Unlearn Before You Can Learn || Masterminds Podcast EP71

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You cannot install an upgrade on top of a corrupted file. Your phone knows this. Your mind has not figured it out yet.

In this solo episode of the Masterminds Podcast, Richie Mensah makes the case for one of the most important — and most overlooked — principles of personal growth. Before you can learn anything new, you must first unlearn what is already there. The beliefs you are holding right now — about money, relationships, success, and what is possible for you — were mostly installed by other people before you were old enough to question them. And until you examine them, challenge them, and deliberately shed them, no amount of new information will change where you are. This episode is a challenge. If you are not ready to have your beliefs disrupted, press pause now.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why you must unlearn before you can learn — and the mobile phone analogy that explains it perfectly
• The four sources of your limiting beliefs: parents, school, culture, and other people's fears
• Why the knowledge that got you to where you are will never get you to your next level
• How past pain and failure create beliefs that follow you for decades without you realising
• Why a closed mindset is the single biggest obstacle between you and wealth
• How to examine a belief and decide whether it still deserves a place in your mind
• Why the level of thinking that starts a business is not the same level that scales one

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If you aren't brave, just skip this video. If you aren't ready to challenge your beliefs, press pause and go swipe on TikTok and watch some people dance. Let's have a serious conversation right now. Are you happy with where you are in life right now? Do you feel you've done enough? Have you made enough money? Are you happy? Are you okay? If you aren't, what are you doing about it? And please understand that where you are in life right now is based on what you know up until this point. What you have learned has gotten you to the exact place that you are sitting right now. So if you want to change where you are, you need to change what you know. You need to unlearn everything that you know and learn something new. Let's use our mobile phones as an example. I hope you know that every time you are upgrading your app, it uninstalls the old version to make way for installing the upgrade. It doesn't install the upgrade on top of the old version. That's not possible because if you do that, it can clash, the code can be corrupted, there can be an old feature that doesn't work with the new features, and everything will come crashing down. So anytime that you are trying to learn new information on top of the old programming that you have, you are doing yourself a disservice. Your mind works in the same way. Every time you are trying to pile up new information on top of your old beliefs that no longer work, your mind will crash. What you are trying will not work. You need to unlearn before you can learn. So let's look at where your old programming comes from. You know, most of us have no idea how damaged we've been from our childhood. Most of your programming comes from your childhood. The childhood conditioning is many things. What your parents believed, you know, your parents' concepts on money, on how to succeed, on love, your parents' concepts formed a big part of what you believed because you saw that growing up. The second thing is school. Now, whatever your teachers believe, whatever you were indoctrinated with during school, have formed beliefs that you still hold dear to your heart and they are even part of your identity. The next thing is religion. The second thing which is forming your limiting beliefs is your culture and your community. You know, the people you grew around with, the kind of things you discuss, the kind of things that everybody believes in your neighborhood forms the person that you are today. Let me give you an example. When you are born in a wealthy community and you see the fact that your friend's father or your cousins and their whole family had a business idea and they walked into the bank and took a loan and they started a business and the business thrived, you grow up knowing that, oh yeah, it's very easy to just, you know, get capital and use open businesses and succeed. When the people five blocks away from you started to make millions of dollars and billions of dollars, all these things are very conceivable because you understand you saw people make a lot of money. But when you are in a neighborhood which believes that anybody who has money, it is either fraud or juju or blood rituals or they went to steal it or cocaine money. When everybody is discussing this, when you all go and meet at the Palm Wine joint to discuss that man who has built a new house, say, oh, say we dear Sikedro, then you grow up with the mindset that nobody can be rich to that level without doing something wrong. Which is why when you hear that Jeff Bezos is a billionaire, you know that he made it by working hard. But when you hear that your uncle, Kofi, has bought five new cars, oh, CK Dro. Because in your community, in your culture, that is the belief. So it limits you. And now, what something like this do? I talk about this all the time. That when you have negative beliefs on money, how do you expect to become wealthy? Because if your mindset is that anybody from your community can only make money by either being immoral or illegal, then because you don't want to be immoral or illegal, you will never figure out how to make money. So you have to unlearn those beliefs before you can actually learn the new beliefs you can build wealth on. The third source of a lot of limiting beliefs is your past failures and pains. You know, you try something once and it doesn't go well, and you now form a belief that either I'm not good at this or this thing is not good for most people, or this is just a horrible experience. Let me give you an example. You are in class three, and they call you in front of the class, or they call you to assembly in front of the school and say that you should come and read a poem. And you get in front of the school and you are shy because this is your first time standing in front of people speaking, and you come, my name is and suddenly your friends are all laughing at you. You go to school the next day when they see you. Look at Kofi Menu. Your friends are all making a huge fun of you. So now you decide that public speaking is not for you. 20 years later, you have a big opportunity. You've done so well in your job. Right now, you are a top engineer in your company, and they say, Oh, they are looking for you to give a TED