Transcription
Average thinkers learn by collecting information, but the top 1% play an entirely different game. In this video, I'm going to draw upon my 12 plus years as a published academic, educator, and entrepreneur to share five overlooked habits I've observed among top performers regardless of their field. And most importantly, I'll share how you can use these to put yourself in the top 1%.
Also starting with the first learning habit, thinking in systems. The billionaire investor Charlie Munger was brilliant. But that wasn't his unique advantage. After all, plenty of people have a high IQ or are otherwise intelligent, but don't think quite like Munger did. You see, his most valuable skill set was the way he systematized his learning process. In a 1994 speech, he stated, "You can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang them back. If the facts don't hang together on a lattice work of theory, you don't have them in a usable form. You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience, both vicarious and direct, on this lattice work of models."
In other words, Munger wasn't reading books simply to memorize new random facts. He was reading with a specific goal of reinforcing an existing web of ideas. Every new idea he learned had to plug into something. It had to relate to something else and only then could he recall it long term. This is what psychologists call relational learning and it's something I work to instill in all of my own students as well.
That being said, we've all been conditioned to want to hear about billionaire investors. But how about top entrepreneurs who achieved success by applying this same principle in a completely different direction? Well, José María Arrizmendiarrieta is just one such entrepreneur. Arrizmendiarrieta was someone who went all the way from being a Spanish priest to educating himself to become the startup founder of a 100% worker-owned company. He helped give birth to what eventually became the Mondragon Cooperatives, which is today one of the largest companies in Spain with over 70,000 worker owners and with sales to 150 countries.
You see, Arrizmendiarrieta didn't start Mondragon with some academic ideology he tried to preach to everyone. Instead, he began with systems thinking. He realized that the community needed a place for young people to learn technical skills. So, he started a vocational school. That school in turn produced a group of young engineers who founded a worker-owned factory. That factory succeeded and reinvested into more education. In turn, more education produced more worker-owned factories. And over time, a self-reinforcing feedback loop emerged. One which Arrizmendiarrieta was intentional about from the start.
But then what are the common principles between him and Munger here? And how can you apply these to your own life? Well, their examples both demonstrate that if you want your learning to scale beyond your mood or willpower, you have to build systems. Internal ones, external ones, it doesn't matter. But something in your life has to function as the skeleton that holds your growth upright. So ask yourself, what in your life currently forces you to learn regardless of your mood or willpower? What structure exists that your future self can't wiggle out of? Maybe it's a rotating set of reading categories. Maybe it's a weekly session where you teach someone what you're learning, which honestly is one of the most effective habits you can build. Maybe it's reviewing your decisions the way investors review their portfolios. The point is systems outperform motivation the majority of the time.
But even if you have the perfect system, you can still fail if you don't practice the second learning habit here, a beginner's mind. The famous musician Yo-Yo Ma could have easily spent the last 40 years replaying the same set of classical masterpieces. He could have played it safe, stayed adored, stayed in the environment he's the master of, but he didn't. He kept stepping into unfamiliar musical worlds, intentionally putting himself in situations where he's not the expert. As he has stated, "A beginner's mind is something that I have to practice each time I perform. What matters is how present I am at the moment of performing." It's this attitude from which his nonprofit organization Silk Road, which focuses on collaboration among diverse musical and cultural traditions, was born. It's why he's collaborated with musicians who play music from traditions most classical players barely understand. And it's why he still after all these decades talks about approaching music as if he were learning it for the first time. Each day he states, "I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life."
And this all raises an important point, namely that your own expertise can often paralyze you. It freezes your imagination in place unless you actively disrupt it with consistent curiosity. But how can you keep this mindset alive? Well, with respect to what you're best at, when was the last time you deliberately put yourself in the position of an amateur by exploring an interdisciplinary approach or even a new field altogether? For most people, the answer is somewhere between a long time ago and never. But if you want to educate yourself at the highest levels, you need that disruption.
