Transcription
You can learn anything in two weeks. And I know that sounds insane to most people, but I'm not talking about mastering a skill in its entirety. Obviously, that takes like 10 years. I'm not talking about mastering any specific topic. I'm talking about making substantial progress toward a goal in your life in 2 weeks. You can learn enough in that time frame to achieve incredible results. And if that doesn't make you extremely excited about how much you can accelerate the progress toward the big milestones that you're trying to achieve in life, like making more money or learning an instrument or learning a language or learning a software like After Effects or Photoshop or learning AI, then I don't think you understand where I'm coming from just yet.
Now, the problem is that most people have become wired to think that success stems from sticking your nose in textbooks for 12 plus hours at a time to study for an exam where 95% of the knowledge you learn goes out the window. And then when it comes time to getting a job or even just getting real world results by applying that knowledge to your daily life, I would argue that less than 1% of it applies. You hear stories all the time of, oh, I went to college, got a degree, then either got a job in a completely unrelated field simply because I had a degree or got a job in the field I was trying to go into, but none of it applied because I had to learn on the job. You actually have to learn how to do things by doing them. Shocker. And the other thing there is that you're learning all of this stuff that doesn't even apply to your daily life. You're putting off your life and your progress for four to eight years, depending on how long you go to school. Because the knowledge, you're not applying it to your life right now. You're delaying your development and the progress you can make until you achieve this point of status that you're given by society to get a job that you're stuck in for the rest of your life. So, in other words, and to round this all out, you're probably completely wasting every second you spend learning. And that is not an exaggeration. Schools train you to learn extremely slow. And if learning allows you to be useful and get what you want out of life, imagine what you could do if you actually spent time learning how to learn. If you knew how to actually learn, how to learn fast, then you could achieve 10 goals in the same amount of time that it would take the average person to achieve one. And they probably wouldn't even achieve that one until they graduated school or learned enough. So that's what this video is for, is to learn exactly how to learn anything fast. And this isn't going to cover all of the science and the psychology and all of the learning tips. This is going to just be completely focused on what you need to do. And it's pretty freaking simple. But sometimes the simplest things are the most complex things in the world for the a person to wrap their head around and actually get themselves to do it. So we're going to go over three insights and if you can actually internalize these things, you will be able to learn anything fast.
The first insight is that skill acquisition equals technique stacking because everything you can do is a skill. That should blow your mind. That sentence alone should cause something to click and just make you realize, holy crap, I can do so much in my life. Everything you can do is a skill. That means if you want to get into a better relationship or you want to make new friends or you want to start a business or you want to improve your career or you want to improve your articulation, your persuasion, you want to be able to talk to people better, you want to improve your body, anything that you have control of, right? The stoic philosophy of control what you can control. That puts life into perspective for you. Because if you can't control something, you can control your reaction to it. So you can control how you perceive life and how you act in life and you can achieve the things you want to achieve. So if you can't control something, you can control your reaction to it. You can control your mind and ease most of the pain in your life or at least learn how to transmute that pain into calm. You can neutralize it. You're not going to experience some kind of euphoria all the time, but you can be okay with where you are even if negative thoughts pop into your mind. That's a skill in and of itself. Now, if you can learn something, that means that you can practice it to the point of it becoming second nature to you. So, you can kind of slice through life with elegance and grace once you stack enough of these skills. You think of a guitar player who can nail a solo without even thinking about it. You think of a professional basketball player who can shoot three-pointers on demand with a 99% success rate. You aren't at that point yet in whatever it is you want to do. It's going to take some effort and some persistence to get to that point. But once you do in multiple areas of your life in health, wealth, relationships, mindset, mental health, whatever else there is, imagine that you just master those four domains. Mind, body, spirit, business, and your life is pretty good, if not in the top 1%.