talk, or they are coming, they are doing a CEO summit, and they want you to be the keynote speaker. And you remember, my name is and you say no, I cannot speak in public. Because you have formed a belief based on your past pains. This thing happens to us, ladies, ladies. I'm talking to you. You were in SS, and some boys show you mafia. So right now, your anthem is men are scam, men are scam, men are, oh my god. So now you meet a good man in your late 20s or your 30s, and you don't know how to handle a good man because you are consistently insecure based on Kofi Menu, what he did to you in senior high. We form limiting beliefs because of our past pains. The only way, see, like as I've given this example, the only way someone who has found a new love can have a healthy relationship is by unlearning what Kofi Menu did to them. Oh, Kofi Menu, I'm sorry for the examples. Unlearning what Kofi Menu did to them and relearning what a positive, healthy relationship looks like. The fourth source of limiting beliefs, which is the most ridiculous, but it happens all the time, is other people's fears. So you are a talented dancer, you are dancing in school, everybody is giving you fans. And then you are you go home, you are dancing, and your uncle says, Hey, you can dance. So then you tell uncle, say, yes, when I grow up, I want to be a big dancer like dance God Lloyd. And your uncle tells you, hmm, me too. I used to dance when I was in school. I tried dancing and I never made money. Dancing there is not a good profession. You won't make money from it. And you get heartbroken and you never try and follow your passion because your uncle Kofiminu could not succeed as a dancer. You are letting other people's fears form a belief for you. Why? That is the most ridiculous one in all the different ways that you can build limiting beliefs. Someone else's fear. Because your father tried to start his pineapple selling business and it failed. So, right now, that you also want to start selling pineapples, your father says, Oh, pineapples, yeah, they don't sell in this area. So you don't try. You are letting someone else's pain affect you. Because your mother was heartbroken when your your father cheated on her with you know the secretary and left her and went to marry somebody else. So you grew up hearing your mom say, men cannot be trusted, men cannot be trusted. So as you've grown up and you found a good man, you are treating this man like he's your father who ran away. Don't let other people's pain form your limiting beliefs. So now, the problem is not that these beliefs exist. The problem is that most of the time we don't examine the belief itself. Is it a legit belief? Should I actually be afraid of men? Should I actually be afraid of women? Should I be afraid to start a business? When my uncle started his pineapple business, what went wrong? Were the pineapples you're selling tasty? Did he set up at the right place? Was his stand attractive? Was he selling rotten pineapples? What actually went wrong? Or is it just that maybe the belief is accurate and pineapples don't sell? If you grew up, like I mentioned, knowing that love doesn't work because your parents' relationship didn't work, or your auntie and her and your uncle broke up when you were very young, so love doesn't work. Have you examined that belief? Were they meant for each other? Were they compatible? What went wrong? Did they go through a crisis that broke the relationship? Is it real that love doesn't exist? Or is what you formed your belief like an exception? Is it something that led to it? You were taught something in school. Does it still hold? You know, when we were growing up, we were taught the kind of professions that you need to do, the kind of professions that are going to make you rich. Most of those professions right now can easily be replaced with somebody who knows how to do AI. Is that still the profession that you want to concentrate on? Do your beliefs still make sense? You knew that everybody who is rich did something illegal to make money. As you have grown up and you've worked under different bosses, your boss, did they make money illegally? As you are seeing people buy stock and become wealthy, as you are seeing people open businesses and make so much money. Are they doing anything illegal? Do your beliefs still hold? Examine that belief. Aside examining the belief, also remember the fact that most of these beliefs were set for you, they were pushed down on you as a child. You were told what to think, what to know, what to believe. You never got the chance to make up your mind for yourself until you grew up. Now, most of us, when we grow up, don't take the time to edit our beliefs. We don't take the time to form our own opinions. Your father was a Chelsea fan. He took you to every Chelsea game. So now what are you? You're a Chelsea fan. Your father bought stocks when you were five years old, and he bought the wrong stocks and lost everything. So you grew up knowing that, hey, stocks dear, don't go there. You can lose all your wealth. But now, as you've grown up and there are podcasts and their financial advisors and all these people, and they are showing you the right way to invest in stocks. Do you still want the belief that somebody else instilled in you to prevent you from becoming wealthy? Or will you unlearn what you were made to believe? Now, this is the next reason you need to unlearn before you can learn. Take this very personally. The level of knowledge that got you to where you are is not the same that is going to get you to your next level. Let me repeat that. The level of knowledge that got you to where you are is not the same that is going to get you to your next level. What you needed to know to reach here is not what you need to know to keep going. Let's say when you start a business, right? For anyone who started a business, you need to understand that starting a business needs you to be a generalist. You need to know a little bit of everything. You need to be a finance person, admin, marketer, sales, social media, graphic designer, everything some. You will do that in the beginning because you are the only employee. After your business matures and reaches a certain level, now the skills you need to develop is no longer about being the man doing everything, but you need to become a teacher who is now employing people and teaching them the things that they've been doing, the things that you have been doing. So that you need to be able to spread your wings. You need to have room to do more, do only the high-level tasks. So you need to have more people who are helping you out. So your set of beliefs needs to go from I can do it by myself to I can build a team to do more. So the first stage is you need to be the kind of person who's self-efficient. Then