in doing that, I was limiting myself to what I knew and discounting new ways to do things.

Does this mean that age, experience, smartness, and education shouldn’t be worn with honour? Absolutely not. A life lived and the lessons learned are what makes each one of us unique and interesting. It gives us a reference point for new things and in some cases, will take away the fear. It does not, however, give us a license to be a snob.

Now that I recognize it, here are some suggestions to avoid falling into the “I know that already” trap:

1. Re-activate your curiosity – I was curious about what Tim had to say about a subject that is, frankly, flooded with experts. Because I was, I now have a new way of managing my time that meets my needs.
2. Actively listen to what is being said –  I am making it a point to set aside focused time for courses, webcasts and podcasts with no distractions. I have learned new tips and tricks that I would have missed if I had listened to it with the ‘I know that already’ mindset.
3. Remove the sentence ‘I know that already’ from your vocabulary. As soon as I did this, I became open to learning things (even some that I had seen before) in a whole new way.
4. Practice humility – I’ve come to realize that snobbery is a form of arrogance. Combat arrogance by doing 1, 2 and 3 above.

I promise you that you will learn lots of new things.

If you found this article interesting, Please leave a comment below. Also check out Tim’s site – booklaunch.com.

May your days be filled with curiosity.

Lorraine