“People often say motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing, that’s why we recommend it daily” Zig Ziglar
Quick note: Today’s the last day of the free workshop to help build your confidence, so don’t miss out and schedule a consultation with me to help level up your confidence, your ability to connect with yourself and others. It only costs you an email after with your thoughts about how I did 🙂
The Power of The First Pillar of Confidence Pt.2
Yesterday you learned about the foundation of learning: your personal why. It’s something that nobody thinks about, but something that will change how you do things. Instead what people do is they float through life like a leaf in the wind on a sunny day. But when you desire something from deep within your core, when you want something more than you want to breath you become something different from most people.
Instead of a leaf blowing in the wind you become a herculean hurricane.
An unstoppable force of nature destroying every obstacle dumb enough to get in the way!
Which is why it’s so important to discover your personal why. And it’s the reason it’s become such an important thing to talk about. Because without it, you’ll do nothing with everything that you’re learning.
Even though you’re learning things that will change your life and transform you into a brand new person you’ll fail if you don’t figure out why you’re doing it.
Figuring out your why is NON-NEGOTIABLE!
However, it’s not the only important thing to learn…
How to Practice A Skill to Learn it Faster Than Anyone Else
Deliberate practice.
Now I know what you’re thinking, “well duh”. But hear me out because people misunderstand what I say when I say ‘deliberate practice’.
What I want to talk about specifically, is how to practice.
Because some people will go out and mindlessly do whatever it is that they want to do. This isn’t how people learn though. This is how people go through school, and tell me, what do you honestly remember from school that has been useful in your life? Anything at all past the age of 10?
Because I’ll be honest, my answer to that question is an earth-shattering ‘nothing’.
Which, if that’s what you want then this course isn’t for you. But as you’re reading the words on your screen and you think back to your personal why you’ll notice that you need to keep reading to reach those goals because you’re going to learn how to reduce the amount of time it takes to master a new skill in an unbelievably and criminally insane way!
Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is when you go excruciatingly and painfully slow while practicing. It means that you pick apart and analyze everything that you can.
For example, when I wanted to practice my shooting in basketball I had to work on my form. I went as slow as I possibly could, ruthlessly picking apart everything about my shooting form the entire time.
Most people practice in such a way that their brain is practically turned off, or on autopilot because that’s how school teaches us to learn. It teaches us that learning things is boring. But that’s not what learning is supposed to be! It’s not how children pick things up startlingly fast. And it’s not how you’re going to learn anymore.
Instead, you’re going to break down what you want to learn so that your brain is running on full blast! That way you can remember and pay attention to even the smallest and most insignificant of details to the point where even Sherlock Holmes would be impressed.
Going back to my shooting form, I paid attention to everything that I could. Where was my elbow? How did my wrist flick through on the shot? What about my finger placement? Were my feet positioned how I wanted them? And etc.
On and on it went where I would pick apart everything about my body while shooting and even my breathing while shooting. It took a little bit of time, but I saw a MASSIVE amount of improvement in an EXTREMELY short amount of time.
And this is how you’re going to shortcut your own learning time. This is how you’re going to start improving at things so stupidly fast, people are going to start annoying you with questions and statements about how you’re a genius.
Which you’ll practically become to other people because they won’t understand things the same way you will. They won’t understand things as quickly either.
You’re going to jump into the league of the elite once you finish this portion of the course!
Why This Works:
The brain is a machine built to recognize patterns, even in circumstances where there isn’t any true pattern at work. That’s just how the brain works and why we’ve become the most dominant species on the planet.
And this is how you can speed up your learning as well.
The pattern I needed to sear into my brain for basketball was that whenever my body and shot flowed in a certain way, the ball would go into the basket. After drilling down my shot to such a slow degree, I would speed up. Then I would speed up a little more and a little more until it was ‘game speed’ (speed I would shoot in an actual game).
I may not have been the fastest, most athletic or even the best player on the court (some of the time I was). But I would be damned if I wasn’t going to be the best version of myself that I could be.
And it works for other skills too
It’s the same for any skill in life, including social skills. Anything that has a pattern means that you can use your brain to recognize those patterns and break down everything that’s going on.
Deliberate Practice is Like a Jigsaw Puzzle:
Besides going slow, you’ll notice a few other things that I was doing: I was relentlessly picking apart everything about my shot. I treated my shot like it was a living mechanical creature. Every little thing was its own gear that had to be carefully perfected.
Which is how you’re going to treat the things that you want to learn. You’re going to treat the skill you want to learn as if it was made up of smaller skills to master. All of which can be broken down into smaller parts as well. The same is true of business, for example, where you need to learn how to manage people, manage yourself and your time as well as the business itself. In addition, marketing is a universal skill you’ll need to learn as well as how to sell.
Everything you want to learn can be broken down into smaller pieces of a much larger picture. A lot like a jigsaw puzzle. The more pieces you master the better you become at whatever skill you want to learn.
And the craziest part of this entire thing is that you don’t have to master every little thing to become good at something! In fact, if you only master 5-7 basic principles of any skill you’ll jump up into the advanced level of most skills on the planet! You’ll become better than 90% of people on the planet in your chosen skill!
Because most people rely on mindlessly auto-piloting the things they do. But if you choose not to, then you’ll become someone much greater.
What This Means For Your Life
I’m sharing all of this with you because if you approach mastering a skill as if it was a jigsaw puzzle, or even a bunch of gears moving something mechanical then you will learn much faster.
In our hypothetical 10,000 hours we’ve already cut out a massive amount of time just by getting your personal why.
By figuring out why you want to learn a skill, you’ve shaved off a few thousand hours. Deliberate practice will shave off even more hours.
Then, by breaking down a skill into the smaller parts, you shave off even more hours.
Instead of it taking you four whole years to master something, you instead can do it in three, or even two or one!
That means that you have three or more years to enjoy a skill you’ve mastered. Which means less frustration, less headaches and more success.
You can start living the life you’ve always dreamed of years faster than you otherwise could.
It’s tedious at first, but once you get into the habit of doing this you’ll start doing it naturally. But there’s even more to hacking your brain and becoming someone other people will envy. They’ll envy your ability to pick anything up like a genius, so definitely schedule a discovery session with me to learn more! Looking forward to speaking with you 🙂
Keep Moving Forward
-Alexander
P.S. Not sure if a consult with me would be worth it? Well check out what Andrew had to say:
