Skills

3 Life Saving Skills (Especially For Your Kids)

Focus Tools

I’ve been studying for a competition.

It has the type of questions that require simple memorized answers like—

What year did the Yankees win their first world series?

“Gnome” is my answer.

That’s 23…

In a system I learned nearly 2 decades ago for quickly memorizing numbers.

You turn the numerals into letters and then words that you associate to the content.

2 being N. 3 being M.

It’s a phonetic system, so the vowels are silent as is the “G.”

To link the number to the question, I see a Yankees player beating the heck out of a garden gnome.

You could do this a million different ways, and ultimately, the more “memorable,” the more it sticks in your brain.

I haven’t done this type of memorizing for years.

Nor used this memory technique so deliberately.

But it’s still stuck in my brain.

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“You Probably Think That You Are Better Now…”

Better now…

They’re the only lyrics worth me citing from Post Malone’s track Better Now.

As you know I only use lyrics about personal development.

When his song deteriorates into the typical love you girl pop.

If I were writing for Post I’d say, man you can keep getting better now.

Coz, well, who wants to be…

Worse Now…

Worse now…

None of us want to sing along to that, do we?

No parent has a bumper sticker—My kid failed 4th grade.

Or My son was dropped from the synchronized swimming team.

No adult brags—I’m into personal stagnation, operating at a fraction of my potential.

No one proudly posts a picture on LinkedIn with their little glass award for worst performer in the company.

Everyone likes to sing how they’re better now.

But how many of us actually are?

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Losers Keep Doing What You’re Doing

The next best feedback you can ever give someone is, Keep doing what you’re doing.

Even if they’re doing a terrible job, you’ll avoid conflict and also ensure they won’t get so good that they outshine you.

Although some people pretend to want honest feedback, you know nobody wants to hear the truth, let alone improve, so just get their tail wagging with a pat on the head and keep doing what you’re doing.

Just like in school, a couple check marks and not getting held back each year is all any human ever wants, why encourage anyone to get better?

Improving Leads To Failure

Improving is for people who can’t work hard enough to keep doing what they’re doing.

Like Rafael Nadal, of course it’s true that people who keep getting better tend to win more, but they also only keep getting promoted to the point where other people fail.

The Peter Principle demands that you must be good enough to keep getting promoted, but not so good that you actually excel.

As one of my favorite book titles states, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, and keep doing what you’re doing is the surest way to avoid succeeding to ultimately fail.

Head Down Hit It Hard

It’s scary to drive and you’re much better off just keeping your head down.

Maybe you could avoid that wall you’ll eventually hit, but with your head down driving hard you might even punch through concrete.

Some people say, pick your head up, set goals.

What the hell do they know? Once you’ve set goals, now you’re on the hook, you likely have to get better, and that will only lead you to fail more successfully anyways.

As I wrote here, no good loser wins that way. Who cares where you’re headed…

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Rapidly Learn Anything This Summer

People often talk about learning being an advantage in the future, yet when hasn’t this been true?

The caveman that first learned to avoid the lion survived longer, and still today rapidly adapting is the key to thriving.

The faster we learn in school, the better grades we get, the better opportunities that are available to us.

In the workplace those who quickly learn the rules of the game and keep learning the fastest are most likely to accelerate.

It’s also true in our hobbies and sports. The faster we learn, the more fun we have, the more likely we are to keep playing.

Do You Know Why Reading Is So Boring?

Because nobody ever teaches us to read fast enough, our brains get bored.

It’s a Ferrari designed to suck in a massive amount of information, yet because we’ve never been trained to read beyond a fifth-grade level most of us read like driving Miss Daisy.

When you understand why, it’s no surprise that on average we read at the same rate we speak, some 250 words a minute.

The cause is subvocalizing, which means instead of taking in information with our eyes as you do in say reading a traffic sign, we repeat the words eveeeeerrr soooo sloooowly in our heads.

If I had trained Evelyn Wood in high school, I would have bought myself thousands of hours of wasted study and repetition, and the first secret to learning fast is to train yourself to more rapidly input information.

But, that’s just for starters, because we learn little from reading.

Reading Isn’t Learning

Sadly, even few smart highly successful people are continuously learning, and even many who pretend to be are merely listening to podcasts or reading books.

Often when I suggest to people great books like How To Win Friends and Influence People, they tell me something like, “Yep, I read that.”

I then ask questions like: How specifically are you using it? What is your process for reviewing what you learned? If you were tested on it, would you get a passing grade?

When I first began this journey, how we learn seemed pretty obvious.