Now, with that said, most people try to learn skills as a whole. They say, "I'm going to start a business." and they start to learn about business. You don't learn about business. You don't get a business degree to start a business. There is no skill that you can learn that's called business. I think Naval Ravakant said that you don't learn business. So, let's make something more practical. Okay, I want to acquire the skill of playing a guitar. That's still that's the whole skill. That's a massively disordered task that you're allowing into your mind and it's not ordered. Your focus is going everywhere. Your attention is already split. in so many different directions, overwhelming you to the point of thinking you can't do it. I mean, when you say you want to learn the guitar, you're talking about 5 to 10 years of study and practice. There are tens of thousands of books, YouTube videos, articles on the internet, and just people who want to tell you what the best way to learn the guitar is. And so, you just get split. You get split in half. You have to understand that these things can't teach you how to play the guitar. They can only show you things that you can experiment with. Because when you're playing the guitar, think about it. When you are actually playing the guitar, are you like, "Oh, I'm hitting an E chord. Oh, I need to mute right now. I'm doing this." Once you're good at something, you just do it because it's a part of you, right? You've changed the neural pathways in your brain so that you are a guitar player. You can do that thing. It's like driving or like walking at that point. It's just second nature. So, how do we shortcut learning new skills? How do we cut through all of that noise and ensure that we're only learning what's necessary to make progress toward playing the guitar, making money, whatever it may be? It's by realizing that skills are composed of techniques. So, if I want to learn how to play the guitar, I don't start learning, I start playing. Because the entire purpose of playing the guitar is to play a song. So, you start there. That's step one. You start with the purpose. You don't start learning. You start with the purpose. What are you trying to achieve? But now you're in a dilemma, right? You go to play the guitar and you don't know how to play it, right? You have a song in mind. You have the purpose. You know what you're trying to do, but you can't do it. So, what do you do? That's when you start learning in the traditional sense, but now your learning is focused. You're not reading an entire textbook. You're finding that little technique that you need to know in order to reach the next step of achieving the goal you're trying to achieve. So, if I'm trying to play the first note and I don't even know how to read it, then I'm going to look up how do I read I'm going to look up sheet music, right? A cheat sheet for sheet music so I can start to understand, okay, that's a that's a a note. And then I look further. Okay, how do I play that on the guitar? Okay, it's this certain finger placement. Good. Got it. Okay, sounds decent. And then from there, if you repeat that process of trial, experimenting with things, and error, correcting yourself or learning the specific knowledge you need to know in order to achieve the unique goal that you set out to achieve, you'll probably end up playing the song on the guitar. Even if it sounds kind of terrible, you'll probably do it. And then the more you practice, the more you'll be able to do it. And I don't even think it would take two weeks, but within two weeks, you can learn how to play that song on the guitar. And then you can continue stacking and then when you move on to the next song, you already have this group of techniques that you've learned before that will make it easier to learn the next song. So let's say you learn the next song in a week and then the next one in 3 days and then you can learn one song a day. By that point, you have most of what it takes. You have 80 to 90% of the fundamentals of playing the guitar under your belt. And then it's just a matter of showing up every day, playing the same thing and slowly increasing the level of challenge you're taking on over time. And when you do that over the course of 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, that's one thing that we actually need to talk about is why are you learning? What's the purpose of you learning? What's the entire goal? If you're just learning things to because you're bored and it doesn't serve any any utility to your life or increase your value or be become a part of who you are, then why are you learning them, right? If you aren't going to do it every day for the rest of your life, then you either need to identify that you've been doing something that you don't plan to do for the rest of your life and start to work on eliminating or replacing it. Or you need to not learn that thing at all because then why are you learning it? For entertainment, sure, that's fine. For a short-term hobby, sure, that's fine. But if you aren't where you want to be in life, those things, those short-term hobbies aren't going to help you.
