Morning Vibes With Dr. Jerry - the First - Episode 305/7 Steps To Learn and Master Anything As Quickly As Possible
Morning Vibes With Dr. Jerry - the First
Hello and welcome to
#MorningVibesWithDrJerryTheFirstEpisode305
Title: 7 Steps To Learn and Master Anything As Quickly As Possible
I hate learning.
I wanted to learn how to trade stocks and I
ended up losing my home.
I wanted to learn how to play chess better and
in one of my first tournaments I threw all the pieces on the floor and cried.
I wanted to learn to play poker and I lost
about $20,000 the first ten times I played.
I wanted to learn how to start a business.
I wanted to learn more about investing.
I wanted to learn computer programming, how to
make a TV show, how to write a book, how to speak to a large audience, how to
do standup comedy.
Heck, when I was a kid I wanted to learn how
to breakdance. I wanted to learn how to kiss a girl. I wanted and wanted.
Every time I ended up crying.
And then I learned to learn.
1) HACK THE
10,000 HOUR RULE
This rule, developed by Anders Ericsson and
popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, damaged me for years thinking I needed 10,000
hours to succeed at anything, states
that you need 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” to reach master-level
potential.
For instance, as Gladwell writes in “Outliers”
(but Ericsson disputes in his book “Peak”), The Beatles got their 10,000 hours
playing 20 hours a day in strip clubs in Germany before they wrote their first
album.
Mozart played piano for 10,000 hours by the
time he was 12 years old.
Story after story.
So I felt frustrated. I feel frustrated.
I’m 50. Sometimes I feel like it's too late
for me.
I only like to learn something if I can be
among the best.
If I can reach my potential.
Potential enough to see the nuances in
something I love so much I want to get good at it.
I’ll be dead after another 10,000 hours of
learning.
But now I’m convinced the 10,000 hours can be
skipped.
Here’s how.
2) PLUS,
MINUS, EQUAL
PLUS
Find
Mentors.
A mentor can be real (someone who is willing
to help you analyze your mistakes), or virtual (read books).
Both real and virtual are good.
For anything you are interested in, you should
read 100 books a year. You should watch 100s of videos.
We
have mirror neurons that learn by watching or reading our virtual mentors. It’s
as if we download their lives into our brain and the mirror neurons think that
their experience are ours.
For instance, when I wanted to learn how to be
a better public speaker, I would watch videos of great public speakers right
before I had to speak.
When I played in chess tournaments I would
play through the games of world champions so I could learn more how they
thought about the game.
And every time I lost a game I went over the
game, move by move, with a grandmaster who I paid to coach me. He would set up
similar positions to my losing position and we’d play game after game until I
mastered the nuances.
When I wanted to learn about investing I read
every investment book I could find and spoke with 100s of other great
investors.
When you read, to maximize what you learn:
immediately after reading a book write down “ten things I learned”. Else, you
won’t remember more than 1 or 2 things at best from the book.
I’m trying to learn Standup Comedy now. I
capitalize it because it’s that important to me.
It’s the hardest skill I’ve ever had to learn.
I’m in year two. I probably watch 20 videos a
day. I videotape myself on stage 4–6 times a week. And I read books about and
by comedians.
And, fortunately, I have a Podcast. So I ask
great comedians to come on and I can ask them any question I want.
EQUALS
This is so important it really deserves its
own letter. This one category alone, “Equals”, is worth about 4,000 of the
10,000 hours.
Find
people who love what you love and spend as much time talking about this shared
area as you can.
If you are all equally striving and finding
your own path through learning this new skill you all want to share, then you
will build community and learn together.
When I was learning poker, , my friends and I
would compare notes on every difficult hand we played during an evening.
When I was learning investing, , I’d talk to
friends in every area of investing (day trading, arbitrage, value investing,
special situations, quantitative, etc etc) and we’d share notes and quickly
learn through the experiences of each other.
Why not do this with mentors?
Because the mentors have so far passed this
level they are not always able to get into the weeds in the same way as the
Equals.
MINUS
Explain what you are learning while you are
learning it. Two reasons:
1) If you can’t explain in a simple way, then
you need to learn more. Beginner’s mind.
2) People who are behind where you are at in
learning the skill will ask basic questions that you often need to rehearse and
rehearse and rehearse. Again: beginner’s mind.
3)
MICRO-SKILLS
Every skill worth learning has dozens of
micro-skills:
For instance, when I started my first
successful business I had some natural skills at sales and technology (it was a
technology business) but I had to learn so many micro-skills in order to
succeed that it felt like I was going to die and fail almost every single day.
Here are some business micro-skills:
Sales,
Management of employees,
Negotiating,
Selling to investors,
Selling to acquirers,
Product development,
Product consistency and execution,
Motivation,
Emotional stability, and on and on.
All of the skills are exclusive of each other.
Negotiating is not the same as Sales. Product
development is not the same as management. But each skill needs to be developed
to be successful.
Chess micro-skills:
openings,
middle game,
endgame,
tactics,
positional play (which can be divided up into
about 50 micro-skills, as well as all the different types of endgames),
attack,
defense,
psychology, etc.
Standup micro-skills (I think. I hope):
likability,
commitment,
crowd work (20–50 different types of crowds,
mic work,
pacing,
stage control,
and finally humor, which includes: punchlines,
premises, tags, call backs, story telling, persona, act-outs, etc etc.
For whatever you are interested in: list the
micro-skills.
Figure out what you are good at,
what you are bad at,
and how you can learn to be better at each.
4) FAILURE
Anything worth learning, you’re going to suck.