the second stage is you throw away that belief because that will no longer keep you going to becoming the leader of a team that can do more. Then the next level is when the business needs to grow again, it can't even just be about the small team that you are interacting with personally. Now you need to build systems that help the company to thrive on a major level so you can scale up. So at every point in time, you need to shed your old skin and develop new beliefs that can take things to the next level. You know, I learned this the hard way. When I started my business, it was a one-man show. So I do things very quickly. Then it became a three-man show. So we just sit around, have a discussion, we act, we move. And at that stage, I always used to complain about bureaucracy. I always used to complain about these kinds of businesses that when they need to take a decision, they have to have five Zoom meetings and send 20 emails. I used to complain, oh ho, why is there such a long email thread before decisions are taken? As I grew up and my business scaled up more and more, I started to understand the reason why you cannot leave decision making to every single person in the business. Because now one thing somebody does here affects somebody in a very far part of the business. So there needs to be a system, a coordination, a coordinated attempt to get things done. And I started to become the bureaucratic person that I used to complain about when I had a small business. So every level in the set of beliefs that you need to have, if you are not ready to unlearn and learn new things, you will collapse. Another example is money making. You know, the frugality and the mindset of spending less, which will help you to earn more and start becoming rich, is very different from the mindset that you need to invest and take big risks and build wealth. So the type of person you need to be to come out of poverty is not the same type of person you need to be to build real wealth. There are different stages, and at each stage, you need to forget what you knew, forget what's got you here and learn something new to grow. Now let's talk about the most unfortunate type of people. People who have a closed mindset. You know, a closed mindset is that person who has decided something and will never move from that position. Let me give an example. Oh me, I don't know how to dance. Oh me, I can I can never become rich. Basically, anybody with a closed mindset is so definite in their beliefs that they don't open their minds to the possibility of something else. And bear in mind, your beliefs should change because life is dynamic. Maybe when you were in senior high, you could not dance. Because at that time, you know, they were cracking. I remember the cracking days. Yeah, you could not dance. But right now that we are in the TikTok era of eh, eh, eh, maybe this one you can do some. So maybe if you tried now, you could learn. Nothing is set in permanence. The beauty of life is how temporary it is. So you should never hold on to any belief so strong that you cannot shake it off. You need to realize that everything which you believe to be true, you can get new facts that will let you see it wasn't true to begin with. Or maybe things have changed. Don't be that person in 2007 who was against cryptocurrency, and in 2026, you still say cryptocurrency is the worst thing to happen in the world. Have an open mindset. Maybe the same way cryptocurrency made other people wealthy, it could make you wealthy too. Maybe too, you will fail. But still have a mind of the fact that things are possible. I'm going to say something that people are going to get upset about. No one has more knowledge than a poor man. A poor man knows everything. They will advise the rich man on what to do with their money. They will advise the rich man on how to make more money, yet they don't know how to make money. You know, we do a lot of these videos, and I come and see, sorry, you that you are coming to comment, you, the poor man that you are coming to comment, I come and see people comment and say, it is not true. It will not happen. Like I remember when I did the video telling people a very basic fact on compound interest that if you invest 20 CDs a day over 20 to 25 years, you will become a millionaire. It is a fact. It is not an opinion, it is a fact based on an investment rate between 10 to 15 percent. You will become a millionaire and you come and see the poor people in the comment. It is not true. Have you considered inflation rate and have you considered this? It is a fact, but your closed mindset is preventing you from understanding to try it. See, wherever you are is based on the knowledge that you have. So if you are poor, please understand the fact that you don't know how to become rich. If you did, you would be rich. I'm calling a spade a spade. A lot of people think that wealth is something that you just build. No, money comes from ideas. When you have an idea of how to make money, you will make money. It's that simple. So when you are not making money, understand that you lack ideas. So when people are showing you the way, instead of arguing and expecting a different way, listen. When somebody who has built wealth is coming to tell you that if you do this, if you invest over this period of time, if you do business, if you put aside 80% of your income, if you do this and you do that and you do that, it will work. And then you come in the comments and you are telling this person they are wrong. They should show you the real way. Do you know the real way? If you did, go and make it. Have an open mindset. Start realizing that, oh, maybe because I have thought this thing was wrong for so long, that is why I have not made it. You know, there's a running joke where they say you are only broke until you are 29. After 29, And you are poor. The reason they say that is based on basic investment. If you consistently invest, you should be able to get rich, not wealthy, you should be able to get rich as you are entering your 30s, heading to your 40s. So if at that stage you've not been able to do that, then it means you were lacking some knowledge in your youth. So now is the time to get that knowledge. When that knowledge is given to you, then you do yourself gangaria. I know all, so I won't listen. Then you will stay there with your closed mindset in poverty. I know this is sounding harsh, but sometimes it needs to be given to you as the raw truth. Change your beliefs, have an open mindset, forget what you know, and learn more. When you do that, you will realize that people have been showing you the way all along. You were just too stubborn to listen. I really hope this conversation, this harsh conversation, has brought you one step closer to being the mastermind that I know you are destined to.