And one way to spark that mindset is through our third learning habit, learning at a higher resolution. When people see the famous gymnast Simone Biles perform, they admire her power. And yes, that's a part of her. But power alone doesn't explain why her performance seems to almost defy physics. If you zoom in, what you find as a learning process built on surgical precision. Early in her career, when she was still in regular school, she trained about 20 hours a week. And later on, she started practicing seven hours per day. But the hours alone weren't the point. The quality of those hours was. You see, Biles is relentless about micro adjustments. A shoulder position that's 2° off, a timing issue in her block, the exact instant she initiates a twist. These aren't details she fixes once and then forgets about. They're more like live variables she's constantly fine-tuning.
In motor learning, this is essentially the idea of what's called chunking. Mastering tiny units of a skill so thoroughly that they can be recombined into something fluid and explosive. You see, the top students I've worked with don't simply repeat the basics for the sake of it, like clocking in and clocking out. No, they go into each exercise or practice session with the goal of identifying small details they can constantly refine. They focus on identifying the weakness, working on them in isolation until they've mastered them, and then finally practicing them alongside other skills to assess what remaining gaps they still have. In a very real sense, top performers look for the small things that everyone else thinks are just beneath them. But those tiny distinctions, they multiply and compound. And so, if you want to learn like that, ask yourself, what's the smallest chunk of the skill you're working to develop that you're avoiding? Because it feels too basic. Well, that might just be your Achilles heel.
One key way to solidify those basics, though, is through our fourth habit, reconstructing ideas from scratch. The great physicist Richard Feynman had zero interest in memorizing complicated explanations. If something didn't make sense, he opened a notebook and tried to teach the idea to himself in everyday language. If the explanation was somehow inadequate or vague, he didn't get frustrated. He treated it as a diagnostic. "That's the part I don't understand," he would tell himself. And then he studied only that part. Then he tried again and again until the idea felt in his words like something he could explain to a freshman. This is why his clarity was so striking. He didn't oversimplify physics or dumb it down. Instead, he made his understanding simple. Only then did the language flow. With my own students, I often don't move on from a problem with them until they can summarize the steps or ideas clearly and in their own words. And this is such an overlooked yet important habit.
But then there's a habit almost no one talks about, but which is one of the most important ones among the top 1%, namely habit five, immersive observation. The Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki creates films that feel alive because he refuses to draw from memory alone. He draws from life. He has openly criticized modern animation for ignoring real human behavior. As he stated, "Whether you can draw like this or not depends on whether or not you can say to yourself, oh yeah, girls like this exist in real life. If you don't spend time watching real people, you can't do this because you've never seen it." Some people spend their lives interested only in themselves.
In other words, Miyazaki believes you cannot draw convincingly if you're not watching real people. Real gestures, real wind patterns, real emotional reactions. As a result, his animators sketch in train stations. They watch the way children behave when they're confused or tired or quietly excited. They study how animals shift their balance or how people fidget when they're nervous. And when you watch his films with that in mind, you start noticing the details. A character leaning into a doorway because they're exhausted, or someone hesitating before speaking, or the posture of a child who isn't sure what to do with their hands. None of these things might actually catch your attention, but they create unconscious emotional impact. They make you connect as a viewer.
But how can you apply this to your own learning and performance? Well, you start by recognizing that immersive observation rests upon a key principle, namely that it is necessary to learn how to see reality clearly before you try to improve it. So, for instance, if you work with people in any capacity, try spending a week intentionally watching how people actually behave, how they talk when they're unsure, how their posture changes when they're stressed, how they signal interest or discomfort without saying a word. And you can also turn that lens inward. Watch your own behavior the same way. How does your voice change when you're under pressure? What do you do with your hands when you're uncertain? When do you stop listening? These tiny, almost invisible cues end up shaping your performance in ways you never notice until you start observing them. And once you see these patterns clearly, then you can actually start to change them.
But the most important question remains, which of these habits, if any, are you currently practicing? And which others do you still need to internalize and work on? I'd love to hear about it in the comments. And if you want to keep leveling up your critical thinking to make a massive impact not only on your own life, but also on the lives of countless others, then be sure to watch this next.