You’re going to suck badly.
The first day you play chess: you might love
it, you might be talented, you might be confident, but you are a disaster
compared to anyone with experience who has studied the game.
The same goes for business. For investing. For
writing. For acting. For art. For creativity. For everything worth learning.
And failure is painful.
Nobody wants to lose money in poker. Or in
investing. Nobody wants to spend months or years writing a book nobody reads.
But if you love something, and you want to get
to your peak potential, your heart is going to break when you inevitably fail.
And you will fail big and horrible and it will
be like your brain and heart are torn in half.
But that’s the good news:
Because now you're qualified to study the
failure. You can go to a PLUS, and your EQUALS, and look at where you went
wrong.
You can’t learn as much from succeeding
because it’s harder to pinpoint where mistakes are (and it means you are not
taking enough chances).
Ray Dalio, the largest hedge fund manager ever; told me
on my Podcast, “Pain + Reflection =
Progress”.
Pain
is a must.
With Standup Comedy, I always say “Yes” to a
challenge.
Do comedy on a subway car? Yes.
Do comedy on a Monday night in a blizzard with
the entire audience from Norway? Yes.
Go on stage with a 102 fever and my voice
completely shot? Yes.
Then videotape. Then go over quarter second by
quarter second.
I was speaking to one of the best comedians in
the world a few weeks ago. He told me he still videotapes and studies every
single time he’s gone on stage.
Every year, every month, he’s better than the
month before.
With business, it’s difficult because a
business can take years.
But try to have mini-failures.
Challenge yourself on deadlines, challenge
yourself on customer acquisition, on customer service, on micro-execution of
product, and on and on.
Figure out the ways that you can fail, do
them, study them, repeat.
5) ENERGY
This should be the first item. Because it’s
the most important.
Without energy, you can’t learn.
If you don’t sleep enough, you’ll be too tired
and you won’t learn.
If you’re in a bad relationship, your brain
will be distracted and you won't learn.
If you don’t exercise your creativity, you
won’t be able to combine ideas and learn from "idea sex".
If
you are too anxious, you will spend too much mental energy worrying about the
future instead of learning in the present.
When I went broke for the fourth or fifth time
I finally had to take a look back and say, “What was I doing right every time I
made money?” and “What was I doing wrong”. It all boiled down to:
PHYSICAL
HEALTH: Eat / Move / Sleep
EMOTIONAL
HEALTH: Eliminate ALL of the toxic people in your life.
CREATIVE
HEALTH: Write down ten ideas a day. The ideas can be about anything.
SPIRITUAL
HEALTH: Learn how to deal with anxiety and regret.
Release control over the things you have no
control over.
Just these four things gave me so much energy,
it probably took another 1000–2000 hours out of the 10,000 hours.
6) THE ONE
PERCENT RULE:
Try to improve 1% a day at whatever it is you
are trying to learn.
This seems like a small number. Just one
percent!
But 1% a day, compounded, is 3800% per year.
That’s 37 times better than where you started
in just one year.
I had a friend who I always played chess with.
He played chess all day every day. But he never read a book on chess or studied
with anyone.
He just played the same moves and made the
same mistakes game after game. I asked him why he didn’t take the basic steps
to improve?
All you have to do is take basic steps each
day to improve as small as 1%.
He said, “Ahhh, I just like to play.” Which is
fine.
But he never got better. Chess is much more enjoyable (everything is much more enjoyable) when
you get better and when you learn and can appreciate the subtleties and the
nuances.
Everything is an art form. The greatest
artists have a vocabulary of 100,000s of patterns in their chosen field.
“Speaking” that vocabulary is pleasurable
because you can enjoy the art form more, you can succeed more easily, you get
acclamation for your success, you make friends with others who are also
successful because you speak their language - but it requires every day
learning new “words” in your art form.
Studying how Warren Buffet invests. Or how
Bobby Fischer plays the King’s Indian. Or how Richard Pryor brought his
authentic voice into his comedy. Or how Richard Branson can build and
manage 400 businesses.
Or challenging yourself to fail a little bit
each day to expand your comfort zone.
One
percent a day = 3800 percent a year.
7) DO IT
You can’t get better at chess just by reading
about it. You have to play. Then you have to play in high stress situations
(like a tournament).
You have to start a business (or work for a
startup or even work for a big business and notice their small successes and
failures).
You can't get to be great at comedy by
watching videos. You have to go on stage. Every day.
Every day.
Summary:
PLUS, MINUS, EQUAL
MICRO-SKILLS
FAILURE (Pain + Reflection = Progress)
ENERGY (Physical, Emotional, Creative,
Spiritual health every day)
ONE PERCENT RULE
DO IT (every day)
USE THE ABOVE TO HACK THE 10,000 HOURS RULE
(10,000 hours of deliberate practice gets you to your full potential)
Until I come your way
again, this is #MorningVibesWithDrJerryTheFirst
Keep it coming!!!
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Anxiety is a disorder that am finding very difficult to eliminate as far business is concerned. What might be the cause?
ReplyDeleteIt all resides in your mind
DeleteIf you tune your mind the proper way and see every challenge as something to be overcome, anxiety will fade away from you
Can't wait to come your way too. How I wish I can start with all of wish. Fear of failure, working on that sporadically
ReplyDeleteFear is the default setting of our lives because it is meant to protect us - and that is the irony - that which is meant to protect us has also become many a man's albatross as many persons fail to reach their potentials in life because of the fear of either failure or success. Overcoming fear is one thing to be done by any one who desires to live life and live it more abundantly
Delete