How to Learn Anything Fast | Ep 1011

In this video, I'm going to show you how to learn anything very fast, and this is these out process that I use to learn stuff. For the fast 14 years in business and more recently, I just broke the Guinness World record fastest selling nonfiction book, which generated $106 million in sales in less than three days. So if you see everyone who's moving ahead of you faster than you, and you hate that everyone's moving ahead faster than you, you might not be as smart as you think you want. Now, that has gave news and bad news. The bad news is you might not be as smart as you think. The good news is it's under control to change, and you can do it quickly. So this is the process that I'm going to walk through on how to learn anything fast. Number one, is we have to understand what learning is. All right. So what is learning? So learning is same condition, new behavior. So that means you do something different in the same exact situation. So if I go knock knock and then open the door and you say hi, this is Alex, and then I say close the door. Next time, I want you to say welcome to Starbucks. So then I go knock knock, they open the door and they say welcome to Starbucks. Send condition, knock knock, new behavior, welcome to Starbucks. To the same degree, if I go knock knock after saying that, and the person says anything besides welcome to Starbucks, that person is a little dumber than the person who got it on the first shot. The number of times it takes you to change your behavior in the same condition is the dictation of how intelligent you are, because learning is same condition to behavior. Intelligence is speed of learning. Intelligence is a rate. It's a question of speed. If you think about how you describe to me, like he's quick, he picks things up fast. So for you, there's a couple of ways to think about this. Way one is, oh, he picks things up in terms of it takes fewer iterations for that person to change their behavior. That's good. But guess what else you can do if you're somebody who didn't have that level of call it intellect, let's say it does take you more iterations. Guess what you do? You can change how quickly you do that. So some people might take three iterations to get something right, but they delay the iterations once a week, another week, another week. If you say I'm going to lock in and I'm going to do seven iterations because I'm twice as dumb as they are, but I'm going to do them all in one day because I'm going to not let any light in my room and I'm just going to lock in, then guess what? You are smarter than them because you change your behavior faster than they did on a timeline basis rather than an iteration basis. So there's two vectors you can think of here. And this is important to me to realize this. I went to Vanderbilt, Fatesy School. I think it's like top five or seven, whatever in the US right now. And when I was there, I felt like I had below average intelligence of the people who were in the room. And so I was like, how am I going to be able to beat these guys? And so I just said, oh, okay, I'll just work from the time I wake up until 9 p.m. every day. So that's what I did. From nine to nine, I used in the library unless I was in class or I was in the cafeteria or the gym. These are the only things I did. I studied and I worked out from nine to nine. That was it. That was what I did. And once I realized that, I was able to move forward a lot faster than other people, even though I felt like they had intellectual capacity superior to me. They might have been able to learn things in three iterations, but I was able to do my 10 iterations faster than they were able to do their three. It's fundamentally learning a same condition in behavior. Now, what is the skill? People have said this a lot. A skill is a scene of adapted behaviors. All right. That means you learn multiple things, same condition new behavior, same condition new behavior, same condition new behavior. When you shame those together, that is a skill. So thing one, understand what learning is. Number two, deconstruct the skill. So what does this mean? So skills are typically chunked up or chunked down. So basketball, also people like he is good at basketball. They're saying he has many skills that are related to this thing. Now, within basketball, you've got dribbling, you've got shooting, you've got passive, right? These are subskills underneath the basketball. To the same degree in business, you can be good at business, versus good at marketing, good at sales, but product, good at hiring. All of these are subskills underneath of those larger skills. Now, if we were to go even deeper than that, we also have generalizable skills across domains. So if I have great hand eye coordination, I might be better or learn something faster, like I will learn how to shoot faster, but I'll also learn how to play ping pong faster. I'll also learn how to serve a tennis serve faster, because I have generalizable skills. And so a specific skill is skill that does not generalize across domains. Now, when you have more specific skills, it's more a degree to which it generalizes rather than does it generalize or not. So I could have that eye hand coordination thing, which I pretty much generalize to anything that I use my hands and my eyes, which is a lot of stuff, right? But with shooting the specific skill, generalize over to, I don't know, chess, probably not. It's like, well, you're using your eyes and hands, but not really, it's a lot more about decision-making, right? And so, are there, are there close your hands? Would it, would that go better for beer pong? Probably, that would generalize over my foul shots versus beer pong? Probably just generalize to a great degree. Not 100%, but decent. And so the reason this is important is that people, like language matters. And so some of you will say, I want to get good at business, Alex. Business