Of course we know how we learn. We’re learning all of our lives, but I soon realized that us adults are conditioned to be terrible learners.

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How Learning To Shoot Like John Wick Transformed These People

Some time ago I decided that if our society wasn’t going to control guns, then I would learn some gun control of my own.

Watching a video of Keanu Reeves shooting 3 gun for his role in John Wick, I thought to myself, that’s exactly how I want to shoot.

So I sought out trainers—two Navy SEALs—and every month or so I run around the desert training to shoot like John Wick.

Now, I won’t pretend that I’m doing this because I ever expect to be in a gunfight—I do this because for nearly two decades I’ve sought out transformational experiences through learning fun skills.

If you think shooting is bad or immoral or wrong for whatever reason, I understand this stuff isn’t for everyone, even if every night we “entertain” ourselves with murder, and playing with toy guns is for most of our kids…

But if you think it would be an awesome experience learning to shoot with two SEALs over your shoulder, then I bet you’ll think it’s even more awesome what I did next.

I Invited My Friends

I’ve become somewhat open about the stuff I do.

For a decade I was too embarrassed to admit that, um… I’m into Eckhart Tolle, but these days I pretty much just share how it is.

That said, I still felt I was going a bit too far when I wrote about training Remote Viewing with one of the greatest men I know, psychic spy, Joe McMoneagle, but I was surprised by the response—

I want to do that. Let’s plan a group trip!

And that got me thinking…

What would it be like if I put together a group to have some of the experiences that have been so transforming for me?

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Timid Salespeople Have Skinny Kids

In all arenas of success there’s a small number of things that make the most difference.

If you get these things right, you massively move the needle in your favor, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Doing these “hard things” often requires overcoming debilitating fears, and training yourself to do things other people won’t do.

Going After It

There’s a young guy in London who I’ve been giving my time to.

He’s very good at getting me to help him, and other leaders too.

Coming out of college he earned himself a top job, and already in his business of wealth management he is producing way beyond those years ahead of him.

I suspect that’s because he influences others the way that he influenced me…

He Reached Out

He wrote me an email.

He told me what he was about, how he was going after it, and asked me if I could be helpful to him.

You can see it in someone can’t you, when there’s something about them that just says I’ll do whatever it takes to make this happen.

That’s infectious to me, and I wanted to help him win.

And he is. He’s making it happen. And he’s only just getting started.

In his business, his willingness to reach out and ask for the order is a superpower that will take him a long way.

The Hardest Thing To Teach

Much of what we’re taught about motivation is WRONG.

Truth is, most of us have all the motivation we’ll ever need, it’s only, the fear is stronger, and holds all of us back.

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How To Learn A New Skill—And Actually Master It

A lack of necessary skills is almost always the gap between idea and execution.

You’ve surely experienced the frustration that happens when you see an opportunity in your life, but lack the knowledge to act on it. We all have. You know you deserve to make more money, but you don’t know how to negotiate. You have a genius idea for a business, but you don’t know how to sell.

If you’ve ever tried to research and learn a new skill, you’ve run into two schools of thought:

The 10,000 hour rule. This is the old school belief that to master a skill, you need to dedicate 10,000 hours to learning and perfecting it.

The “Just Enough” method. This is particularly popular with online coaches. The idea is that you don’t have to be an expert, you have to learn “just enough” to be functional.

Both these schools have their merits, but neither are a complete solution.

If you try to gain 10,000 hours of negotiating experience before asking them to show you the money, you’ll be a decade older with nothing to show for it.

If you learn just enough to negotiate a slight raise now, you might get what you’re looking for in the short-term, but at every level you’ll still fail to earn what you’re worth.

I teach my clients a system for building skills that enables them to rapidly—within days or weeks —reach a high level of competence (relying on the 80/20 Principle), while at the same time taking the daily actions that build to mastery over time.

How do you get enough skill to be dangerous and get what you want now, and keep becoming more dangerous over time?

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52 Books To Change Your Life In 1 Year

Postscript— I’ve thought many times about taking this article down. It’s true that I like these books, and reading was indeed a very important part of my process of transfomation, yet…

One thing I learned from nearly two decades of reading is that pouring through books is of little value, relative to taking the best books and mastering them.

For instance, in speaking with someone about communications, I suggested, rather than reading a bunch of pretty good books, go deep into mastering Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People.

Sure, there’s lots of great books out there on this topic, but in the end it’s not what we’ve read that counts, but specifically, how good we are at putting our knowledge to work.

So, I keep this article here, but strongly suggest that rather than kindof knowing 52 books this year, master a small number that truly drive transformational learnings and results for you.