Now, we just talked about learning how to play the guitar, but I want to talk about something more practical for creatives. Most of you in my audience are creatives. So, think about learning Photoshop or After Effects or Adobe Premiere, right? These things that if you learn them, they substantially increase your ability to create something better. They increase your ability to take your mind and put it into the into reality. Now, while most people when they want to learn this, they go and they watch an hour-ong tutorial that teaches you every single [ __ ] tool that lives in the Photoshop sidebar. Again, you're learning 95% of 95% of the thing you're learning in that video. You're not going to apply. You're wasting your time. When most people are doing that, you start with what you're trying to do. You're trying to create an image. And the thing with that is you have no business learning Photoshop, if you aren't actively working toward a goal that requires it. Because when you have a goal and you need to learn the skills or the software or the things in order to achieve that goal, you learn it that much faster. If you're just learning Photoshop because you're bored, again, go and read a fiction book instead. You don't learn skills for entertainment. You learn them for utility. So, you have this image that you want to create. Let's say you want to put a tree on a different background, but you don't know how to do that, right? So now you narrow what you learn to how to remove the background from a tree. And when you watch a few videos on that, you realize that there are many ways to do that. So you try them out. You experiment and you realize, okay, this specific technique for selecting and masking an object is better to do with a tree than with just a plain object because a tree is much more complex. you have a lot more things that you have to remove. And if you do it another way, it may not come out that well. And so once you accomplish that, once you remove the background from the tree, then you solidify that little piece in your mind of, okay, I can use this technique. I know this technique exists. I can do it that much faster the next time. And with that, and for those that understand Photoshop, you understand that selecting and masking objects gets you like 50% of the way through Photoshop. like you know mo you know how to do many many things if you know how to select and mask an object as those techniques stack you've not only saved yourself countless hours of learning nonsense but you can effectively create most things that you set your mind to onto insight number two we need to understand progressive overload of the mind because skills are groups of neural pathways that form with repetition and practice. So if skills are a group of these neural pathways, we can think of a technique as a single neural pathway. They are a single piece of the skill puzzle. And when you collect enough pieces to the point of seeing 80% of the image that the puzzle's trying to create, you can infer most of what you need to know in order to see results. So if you think of a puzzle, right, the puzzle that isn't put together yet is the skill that you're trying to learn. And once it's once you can actually see the full image by putting the puzzle pieces together, that's when you've mastered the skill. But by learning these techniques, you're you're putting together little pieces on the puzzle until you reach 50 60 70 80% of seeing the image. From there, you can infer what it's going to look like, right? Even the empty spot, you can think, okay, I can kind of form an image of what's trying to happen here. The same thing happens with skill acquisition. The more you learn, the more effective you get very quickly. As an example, if you're trying to speak Spanish and you understand a few techniques to use to speak Spanish, you can say something like, "What can I buy water?" And most people will understand what you're trying to say, right? You don't have to exactly say, "Where is the best place to buy water bottles?" Because they can infer what you're trying to say. Are you a master at the skill? No. Are you continuing to practice? Yes. But you can still do something. You can still make progress toward the goal. You're not blocked. You're not just sitting around doing nothing because you don't have any form of the skill to actually do the thing you want to do.
Now, we need to take a look at a more difficult example because something like playing the guitar or learning Photoshop or learning Spanish, those don't have any risk, right? They're not tied to your self-worth or your ego or your survival per se. So if we look at the example of making money, you say making money is a skill or un being unable to make money is a skill issue and people start to go insane because they're like no it's not a skill. It's determined by this this this and this and I'm oppressed and I can't I can't learn anything that would allow me to make more money. And the same thing happens here with like making new friends or getting into relationships is that when your self-image and your emotions and your survival and your sense of who you are, I think I already said that when those come into play, all of these distractions stop start popping into your mind and you can't even take the first step toward doing the thing. As we talked about previously, control what you can control and you can practice that to the point of becoming very good at it. But the thing about money is that most people for most people it's difficult for them to see money as something within their direct control because they carry the burden of conditioning. Their mind being programmed by their teachers, their parents, and other life experiences that influence their perception of money. And while you can't control that, you can control your reaction to those impulses that pop up when someone says making money is a skill or going up and talking to new people is a skill and you instantly react in some negative way and prevent yourself from doing it. But remember, you can control how you react and that alone is a skill that will allow you to learn many other skills faster. If you were to peel back all of these irrational thoughts that are just clouding your head around money and other things that you want to achieve in your life, the things that are preventing you from execution and actually starting doing the thing, you would realize that the ability to make money can be learned extremely fast. I'm not talking about a get-richqu scheme type of fast because that's like here's a business model, take this, don't learn anything, copy