is not something you can get good at. It is a bucket of term that has many skills underneath it. And since we just defined what skills are, which is adaptive chains and behavior, you start something and you do three or four things in a row that get an outcome, right? Business has marketing. And guess what? Marketing is also a skill that is an adaptive chain. And so you basically have to keep chunking down. And so you finally figure out the skills that you can quantify in terms of behavior. And so this goes all the way up and all the way down, like reading, writing, and speaking are generalizable skills that apply to everything. Learning in and of itself is a skill. Like your ability to learn, your ability to figure it out, right? And so back to this little example I have here. Many of you want to learn more stuff. But because you have not broken down the thing you want to learn, you stare at the screen and keep searching, hoping that you are going to get some recipe. But the recipe is that you have to keep breaking it down into smaller and smaller constituent parts so that you can get it into an understandable unit that you can change your behavior within. So I say this, but that then leads to point number three. I don't run a lot of open loops, keep it spicy, which is that we have to define success. Now this is a bit of a trite term, but fundamentally this is what it is, success of the skill. And so we would need to identify the specific behaviors and actions that demonstrate mastery of each sub skill. So we want to get clearly good looks like in practice. What does this actually mean? Okay. So if I said I want to get good at foul shots, all right? So foul shots probably have different parts associated with it. There's probably going to be, I have to measure the distance, and I could probably say, what percentage of my shots did I hit within the box? Okay, what percentage of shots did I get within the, what percentage of them that I get in all together? Right? And then within that, I could probably say how many times that I finished my follow-through and like, I don't know anything about basketball. But I would be like, okay, am I finishing above my head because that's where I want the follow-through to be? And where is my shoulder position and my twisted and my straight up and my shoulder with the basket? How many times did I do this? And so you might hear this and be like, wow, this sounds overly complex. It's like, well, welcome to winning, right? We have to break things down and you have to think about yourself in some ways like a child because our ability to learn gets worse over time, right? We are less plastic, our skill at learning. So rather, our horsepower of learning is worse, but our skills at learning can get better, all right? So how do we, how do we reconcile those? If our skills get better, then it means that we are better at being specific about the thing that we need to change. Right? And if you are not specific about this things, you will wonder for a long time why you are not getting good. So you have to quantify the highest degree possible. And to be clear, you'll start quantifying things at the beginning and then you'll get better at describing them. But if you do not track, you do not care. Period on anything. In any skill worth learning, if you aren't tracking it, you already demonstrate that you don't care because there's no way for you to know if you're getting better. Hey, and real quick, I spent 200 hours this year just making this one project for you, which is the $100 million scaling roadmap. And I broke up the stages of business into 10 stages. And you can identify where you're at by simply just putting in your business information. You got acquisition.com/roadmap. And it'll spit out this custom report that tells you what the constraints are at that current level and what you need to do to graduate and get to the next level. This is our gift to you, absolutely free. On the thank you page, you can book a call with our team and we'd love to help you figure that out and ideally get past it. So that brings me to number four, which is ignore the black box. Okay. So ignore black box. Okay. So let me explain what I mean with this. A lot of times people will try and create this narrative around psychology, around emotionality, around biomolecular, whatever the hell, gobbledygook. And so I can say that it is incredibly difficult to understand why something works or why people do things. But what we can't observe is whether something works or whether they did something. And so we want to say, okay, we have this box. There is an output. Instead of trying to figure out what magic is happening inside of this box, we just want to focus first on the inputs. And what's interesting about focusing on the inputs is that the inputs themselves will give you feedback loop that is required in order to get better at the skill. So basically, being inefficient, sucking for a lot of reps will get you better at not being bad. Because you will be so bad that you'll think, "My God, I suck at this. I wonder if I get sucked less at this." And then you'll tweak a couple things and you'll be like, "Well, I'm not as bad as I once was. I'm not good." But eventually you keep doing things that make you less bad until eventually you look back and you're like, "You know, if you less bad yourself a hundred times, you're actually pretty good." And so this is where doing more in the beginning without the obsession on understanding why will get you closer to your goal because so many times people say like, "Well, I want to understand why." You want to have a narrative that someone gives you to scratch a psychological itch, not because it inherently does anything. I'm going to give you an analogy here. Imagine we do a tennis lesson. You go to a tennis program, right? And let's say you're gripping the racket. In order for you to grip the racket correctly, does