How To Get Good At Anything | Achieve Mastery

Today I have 192,000 followers on Twitter. Well, it's called X now, but anyway, you get the point. And if you go back 3 years to 2020, my tweets looked a lot like, well, this banger. But today I routinely write tweets that will reach millions of people. What happened in the past 3 years? Spend a few minutes on Twitter and you can see that it's actually a game. People are competing to see who can get the most eyeballs, the most likes, the most retweets to their stuff. But how do you get good at a game like that? What school teaches us is you go study something and then you get good at it and then you go pass the test. But it turns out if you If you use that approach on life, you end up not accomplishing much. The opposite is actually true. What you do is you go try things and you incrementally get better each individual time, using each one of those efforts as an experiment to teach yourself more about the thing. So that's what I did starting in 2020. I used each tweet as an experiment. I wrote a little, saw how it did, and then I learned each time, incrementally writing better tweets. And the trick was I made each tweet better than the one before. And that's lesson number 1. If you want to get truly good at something, start immediately by doing the thing and grow better by each and every iteration, treating each time you do it as an experiment. Moving on. This guy is MrBeast. He's the face of YouTube. He's getting hundreds of millions of views, uh, which by the way is hundreds of millions of more views than I'm getting, but don't worry about that problem. And I watched these interviews of MrBeast. His real name is Jimmy, by the way. And Jimmy says something very interesting. He says, everybody's talking about the 10,000-hour rule, which is something where you do 10,000 hours of something to get to mastery. And this actually comes from a book by an author named Malcolm Gladwell, and he cited a study where somebody observed that it took about 10,000 hours for somebody to become very, very good, an expert at a particular domain. And the idea was you spend 10,000 hours, which is about 8 hours a day for 3 years, and eventually you become great. But it turns out there's a problem with the 10,000-hour rule. It's actually, well, not true. What matters less is the amount of time that you spend learning And what matters more is how you spend that time learning. And so let's bring this back to MrBeast.

His quote was, you know, they say it takes 10,000 hours to master something, right? Yeah, obviously everyone says that and everyone's like proud when they're like, I put 10,000 hours into this thing. Like, I'm like, I'm going to put 10,000 days into this. Like, literally, I'm going to like— 10,000 days is like 30 years and I'm almost 15 years in.

And what Jimmy has done, MrBeast, is hit on something that I think is the second important thing to get incredibly good at anything. Which is you make it about the journey and not about the destination. And you don't say, "I'm gonna become an expert at a specific thing." What you say is, "I'm going to become a lifelong learner of this thing. I'm gonna make it part of my personality to become a student of the game I'm playing." And you end up winning because every day is just you grinding out, getting better. The next point to learn anything is called finding a tribe or creating one. When I started on Twitter, I went solo for a long time. And then I heard some rumors of these groups where people would get together on WhatsApp or Signal or other groups, and they would share learnings with each other. And when I heard about these groups, I realized there was an opportunity here. So I did the same thing. I went out and I contacted 6 or 7 other people that were at about the same place as me on their learning journey to become good at Twitter. And I said, hey, I'm putting together this chat group. I would love for you to be a part of it. Instead of learning like one person, We'll learn like 6. We'll work together. I learned this lesson traveling to Cancun. And yeah, it's this Cancun in Mexico filled with Americans, usually drunk. But the thing I learned wasn't at a foam party or a jungle rave. And this lesson I learned when we went there for a family vacation. And I had started learning Spanish in order to challenge myself. But every time I went to a lesson or I opened up the study book, it felt like work. I dreaded each individual lesson. But what happened next when I went to Cancun was amazing.

So living in San Antonio is awesome. You can go to the Riverwalk, you can go to Fiesta Texas, you can go mountain biking, you can go to Chili's. We have everything here. And the cool thing about San Antonio is it's part of this area called the Texas Hill Country, which has all kinds of great places to live in San Antonio, places north, and places west, all the way up to Austin. So come here and be my neighbor. And when you do, All City Real Estate can make that process super easy. Their complete move-in package covers moving decorating, professional organizing, and tech setup. All you need to do is walk in the door. And if you're selling in the area, they can do everything too, from professional staging to cleaning to moving and taking care of any repairs that come up during the sale. Their goal is to make it super easy for you, uh, to come be a resident here in Texas. So definitely get in touch with Megan Pelly at All City Real Estate. You can email her at Megan@mjprealtyteam.com, and that's Megan with an H, so M-E-G-H-A-N. Or you can call her at 210-232-3666. We'll put her contact information below in the show notes, and you can browse beautiful houses for sale in the Texas Hill Country on her website, toptexashillcountryhomes.com. Again, that's toptexashillcountryhomes.com, and thanks to them for sponsoring today's episode.

On the flight down, I said to myself, I am going to try to speak Spanish every single opportunity I can. In Cancún, I'd speak Spanish and the people's eyes would light up. They would realize I was learning Spanish, and I would tell them, "Hey, I'm just a student." And by speaking their language, it created a real connection with people. And I saw in that moment an opportunity where all of my travel through Latin American countries in the future was going to be different because I was now able to communicate with folks on their terms, in their language. I'd found a way to make learning Spanish actually fun. I had dreaded it before, but now it had a bigger purpose. And I'm convinced that everything can be done this way. Fitness? Well, go find a game to play. Health, create a competition with your friends or a social event where you want to go, but you have to be healthy to be there. Math, well, use your math skills to go build rockets if building rockets is fun for you. And I'm convinced that you could basically hack your brain with any one of these techniques to make learning fun so you do it even more than you would if it felt like a chore. My first CEO job was in my late 20s. I'd read a few books and, you know, I thought I knew it all. I'd stopped learning and I'd also stopped being coachable. Being a know-it-all, I decided that we would save money. And one of the ways we would do that as the CEO of a new company was to save money on our trash fees. So our company, it turned out, produced a ton of excess cardboard and I instructed everybody on my team to burn it inside of our dumpster. And you've heard of the idea of a dumpster fire. There's a reason we use that phrase. And I learned firsthand that day that dumpster fires suck for a very good reason. That thing burned for 3 days and we ruined the dumpster. It cost us a ton of money. And ultimately it did that because, well, I was stupid. Instead of listening to the people around me and even asking their opinion, I just went and made a dumb decision. I wasn't coachable. I wasn't curious. And today, well, I try to do the opposite. I stay coachable and hungry. I try to grow my mind by searching for challenging situations. And this leads to point number 5: Stay hungry. Growth is a thing that in your mind has to never stop. So that's it. That is the system I use to get good at virtually anything. And here you can see the system on the screen. Check the comments below for a link to these 5 principles that I've laid out in a PDF, and you can print 'em out and do whatever you want with 'em. It's free. And also I send stuff like this in a newsletter, link in bio, sign up for that, and I'll send stuff like this out to you every week. Thanks for watching this here on YouTube. Please subscribe to my channel so you can see more like this in the future. And if you think I got something wrong or I missed something, comment down below. I'd love to hear from you.