exactly what I was doing, and then continue doing that until you get rich quick. Those don't work. What I'm saying is that making money, the skills that compose what making money or business is can be learned extremely fast if you don't let your mind distract you away from that thing. It's just like hitting a three-pointer, right? a beginner that has just picked up a basketball and can barely dribble, it's it's going to be all luck for him to hit a three-pointer. But a pro can hit it 99% of the time. Now, a professional at business or whatever it is, the people who are making a hundred million plus or have billion-dollar valuations, you don't even have to be there to make life-changing money, right? You have to be 20% or 30% or 40% of the way there. And that can be done within six months. Six months is all you need to change your life. If you can simply focus for that amount of time on learning the techniques you need and practicing them to make money, you get to 20 to 30 to 40% of the skill learned and you can make 100,000 a year, 200, 300. It's probably a solid range that that's what most people are trying to make. And they assume they have to reach that 100% level. They have to be the professional NBA player when you don't even care about getting that far in business. So you're not chasing a unicorn valuation of a startup. I've had a few people tell me that I'm very good at breaking things down and making them seem like they aren't that daunting. And it's the same thing with money because I've realized that myself. So if you want to make money, you start with the purpose to make money. In order to make money, what do you need? Something to sell and someone to buy it. If you don't have an idea on what to sell, then you go and search for specific knowledge that teaches you about coming up with a profitable product idea. If you want something like that, I've written many of them before. I'll link one in the description below, which is like a mega guide to creating a product. Now, if you continue to keep your mind at bay during this process, you end up building the product. I've worked with many creators, many businesses, many brands, and when they're just starting out, they have this product idea, and then a year later, I ask them, "Hey, where's this product?" And they're like, "Oh, I didn't even start building it." You don't have the chance to make any money if you do not have a product or service to sell. It's quite obvious, but your mind is just getting in the way. You haven't mastered that skill, but now you have a product or you went the other way. You did something else first. That's fine. Let's say you have a product. Now you don't have people to buy it. So what do you start researching? How to generate traffic. You find out that you can start a personal brand. You can post social media content. You can do SEO. You can do cold outreach. You can do Facebook ads. You have all of these different techniques that you can use. All of them work. Some are better than others only in the context of your specific situation. For someone who doesn't have any money, then Facebook ads may not be the wisest idea to go for. If you're just a beginner, then it's probably social media. I've talked about this many times before. Social media, personal brand, something of that nature where you don't have to spend anything and your success is completely dependent on your skill. That's the thing I love about social media in general is that it's just a battleground for people who have the highest skill. If you aren't doing well on social media, you can blame the algorithm. You can blame other things, but I guarantee you 95% of the problem is that you just aren't good enough. And again, the reason you're thinking about the algorithm and all of these other things and considering quitting is because you haven't mastered your mind. And that alone, all of these emotions that are circulating, all of these negative thoughts are impacting your ability to do good work. So your skill, let's actually, there's something here, right? I keep saying that you have to master your mind. It can distract you from all these things and you learn this skill. There's some concept here where the skills that you do have can be at a specific level. You can be at level 50 in Photoshop, but if you are trying to perform, if you're trying to use that skill from a negative and narrow state in your head caused by stress, anxiety, all of these negative thoughts and emotions, that skill level decreases by a lot. You're operating at a 10, a level 10 on Photoshop when you're actually a level 50 when you operate from a place of calm. So, it's like a double whammy, right? You've learned all of this stuff about business, but since your mind is just super narrow and stressed out, you're you still feel like a beginner. Now, how is this progressive overload of the mind? Because if you want to bench press 315 lbs, let's say benching 315 lbs is the same as making a million dollars. You don't start by putting 315 lbs on the bar and just crushing yourself and probably dying, especially when you've never lifted a single weight in your life. No, you don't do that. You start with the bar and then once that becomes easy, then you add 10 lb plates on. Then you add another 10 lbs, then 45. And then over the course of 3 years, potentially more depending on how focused you are, right? Many people can speedun hitting 315 lbs on a bench if they don't get distracted and start doing all of these other exercises and switching training programs and other things. If you were solely focused on benching 315 lbs, you would hit it much faster than the guy who is very fit, goes to the gym every day, does all of the right things, but simply because you're focused on the goals and moving the le levers and needles to reach that specific goal, then you're going to achieve it so much faster. I've been in the gym for 10 years. I don't give a [ __ ] about benching 315 lbs. I'm strong. I can probably bench like 285. I could actually probably bench 315. I just haven't tested it in so long. But it could have taken me 3 years. I remember the first or second year that I started lifting in high school in after school weights. My friend Jerry and I were just going back and forth. We were in the gym every day. All we cared about was bench. I got to 275 lb max. Like by year two, it was extremely fast because that's all I cared about. My nutrition followed that. My life followed that. All I was watching on YouTube was how to lift more. The same thing applies with skill acquisition and achieving the goal you want to achieve in your life.