the tennis pro then say, "Hey, we should really discover why you grip the racket incorrectly?" What different teachers didn't describe you proper way to hold a racket? And let's try and understand the undermining emotionality behind the grip that you have. No, they're just going to get you to grip the racket correctly. And so for you, I would encourage you to ignore people who try to put on all of these wives and psychology and the subconsciousness and the normal linguistic programming, and all this hollow below. When like, you just need to send this email, say these words, move your body in this way, use your voice like this, hold your head up, stare straight. If someone cannot tell you what to do with either your mouth or your body, they are not getting you clear directions to succeed. And so I would encourage you to use that as your razor as who is good at teaching and who is it. Because they will try to appeal to some sort of mysticism that they are tapped into the universe, like they'll anthropomorphize fancy words, the universe saying that it's whispering the secrets. Like, you can have it. It's telling you, like, no, there is observable reality. If you can describe that observable reality, by the way, very difficult. Right? Much easier to tell someone to be charismatic than it is to actually come up with these 37 activities that people then later ascribe as charisma. So, the way to think about teaching yourself is to look at situations through an observational lens, like a scientist, like somebody who does not understand the emotional context, and then say, why do, what does this person do that gets these people to smile? Output smile? What are the inputs? The inputs is this person shook that person's hand. When did he do it? When he walked in the room? Okay, did he smile? Yes. So, he walked in, he smiled, he shook their hands. How is he holding his body? Is he like this? He's like this. Okay, so I need to contract my traps and my mid-back so that I can stand up straight. Okay, when I do that, people perceive me in a different way. How do I know they perceive me in a different way? I don't. But what I do know is that they have a higher likelihood of applying with my requests. And so, this is the idea when I say, like, if I hurt myself, I'm like, listen, people will say, like, he bought because we hit his emotional trigger. Where is this trigger that we can observe that it got hit? We only know, did he buy? Did he not buy? Period. And so, we just want to manage the variables prior to the desired outcome. And can we do more of this stuff that increased the likelihood these things occur? Which, obviously, in order for us to do all of this stuff, we have to measure. And so, I said it before, but if you don't track, you don't care. And so, you have to find a way to measure your success, measure the outputs, or you will never improve. And so, what I do in my learning process for whether I'm learning from a guru, from a course, a webinar, a podcast, anything, right, is I look at the top 10%, the top 1% of people first. And then I try to observe, what do they do, not what they say about what they do, what do they do that I can replicate. And I want to give you, like, the heck of all hacks here. Most people who are good at stuff don't know why they're good. Michael Jordan, not a very good coach, player, the gut, barred on no question, right? And so, how can we have this guy who's so good at basketball, not be good at getting other people to be good at basketball, because this is another skill. Transferring skills, teaching, is a different skill than doing. And so, it's difficult because when we, this is why, if I could probably, praise for something that has been helpful for me, is that I struggled socially earlier. And so, I had to observe, like, why are they cool, and I am not. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying I am now, but I'm saying that. And for them, I was like, these guys do something different than me, because they're occupants. They're different than playing, but it's that observational muscle, which is like, I have to just only describe the world, but what I can see. And when you do that, it becomes significantly easier to break things down. Because you say, like, because the reason this is important, is because that's the only medium through which you can communicate. And so, all of the rest of the hall of blue doesn't transmit the physical plane. Now, for those of you who believe in all of the other hall of blue, I'm with you. Let's go. Let's go to manifestation. But manifest on your own time, and just focus on doing the behaviors that increase the probability of these good outcomes occur. Now, when you're doing it for yourself, unless we've observed the top 1%, top 10%, say, okay, I'm going to observe the things they do, and I'm going to replicate them to the best of my ability. You will suck, and it's probably because you have not observed all of the things they do. And so, you will have complete context to every single one of those microsteps that they did that made it good. Because if you look at a good reel and a bad reel, like on Instagram, for example, let's say you want to get better at making reels, you might not have the awareness, the perspective from which to make a judgment, the observational skill, to delineate why this is different than this. But you can't say that this sucks, and this doesn't. It's a great first step. Right? Now, if you can't even say, why does this suck first is this one? We don't know, and we don't know why it sucks. We know that it sucks. Because of the algorithm, and because of the views, and because of the likes. Right? And so, we just, like, fundamentally, all we're doing is replicating skills that we can observe in other people. And once we replicate them, at a some point, you will start to learn from first party data, meaning you will start to learn from your stuff. Okay. What do I mean by that? So, some of you guys may have seen the interview that I do with Amjad Unreplared, the CEO, the founder of Replay. We talk about how learning works. AI has to get trained on data. We have to clean data and say, good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, over and over again. Once AI can learn in the real world, the feedback loops are significantly faster. And so, it's first party data. It's it drove in the road here, and then all of a sudden, it's going to clock, do they got feedback, and went back in the lane. Right? And so, at a certain point, you'll stop relying as much on, bodily, all the people who are doing better than you at the thing. And then you will start to do a tremendous amount of volume. And then from your volume, you will look at your work. So, let's say this is the volume we did. This is all of our reps. And we say, okay. What made these different from all these? What is the difference? Now, there is for sure a difference because these are the top 10%. You might only be able to identify one or two differences. So, you will take these things that you find different, and then you will do another set of many repetitions. Well, you'll do this. And then you'll have a top 10% again. And on here, you'll get another inference of why that's the top 10%. And then, but wait, there's more. We will then go taking all those inferences. And then we have our top 10% again. And here, you get the idea. Your idea and observation density will increase like coats of paint. Every time you go over it, you will learn one more thing. But I would say that the key to learning is observation. Once you can observe the differences between current and ideal. And this is honestly the gap. People, like, I get the compliment often. Alex breaks things down in such a simple way. It's really just looking at the world through the lens of analysis, of observation and saying what is different about these things. And looking at it almost as an artist where there is no meaning behind anything. Just simply this person extended his hand, that person extended their hand, this person nods when that person talks. When that person stops talking, this person doesn't nod. Why doesn't this person nod when that person talks? Oh, okay, people determine that this person has more influence. The person who nods when the other person is talking. Okay, if I want more influence, when other people talk, I should nod. And then occasionally interject, yeah, sounds good. That's interesting. Go on. Tell me more about that. Okay, great. So that I can start observing. what else does this person do? This person, when he asks for things, takes a step back. This person does it. Okay, so when I ask for things, but when increased likelihood of compliance, I'll take a step back. And so it's these observational differences, which separate the people who win and the people who won. Now, of course, there are naturals. What I would determine as a natural is someone who observed not consciously, but still learned. So I'll explain. Many of us, we learn a lot of our stuff in our country. When you are a king and you're a toddler, you learn from your surroundings, you're two years old, you're like, "Huh, what observation is Papa doing today? I will observe him and I will model his behavior." No, all you did, and here's a wild thing, is that if you see someone get rewarded, you will automatically want to do that. What do you think testimonials are? It's modeling. Oh, that person is like me. They got what I want. Their behavior was they bought this thing. I will therefore buy the thing, model what they did, to get what they want. That's how it works. So step six is that we have to analyze the differences, analyze and iterate. Which is what this is. Look at the top 10 percent people, take their initial and then use that as backstool and then look at the top 10 percent of your stuff, look at the observational differences and keep doing it like coats of paint. Then step seven is repetition. If necessity is the mother of innovation, repetition is the father of skill. Which is that you repeat these steps over and over and over again until people call you unnatural. And so I've been, you know, blessed if you want to use that word, being good at, I was good at school. I was not bad at school. Some people are like, "I became an entrepreneur because I said to school, I was good school." I was good school and when I got into business world, I took it like a particular curriculum. I mean, like I wanted to learn all the language. I wanted to learn the lingo. I wanted to learn how it all worked. And what became difficult for me was that many people have scrapped similar things with different words and that became very confusing. And so I get asked a lot now, like, what are my primary sources of learning? Like, where do I learn? Where do I go for learning now? And the honest answer is that the vast majority of my learning is first-party. It's, we do lots of stuff. We look at what worked. And we do more of the stuff that worked and then we do it again. And then I tell you guys what I did, right? This is the process. This is what we do. Now if we're going to go into a new field, I'm going to hire experts and I'm going to hire them so that they can, they can get me on iteration nine as iteration one. And then I'll start at nine. And then my goal is to beat them at that thing. Just by simply applying this process with faster feedback loop than they have. This is important. Like, on a long enough time rise in, the speed of iteration is the only thing that matters. So think about this for a second. Your speed of iteration and or improvement from the iteration to be clear, not just changing things, but everything improvement. Your rate of improvement on a longer time rise in independent of your starting point is the most important rate that is required for you to win. The team that gets better the fastest wins