Here’s five from this list I find truly transforming—

Eat That Frog

The Magic Of Thinking Big

Man’s Search For Meaning

Influence

Flow

And, btw, 3 of my all time favorites aren’t even listed here, coz they’re more like bibles than to read this year—

Dale Carnegie’s book above, and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and Outwitting The Devil.

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I started this new phase of my life by reading. Years before I quit Goldman Sachs, stepping back from my career and asking, What Do I Want? I had no clue where to go for answers.
So I just started reading books on self-help, personal development and everything else that I thought would help me figure out my life. Like Forrest Gump, one day I started reading, and I never stopped. All the time people ask me what I’m searching for in all these books, and I tell them quite simply I’m searching for the same thing that you are.

Hence, if I were to recommend one simple practice to people who are serious about getting what they want, it’d be this: Grow and learn. Read at least one book a week.

I know to some people that sounds like a lot, but I also know that if most people stack up the amount of time that they spend reading junk (e.g. basically all “disposable” information online or in the news), they’d find tons of time to consume knowledge that will transform their life.

For those of you who are looking to keep growing, I’ve put together this course of 52 books for you to read over the next year—one book a week—that will transform you and your life.

Week 1

Eat That Frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Brian Tracy’s classic is one of the best books on getting things done. Goal setting, initiative, focus, and follow through—it covers it all. It’s the perfect choice to get the ball rolling in week 1.

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More On Mastery…

I received a number of follow-up questions on the topic of mastery, so I thought I would share with you an excerpt from Do What You Want on Wall Street.

Mastery is one of seven principles that matter to taking action and getting what you want, so take mastery seriously, and watch yourself accelerate towards what you want!

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BUILD MASTERY

Ray Dalio runs the largest hedge fund in the world for many reasons. He writes about one of them in Principles: “I often hear people say, ‘It’s getting better,’ as though that is good enough, when ‘it’ is both below that bar and improving at an inadequate rate. That isn’t good enough.”

Consider my client Dean. When Dean walks into a meeting, he knows why he is there. He knows his ask, and he has designed the meeting to get to the ask. He knows who he needs to be, how to position himself and his firm, and he has profiled the client. Dean knows what drives him, how he thinks, and what he values. He even knows when he is creating pictures in his mind while he speaks. He acts strategically with intent, bringing the most advanced tools and skills. He is exceptional at reading people, controlling conversational frames, and using persuasive language and narrative to drive emotion in every meeting.

None of this has happened by accident. He has learned this because he is dedicated to achieving mastery.

Mastery comes from exceptional dedication to excellence. Kanye West said it took him five thousand hours to create one song, Power. Even if he were working around the clock, this is more than six months, for one song that runs four minutes and fifty-two seconds!

Mastery doesn’t come easily. As Albert Einstein said, “Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person.”

For a professional footballer, mastery does not happen by picking up the ball and running with it.

And no one imagines that thousands of hours of welding on a production line qualifies you to be CEO of Ford. The key to an exceptional career is building mastery at the right things.

It is easy to see how targeting mastery and driving your system through continuous improvement builds you into someone of great and unique value, which is an unstoppable formula for getting what you want.

Most Fail Because They FAIL at 93% Of Communications

For those contemplating hanging out their own shingle, Steve Schwarzman has a warning for you.

In a discussion at Harvard Business School, he discouraged Wall Streeters from leaving established firms and starting their own.

He’s right, Wall Street is different to Silicon Valley, and the cost of failure is greater.

He’s also right that to succeed as an entrepreneur on Wall Street takes an established reputation and a track record of success.

He’s even more right in suggesting that if you expect to build a me-too business, like the vast majority of buy-side funds that are started and shuttered, then think twice.

And, too he’s right that succeeding on your own takes a different set of skills, which is where most people fail.

With great experience and a solid track record many think they have what it takes, but unless they are willing to become expert at raising capital they will fail.

Many highly successful people believe they are excellent communicators and they think that with some half-baked pitch capital will flow to them.

They are wrong.

Not only will capital not flow to them, but they are likely far from excellent communicators.

At best having picked up a few books on communications and influence, even most highly successful people are unconsciously incompetent at communications.

They don’t yet know how bad they are, and, more importantly, they don’t realize how damn good they can be!

Almost everyone you meet believes communications is talking proper…but savvy people know that only 7% of your communication is the words you use.

That’s right, 7%!

All those fancy words and ideas and sounding smart, well, that is worth about one foot relative to moving an entire human being.

So, if you want to get damn good at raising capital (or otherwise influencing anybody), you want to get focused on the other 93%.

What is that? And how do you master it?