You’re Not Behind: How To Become Dangerous At Anything You Do | Ep 981

I'm going to show you how to learn anything very fast. And this is the exact 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 are. Now, that has game news and bad news. The bad news is you might not be as smart as you think you. 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. So number one, that was pretty. I see that, that was all pretty. That was pretty good, hold on, we'll use the original one. That was pretty good. So 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. Same condition, knock knock, new behavior, welcome to Starbucks, right? 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 a dictation of how intelligent you are. Because learning is same condition, new 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, because I, so I went to Vanderbilt, Fatesy School, I think it's like top five or seven, whatever in the U.S. 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, OK, I'll just work from the time I wake up until 9 p.m. every day. So that's what I did. From 9 to 9, I used to do the library, unless I was in class, or I was in the cafeteria, or at the gym. So these are the only things I did. I ate, I studied, and I worked out from 9 to 9. 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. And it's fundamentally learning a same-conditioned new behavior. Now, what is a skill? People have said this a lot. A skill is a scene of adapted behaviors. All right, that means you learn multiple things, same-conditioned new behavior, same-conditioned new behavior, same-conditioned new behavior. When you chain those together, that is a skill. So, thing one, understand what learning is. Number two, deconstruct the skill. So what is this mean? So, skills are typically chunked up or chunked down. So basketball, also because 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 sub-skills underneath the basketball. To the same degree in business, you could be good at business, versus good at marketing, but at sales, but at product, good at hiring. All of these are sub-skills 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 a 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. I hand-cordation thing, which I pretty much generalize to anything, that I use my hands and my eyes, which is a lot of stuff, right? But, which is shooting the specific skill generalize over to, I don't know, chess, probably not. It's like what you're using your eyes and hands, but not really, it's a lot more about decision-making, right? And so, are there closure hands? 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 of 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 know, rather than 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 subskill. So, we want to get clear and 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 the shots did I get within the, what percentage of them did I get in all together, right? And then within that, I could probably say how many times that I've 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? Am I twisted? Am I straight up? Am I screwed 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, but 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 this? 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 were not specific about this things, you will wonder for a long time why you were not getting good. So you have to quantify to 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 in the 10 stages, and you can identify where you're at by simply just putting in your business information. You go to 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 by 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 observe is whether something works, or whether they did something. And so we wanna 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 wanna 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 of 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 wanna 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 gonna give you an analogy here. Imagine, we do a tennis lesson. You go to a tennis pro, 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 gripped the racket incorrectly? What different teachers didn't describe you proper way to hold a racket? And let's try to 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 these 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 isn't, because they will try to appeal to some sort of mysticism that they are tapped into the universe, like, they'll anthropomorphize fancy word, the universe saying that it's whispering the secrets. Like, you can, 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? Outputs 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 bodies? He liked 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 you've heard my stuff, 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 than increase 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 chorus, or webinar, a podcast, or anything, right? Is I look at the top 10%, the top 1% of people first, and then I start to observe, what do they do? Now what they say about what they do? What do they do that I can replicate? And I want to give you like the shock 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. Bar none, no question, right? And so how can we, 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 it's to be clear, I'm not saying I am now, but I'm saying that for them, I was like, these guys do something different than me because they're all cups. It's sort of 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 fiscal 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, once we've observed the top 1%, top 10%, and said, 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 have complete context to every single one of those micro steps that they did that made it good. Because if you look at a good reel and a bad reel, like on Instagram, for example, and so you want to get better at making reels, you might not have the awareness, the perspective in 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? 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 yourself. Okay. What do I mean by that? So some of you guys may have seen the interview that I did with Amjad and Replay at 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's drove in the road here and then all of a sudden someone talked and they got feedback and went back in the lane, right? And so at a certain point, you'll stop relying as much on, constantly, 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 look at your work. So let's say this is the volume we did. This is all of our reps. 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 the things that you find different and then you will do another set of many repetitions. Will you 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'll 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 that. What else does this person do? This person, when he asks for things, takes a step back. This person doesn't. Okay, so when I ask for things, but when increased like the compliance, I'll take a step back. And so it's these observational differences which separate the people who win from 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 in our stuff in our consciousness. When you are a king and you're a toddler, you learn from your surroundings. You were two years old. You were 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% people, take their initial, and then use that as batch one. Then look at the top 10% of your stuff. Look at the observational differences and keep doing it like coats of paint. Then step seven is repetition. So if innovation, if it wasn't, 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 a natural. And so I've had, I've been, you know, blessed if you want to use that word at being good at, I was good at school. I was not bad at school. Some people are like, I became an entrepreneur 'cause I said to school, I was good at school. I was good at school. And when I got into business, we're on, I took it like a, like a, a particular curriculum. You know what 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 scraped 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 what do I learn? Like where do I, 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 gonna go into a new field, I'm gonna hire experts and I'm gonna hire them so that 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. And so if you, in the, this, this is important. If like on a long enough time horizon, 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 from our recent bit improvement. Your rate of improvement on a longer time horizon, 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 horizon because your rate of growth or 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 salespeople out convert the other salespeople? 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 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 or whenever again, especially if people say, ooh, so indulgence is 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 and know why you failed than to succeed in not knowing. And it's because if you failed and 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, not somebody who believe like I, 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 is it, right? And I'll say that honestly, I have to say 99, which is pretty 99 of 100, just a lot, right? 99 times out of 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 is, 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 setter 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 delt at birth. The question is, and so what? Are you gonna 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, sorry. And so what? Right? They got lucky. And so what? You're both gonna die eventually and five generations, so now your progeny won't remember what you did to be getting with. And the whole point in this game was for who you become, not who 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 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, so many crazy, right? Everyone got a ticket, ooh, whatever you want. 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 can do it. And thank God, I didn't win the powerball and won a billion dollars. Because if I had, I don't think I would. I don't think I'd be me, I'm very happy with the way it. And so I think that luck, as much as you could say, of me and that guy's lucky, think about how unlucky they are because they never have the opportunity to go through the gallant day. You get to go through to become the first year in a year. And I think that's something I'll rest my case on it. I think I'll rip on it. So, hope you guys don't do that. That's hope you learn anything. At least that's how I learned shit.