on a longer time rise because your rate of growth, your rate of improvement beats everyone else. And so you mastering this process, although it may seem simple, being able to observe objectively, what is this person doing differently? Why do these videos do better? Why do these sales people? I'll convert the other sales people. And I want to re emphasize point four, ignore the black box. Do not try to explain. And like, there will be very few things that you've probably seen in my channel. I actually commit to the word why. The only things that I can say that I feel like I can say why someone does something is because they've been reinforced for doing it in the past. They've been worded for doing so or punished for doing something opposite to that. That is all. That's the only thing I'll commit to saying why? Everything else, I just know that. And so I have saved an inordinate amount of time in my development cycles by not trying to figure out why people do things. Because the reality is they don't know why they did it either. If I were to ask you why did you do X, Y and Z? You probably can't consciously answer it. Now what you might do is you might mouth noise something back to me because you've been reinforcing the past for responding to questions. But whether or not what you say is true is irrelevant. And so this is why when sometimes experts, people who have great outcomes trying to teach how they got the great outcome, their mouth words don't actually help anyone because they're just responding to a question. So if you've ever had someone saying, so I'll give you an example of this. So let's say, well I've ever had someone say like, hey, what's up? And you say, I'm good you, right? You probably don't even think about saying, I'm good. How about you or whatever? It's automatic, right? And so to the same degree, people are rewarded for answering questions to a certain way. And so is that person good when they say, I'm good you? Maybe, maybe not? Who knows? Right? And so in that same vein, when you ask someone, how did you become successful? The first time they get asked that question, they might think a little bit. And then they start using the same answer over and over again, especially if people say, ooh, so indulgence makes more fun, right? And so they get rewarded for doing that. But that has zero bearing on whether what they said is what they actually did. Or whether that was the reason that they were successful. And so there's a, there's a famous professor of Professor Bergman from Stanford who said this quote that I always think about. He said, it's better to fail in know why you failed than to succeed in not know why. And it's because if you failed in, you know, why you failed, then there's a possibility that you can course correct and then improve. If you succeed and don't know why, you won't be able to recreate it. And I'm not somebody who believe, like, like, I never want to say somebody got lucky if they're successful. It's just not really in my ethos. But over my career, I always look at somebody who, anybody who's done better than me at anything, I'm like, they've done something I haven't done, what it's right? And I'll say that honestly, I have people can say that 99, which is pretty, 99 of 100 is a lot, right? 99 times 100 when I meet somebody's better than me at something, they've done stuff I haven't done. I can name on maybe one hand people that I met. And I was like, I actually just think this was. And the thing is is that when I say that though, it almost makes me feel sick to say it because I'm like, maybe I don't have the observational skill to see what they did well. And that's still on me because me calling someone else lucky makes me better in zero ways. No ways. And so when I think about that, I would encourage you to remove luck from your lexicon. In no way am I saying that it doesn't affect things. Of course luck, you know, probably chance center is a reality of life. To the same degree, your genetic hand for whether you gain muscle or lose fat is something that you get dealt at birth. The question is, and so what? Are you going to not work out, not eat healthy, not try hard because your genetics are half as good as somebody else's? No, you still want to be cut, you still want to be in shape, you still want all those things. So guess what? You got the card that means you got to work twice hard. And so what? Right? They got lucky. And so what? You're both going to die eventually and five generations. So now your progeny won't remember what you did to begin with. And the whole point in this game was for who you become, not what you get along the way. So it doesn't matter if they got lucky. If anything, luck robs them of the opportunity to become as good as they possibly could because they want. And I'll tell you a really weird story just to show you how how messed up I am. I remember this is I was 20, 21, somewhere there, 20. I bought a powerball ticket with my girlfriend at the time. And it was like, when it was like a billion dollars, it's really crazy, right? Everyone got to take us. And I remember after we bought it that I had this or after I wanted that I had this moment of like sheer terror when the drawing was happening. And the terror that I had was that I would win. Because I thought if I win, I will never be able to prove that I could do it. And thank God I didn't win the powerball and win a billion dollars. Because if I had, I don't think I would. I don't think I'd be me and I'm very happy with who I am. And so I think that luck, as much as you could say, man, that guy's lucky. Think about how unlucky they are because they never had the opportunity to go through the call that they get to go through to become the person here and become. And I think that's something I'll rest my case on that. I think I'll reappear on it. So hope you guys did that. That's how we learned anything. At least that's how I learned shit.