Screw The 10,000-Hour Rule. How To Learn Anything In Less Time
Traditional education taught me how to hate learning.
The more I progressed through higher education, the more I realized it was mostly antiquated garbage that didn't apply to me or my business journey. Sure, adding and subtracting have been helpful, but Business Calculus, not so much.
School teaches its students how to be cattle, grazing a corporate forest.
It is no longer effective to learn old principles from dying dinosaurs.
Nor is slogging through 10,000 hours to be great at one thing.
The education system isn't entirely to blame.
Once I learned that I needed to build a series of skills to progress in life, everything changed.
One business book became thirty. Then, one sales book became ten, leading to a sales course and mentor. Then, I hired a business coach to go deeper.
When you focus on the skills that matter to your unique life and passions, you magically morph into a new, superhuman.
To shoot rockets into the sky, Elon Musk didn't learn the history of religion or how to write a memo in English class—he became a self-taught rocket engineer.
But, he didn't just learn; he questioned everything.
Unblock Yourself
Ignorance is born from a toxic mind.
Shamar Rinpoche says it best,
"We feel desire for that which we deem good; we feel aversion to that which we deem bad; and we are always in an unclear, unknowing state caused by the ignorance of the mind."
We block ourselves from true wisdom because we follow our emotions, not logic.
Over the years, we build up a series of limiting beliefs we deem law. The problem is that most of what we believe has been installed into us like we're a machine traveling down the assembly line.
We didn't have a choice.
It was programmed into us.
All our desires are mimetic, which is imitative, not intrinsic. We're told what to believe, how to act, what to think, and what's acceptable.
We learn from models, which we imitate over a lifetime. And these models can be distant people on the other side of a social media profile.
"They have abs, so do I." "They say X is true, so will I." "They say Y is bad, so do I."
Model after model, our beliefs are installed into us.
Parents, religion, and society all expose us to their beliefs. Some are good, and a lot is wrong.
It's what Don Miguel Ruiz calls "human domestication."
As children, we're taught to live and believe a certain way. We live in a dream;
"The dream of the planet includes all of society's rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events, and holidays."
Over time, these dreams become our entire belief system, which blocks us from learning new things, and questioning what's a dream and what's not.
Others tell us that we must be a certain way.
"To be alive is the biggest fear humans have."
To learn faster, you must unblock yourself and open yourself to all possibilities.
Always have a goal first.
Before you go out and learn underwater basket weaving, every skill, everything you want to know, should be tied to a goal.
Sure, you can learn passively, but the best learning should be motivated by a bigger picture.
For example, I have two big objectives for my business:
1/ Develop a new generation sales team
2/ Acquire a company
I've built my learning around these goals to fill in necessary skills that I might be lacking to turn the objectives into a near-term reality.
Your learning should help you achieve your goals. When you increase your ability, your goals become easier to achieve.
It's what BJ Fogg calls the Ability Factors.
Your ability to achieve a goal is as strong as your weakest ability factor link. Once you know what's restricting you from achieving your goals, you can find ways to loosen the tension by increasing your ability.
The Meta of all Meta-Learning
Be a master of many—but choose wisely.
In a world of infinite possibilities, you don't need to pigeonhole yourself into investing 10,000 hours in mastering one craft.
Instead, build a series of talents that magically work together to make you unique and valuable. When you create a "talent stack," as Scott Adams puts it, you become indispensable in so many areas.
Don't just be an expert at Finance, be an expert at:
Finance
Negotiations
Stoic Philosophy
Sales
Psychology
Mindfulness
Each one of these feeds into one another.
They connect your learning to topics that, on the surface, seem unrelatable, but everything symbiotically molds together.
Open your mind.
Don't close your mind to other people's views, beliefs, and experiences.
Just because you were domesticated thinking one thing doesn't mean the opposite cannot be equally true. The most significant wars and the nastiest interpersonal conflicts arise from protecting one's beliefs and ego.
Millions (so I think) were killed protecting the sanctity of Catholicism. Still, that belief is no better than Buddhism or any other religion that tries to help people be better humans. It's sure not worth taking another life over.
If you have a political preference, but you close your mind to the opposing views, you silo your thinking, and you become a parrot that's been intoxicated by other people's words.
When you learn, learn wide, and open your mind to all possibilities. And while you're at it:
Question everything.
Macro > Micro using The DSSS Method.
Understand the core principles before you venture into the nooks and crannies.
Learn the macro before you try to learn the micro.
Elon Musk recommends "view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."
You don't need to spend 10,000 hours practicing to learn a valuable skill.
Instead, when you identify the essential topics, you dramatically shorten the time you need to practice.
Follow Tim Ferris's DSSS Method:
Deconstruction: Break down a skill into its major components (The Macro Principles)
Selection: Look for 20% of the components that give you 80% of the value.
Sequence: Decide which order to learn and practice in.
Stakes: Determine the consequences you take on if you don't follow through.
Learn, Practice, Then Execute.
Just reading about a topic makes you a dreamer.
You have to do "use it, or lose it." Until you apply it, you turn your brain into a closet—full of clothes you'll never wear.
I call it the LPE Learning Framework:
Learn through books, courses, and conversations.
Dig into the Selection process or the core principles that will give you 80% of the value you're trying to extract.
This is the first stage of learning in the "classroom."
Practice in low-risk environments.
To learn, you have to practice.
It doesn't matter the topic; practice what you learned. For example, if you're learning philosophy, try to teach it. If you're developing sales skills, role play with your co-workers.
Whatever it is, you must practice in low-risk situations.
Execute in the real world.
Executing is game time.
You start to execute what you learned in situations that matter.
You then make adjustments while executing and decide if you need to go deeper into the micro topics.
Put yourself through some pain.
The best learning occurs through disfluency.
When you struggle, you learn. For example, if you're in sales and cold-call a potential client, but the call ends up a disaster, you'll learn valuable lessons.
You'll learn even more if you conduct a post-mortem and discuss the lessons with someone else.
Or, if something doesn't make sense and you wrestle with the topic, you'll learn it better.
Never look for easy answers.
Build disfluency in your learning.
Whatever you want or need to learn, don't slog through thousands of hours trying to figure it out.
Open your mind, focus on the principles that will give you the greatest value, and execute them in the real world.
Doing this will give you a significant advantage over people who rely on traditional, inefficient learning methods.