Now, insight number three is a missing ingredient to learning absurdly fast. And that's that rapid learning requires pure focus. Pure focus. I don't think many people in today's world have actually experienced that pure focus. Just you and the task and the skill you're trying to learn. No thought, no emotion, no distraction. And a distraction is any person, place, or thing that pulls any thread of attention away from your goal. You literally cease to exist and you become one with reality. Input and output merge. Every slice of information that goes into your brain is instantly transformed into raw material that is put into reality like a lock and key. You enter a period of intensity where your mind collapses on a clear goal. Pattern recognition kicks into overdrive. Books, content, music, and conversations gain an entirely new dimension. Reality becomes the source of inspiration as it always has been and will be. But you don't have distractions pulling you away from that connection with what is. For most of the time, for most people, this doesn't happen, right? Learning is a slow grind that you hate doing. In that case, you may benefit from a prompt I've created before, which is a deep work coach that helps you structure your deep work sessions and get into the flow state. Again, that's in the description as well. But if this is you, if this if learning is just a slow grind, there is one trick that I like to deploy that kind of kicks myself into overdrive and really narrows in my focus. I deploy this tool when my mind is filled with dissonance, right? When I'm I'm tired of the life that I've been living, I have an idea, a somewhat clear idea of where I want to be, but I'm just like stuck in the middle. I have something that kicks me out of that and gets me to start learning towards who I want to become. And that tool is something I've talked about before, which is called tactical stress. And this is a form of environment engineering. For myself, I was able to learn After Effects, a very complex software within two weeks because I filled my YouTube video with a storyboard and animations that I didn't know how to create, but I wanted to, right? And the thing about this is that I have to put out YouTube videos every week. It's a part of who I am. It's tied to my survival. It's ti tied to my income. It's tied to my sense of identity at this point. So, if I don't put a video out, then entropy releases, right? things start to get more chaotic, right? If I go two weeks without posting a video, my mind is racing because I don't know what to do. In that case, I have to put a video out because that's the life that I've built myself into. Tactical stress is when you put yourself in a high pressure situation that creates a strong deadline to achieve the goal you've been meaning to achieve. This could be quitting your job to make your business work or moving into an apartment you can't afford to push for that new career. This could be saying hi to the person you're attracted to. So, you have to at least start some kind of jumbled conversation. And then you either make it work or you hesitate and get crushed. Tactical stress is so effective because most people tend to fall into the idle state. They numb themselves before they hit rock bottom, never allowing the pain of where they are to outweigh the pain of where they want to be. That's when you deploy tactical stress. Right? When you notice the pain of your current situation holding you back to avoid repeating the same six months for the rest of your life, what you're doing here, this tactical stress is testing your one rep max. Right? If you go to the gym and you test your bench press one rep max, it's not supposed to be easy. you you're making this calculated decision of yes, I think I can achieve this big milestone and I'm going to literally put myself under the bar and if I don't use all of my strength, if I don't use everything that I've trained for up until this moment, I'm going to get crushed and I'm going to feel bad about that. I can try again later, but this is like this is it, right? I'm hyping myself up. I'm getting myself ready to do this and then I release and I go all in on what I've been trying to do. So, you have to mimic this in your environment. You have to put yourself in an environment that is like you're holding your one rep max on bench press, but you know you can lift it. It's it's not a one to two second thing or 10 second thing like bench pressing is. This is a 3 to six month thing, right? you're under this pressure mentally, emotionally for 3 to 6 months while you're pushing, you're grinding through that one rep max. And it feels good to do so, right? If you've ever done this, you love going to test your one rep max. It's bad to do it too often because you might get injured, but you love doing it because that's where everything you've trained for comes into play. It's not this repetitive thing. It's the the one thing that you can do once or twice a year to kick yourself to see how far you've come. So that, my friends, is the final piece to learning. If you're just stuck in this slow, boring grind, then you need to test your one rep max and push yourself toward the goal that you've been meaning to achieve. Thank you for watching. Like, subscribe, links in the description for my bi-weekly, no, twice a week newsletters. Those are on human potential, business, just becoming future proof in general. You can subscribe for free or paid. And before you leave, just like, subscribe. The button is literally right there. I always forget about it too, but I would appreciate it if you did. Thank you again for watching.