You’re Not Behind: How To Become Dangerous At Anything You Do | Ep 923

I'm gonna show you how to learn anything very fast, and this is the exact process that I use to learn stuff for the past 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 3 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 good news and bad news. The bad news is you might not be as smart as you think you are. The good news is it's under your control to change and you can do it quickly. So this is the process that I'm gonna walk through on how to learn anything fast. So number one is— that was pretty— I see that, that was pretty good. Hold on, we'll use the original one. That was pretty good. Okay, 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 to behavior. Intelligence is speed of learning. Intelligence is a rate. It's a, it's a question of speed. If you think about how you describe somebody, like, he's quick, he picks, he picks things up fast. So for you, there's a couple 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 3 iterations to get something right, but they delay the iterations once a week, another week, another week. If you say, I'm gonna lock in and I'm gonna do 7 iterations cuz I'm twice as dumb as they are, but I'm gonna do them all in one day cuz I'm gonna not let any light in my room and I'm just gonna 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 was important to me to realize this because I, so, um, I went to Vanderbilt, fancy school. I think it's like top 5 or 7, 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 gonna be able to beat these guys? And so I just said, oh, okay, I'll just work from the time I wake up. Until 9:00 PM every day. So that's what I did. From 9 to 9, I was in the library unless I was in class or I was in the cafeteria or the gym. Those are the only things I did. I ate, I studied, and I worked out from 9 to 9. That was it. That was all 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 3 iterations, but I was able to do my 10 iterations faster than they were able to do their 3. And so fundamentally, learning is same condition, new behavior. Now, what is a skill? People have said this a lot. A skill is a chain 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 chain 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— so people like, he is good at basketball, they're saying he has many skills that relates to this thing. Now within basketball, you've got dribbling, you've got shooting, you've got passing, right? These are sub-skills underneath of 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 sub-skills underneath of those larger skills. Now, if we were to go, uh, 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, uh, 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, the— 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 would pretty much generalize to anything that I use my hands and my eyes, which is a lot of stuff, right? But which would, uh, which 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 closer ones? Would it, would that go better for beer pong? Probably. That would generalize over. My foul shots versus beer pong probably does 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 wanna get good at business, Alex. Business is not something you can get good at. It is a bucketed term that has many skills underneath of it. And since we just defined what skills are, which is adaptive change in behavior, you start something and you do 3 or 4 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 until you finally figure out the, 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, are, are generalizable skills that will 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're 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 then you can change your behavior within. So I say this, but that then leads to point number 3. I know, right? Little 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 on what 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 altogether? Right. And then within that, I could probably say how many times did I finish 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 squared 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 worse over time, right? We are less plastic. Our skill at learning— so rather, our horsepower learning is worse, but our skills at learning can get better. All right, so 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 those things, you will wonder for a long time why you are not getting good. So you have to quantify to the highest degree possible. And to be clear, you'll start quantifying things in 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 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 4, 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 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 then you'll think, my God, I suck at this. I wonder if I could suck less at this. And then you'll tweak a couple things and you'll be like, wow, 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, if you less bad yourself 100 times, you're actually pretty good. And so this is where doing more in the beginning without the obsession on understanding why will 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, 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 to you the 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 whys and these psychology and the subconsciousness and the neuro-linguistic programming and all this hullabaloo 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 giving you clear directions to succeed. And so I would encourage you to use that as your razor as who is good at teaching shit and who isn't, because they will try to appeal to some sort of mysticism that they are tapped into the universe. Like, like, and 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, uh, 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? Is he 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 complying with my requests. And so this is the idea when I say, like, have you ever heard my stuff where 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 wanna manage the variables prior to the desired outcome. And can we do more of this stuff that 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, a course, a webinar, a 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 wanna give you like the hack 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 goat. 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 transfer something that has been helpful for me is that I struggled socially earlier. And so I had to observe, I'm 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 for them, I was like, these guys do something different than me because their outcomes are certainly different than mine, right? But it's that observational muscle, which is like, I have to just only describe the world by 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 hullabaloo doesn't transmit the physical plane. Now, for those of you who believe in all of the other hullabaloo, I'm with you. Let's go. Let's go. Manifestation. But manifest on your own time and just focus on doing the behaviors that increase the probability of these good outcomes occurring. Now, when you're doing it for yourself, once we've observed the top 1%, top 10%, 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 don't 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 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 versus 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 some point you will start to learn from first-party data, meaning you'll start to learn from yourself. Now, what do I mean by that? So some of you guys may have seen the interview that I did with Amjad on Replit, the CEO, the founder of Replit. 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 drove in the road here and then all of a sudden someone honked and it got feedback and it went back in the lane. Right? And so at a certain point, you'll stop relying as much on modeling 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— 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 the things that you find different and then you will do another set of many repetitions where 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 will learn one more thing. But I would say that the key to learning is observation. Once you, once you can observe the differences between current and ideal, and this is honestly the gap people like— I get the compliment often that Alex breaks things down in such a simple way. It's, 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 autist 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's talking? Oh, okay. People determine that this person has more influence. The person who nods when the other person's 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 then I could 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, if I want to increase likelihood of 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't. 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, we're learning a lot of our stuff now consciously. When you were a kid, when you're a toddler, you learn from your surroundings. You, when you were 2 years old, you weren't like, huh, what observation is Papa doing today? I will, 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 this thing, model what they did to get what they want. That's how it works. So step 6 is that we have to analyze the differences. Analyze and iterate. Which is what this is. Look at the top 10% of people, take their initial, and then use that as batch 1. Then look at the top 10% of your stuff, look at the observational differences, and keep doing it like coats of paint. Then step 7 is repetition. So if innovation— if, was it, uh, 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 because I sucked at school. I was good at school. I was good at school. And when I got into the business world, I took it like a, like a, I took it like curriculum. You know what I mean? Like I wanted to learn all the language. I wanted to learn the lingo. I want to learn how it all worked. And what became difficult for me was that many people described 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 free 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 this pro— 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 9 as iteration 1, and then I'll start at 9, and then my goal is to beat them at that thing just by simply applying this process with a faster feedback loop than they have. And so if you— if in the— this, this is important. If 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 for no reason, but improvement. Your rate of improvement on a long enough 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 long enough time horizon 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 salespeople outconvert the other salespeople? And I want to reemphasize point 4, ignore the black box. Do not try to explain. And like, there will be very few things that you've probably seen on my channel where 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 rewarded for doing so or punished for doing something opposite of 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 reinforced in 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, try and 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 say— so I'll give you an example of this. So let's say, um, if you've ever had someone say like, hey, what's up? And you say, uh, 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 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. If, especially if people say, ooh, ah, mm, so intelligent, so smart. Ah. 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, uh, there's a famous professor, Professor Bergman from Stanford, who said this quote that I, I always think about. He said, it's better to fail and know why you failed than to succeed and not know why. 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'm 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 probably could say that 99, which is pretty— 99 out of 100 is a lot, right? 99 times out of 100, when I meet somebody who'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— um, 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, probability, chance, et cetera, 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 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 as hard. And so what, right? They got lucky. And so what? You're both going to die eventually, and 5 generations from now your progeny won't remember what you did to begin with. And the whole point of 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, 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 or something crazy, right? Everyone got a ticket. It's like, ooh, whatever we want. And I remember after we bought it that I had this, or after I bought it, 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 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 the way. 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 gauntlet that you get to go through to become the person you're going to become. And I think that's something— I'll rest my case on that. I think I'll wrap on that. So hope you guys dug that. That's how we learn anything. Um, at least that's how I learn shit.