You're gonna spend thousands and thousands of hours learning over the course of your
life. And what's crazy is that despite all that time in the classroom, learning languages,
music, whatever it might be, you might be learning one of the slowest ways possible;
not because your teachers didn't have good intentions, but because they did not know
how to teach you to optimize that learning experience.
The good news is this. There are ways, principles, that you can apply to everything, from martial
arts to business, that are going to help you lap the competition. You can learn much faster
than you are. So, right now, think of something in your life; one thing that you're trying
to progress in, apply these 5 tips and watch as you just go crazy, crazy fast through your learning curve.
First thing is this: Measure a smaller unit of success. And to illustrate this point,
think of two salesmen making outbound sales calls. First salesman, he wants to measure
whether he's successful in that call. He makes the sale or whether he isn't; he doesn't make
the sale--good thing to measure. Second salesman says, "Yes, I want to know those things, but
I'm gonna go smaller. I want to know, first milestone is the person staying on the phone
with me for 10 seconds; second milestone, did I finish my entire 30-second pitch? After
that, did they ask me a buying question within the first 2 minutes? And so on, all the way
through the close.
It goes without saying, this guy, over here, who has smaller milestones is going to do
better because he can diagnose where he's going wrong. This guy only knows things are
generally going good or they're not. He's got no data, no analytics. This guy on the
other hand can say, "My first 10 seconds are great. My first 30 seconds are great, but
I'm missing something after that that isn't going the way I needed to." And this one became
very clear to me.
I've been practicing jiujitsu lately and in class, there's a lot of these complex submissions,
and I saw myself feeling like, "Okay, if I'm doing well, that means I get the submission.
If I'm not doing well, I'm not getting the submission." But I spent a lot of time not
getting the submission. What has gone better for me is rather than say, "You know what? Forget the
submission.
I need a smaller step, which is gonna be, can I break this guy's posture? Can I grab
his wrist, pulled off my chest, and pull him to me? Yes or No. Crap, I'm not doing that
thing right. Okay, what am I doing wrong? Fix the wrist, okay, I've got that piece, next step.
When you deconstruct things in this way--that's what Tim Ferriss calls it--you can chunk all
these little lessons together and that makes the learning process. At the end, you just
re-assemble these pieces and you will fly through the learning curve. So that's the first tip.
Second tip is this. When you're thinking of this thing, pick only one thing at a time.
And I see this all the time when people ask me about the channel. They come in and say,
"Charlie, I've watched all of your videos. I've seen them twice, seen a ton of improvement,
but I'm kind of hitting a plateau, what do I do?"
And I never tell them, "Go ahead, watch it third time, all 60 videos." That's not the
right thing to do. The right thing is to pick the one video that have the tip that could
be best for you because you know your own self, right? Pick the thing that's gonna be
best for you and apply that until it becomes an unthinking habit.
When we teach our programs, we've done a ton of different ways. We've done weekend bootcamps.
We've done group classes. We've done one-on-one Skype coaching. By far, the fastest improvement
that I've seen in my clients comes from the online program that we have that walks people
very specifically through things, okay, week number 1, First Impression. Week number 2,
we've got the first impression, we're gonna move to confidence. Week number 3, conversation,
going chronologically.
And within that first week, it's eye contact, tonality. Each day has just one thing that
they're going to focus on. And what this enables you to do or someone to do, in any area, is
that you get to focus on that thing without having your mind just be flooded with "I got
to do this and this, and I got to remember how to finish the submission." You get to
focus on one thing, make that a habit, and then, move along. So that's the second tip.
The third tip. People get this one wrong, I think, from college, and it's that if you
have a set amount of time to dedicate to any sort of learning endeavor, you are much better
off spending that time a little bit every day than you are in one batch to process.
There's some things in life that do better in batching. Learning is not one of them because
learning comes from repetition, right?
I see people in college they go, "Wait a second, I crammed for my last test, I did fine. Eight
hours straight, I studied." Yes, but how much did you remember three days later? If you're
trying to build a skill, you're trying to rewire your brain, create new neural pathways.
Say you're playing the piano. If you sit down for three hours and play, play, play, play,
play, and then, come back a week later, you're not gonna have it. But if you sit down for
half hour a day, walk away, come back; the next day, half hour, you're getting to review
what you did in a much shorter time span. That's going to help you learn faster.
So, keep in mind, if you have something, this consistency, every single day--with the exception
of things that require rest, like weight training--you want to keep that up. Now, a couple of caveats
here. First thing is this takes much more will power. It's a lot easier for people to
go, "I want to run really hard," for one day than it is to do it for a year a little bit every day.
So if you're working on will power, you haven't mastered that, check out our video on will
power. It's gonna help you with that. And the second thing is that this is true of learning
and practicing. They're not necessarily of production. I'm a writer and if you're going
to write, I recommend you read and write every day. But if you're writing your masterpiece,
some people, myself included, do better to have this complete flow experiences of six
hours at a time. You write, write, write, write, write, walk away for a week, and then,
come back to it. So learning and production, not necessarily the same mechanics going on
here. But this brings me to the fourth thing, which is my favorite of everything that I've
mentioned so far because it's impacted me most recently in the biggest way and that's
with Charisma on Command.
When we started this, I was doing it wrong. This business is actually about three years
old. I had a blog, which I still do, and I was writing articles in that all the time.
And I'd write an article, you'd get a couple of subscribers, write an article, there's
a couple of subscribers, but the growth rate was very, very linear. It wasn't going very
quickly. And about 6, 7 months ago, I was talking to Ben, my co-founder, and we said,
"We need to mix stuff up. We got to try something different because we can't do this turtoise
thing forever." So we said, okay, we're gonna do LinkedIn, we're gonna do Facebook, we're
gonna do Pinterest, we're gonna get in Instagram, which I don't even know how we would possibly
do that for Charisma on Command, and we'll do YouTube.
And if you'd ask me then, which one is gonna take it off, I thought LinkedIn, but surprise,
surprise, YouTube exploded, right? We went from 8,000 subscribers to about 300,000 today,
and just 6, 7 months.
The point is, you do not know which vehicle is gonna take you there. Everyone tells you,
get a mentor, get a method, get a teacher. True. But when you're first starting, pick
a bunch of different mentors. Pick a bunch of different methods. The good news is, introductory
class for a lot of people is discounted or free. So, when you're starting, say, improv
comedy, go to a bunch of different clubs. Find the one that works for you. Once you
find the one that is making you grow the fastest, that you like the most, double down on that,
and that's what we've done with YouTube.
For the last several months, I've been-- all my energy is going to YouTube. But then, something
happens, which always will happen, is you'll start to plateau. Now, our biggest growth
month for this channel is probably a month or two ago, and since then, things had kind
of leveled off, which tells me that yes, this is still a worthy investment of my time, but
something needs to be tweaked. Something needs to change. Maybe I need a different style
of video. Maybe now that the business is at a different spot, I'd invest in ads that I
hate to bombard you with before every video, but maybe we need the ads on the YouTube channel.
Maybe we need to find mainstream coverage. Maybe we need to take our book and get a book
deal, which, by the way, shameless plug, if you have an agent friend, or know someone
that does self-improvement, non-fiction, please email me charlie@charismaoncommand, because
that's one of the angles that we're looking at to take us to that next exponential growth
level. But the point is this, at the beginning of every endeavor, mix it up. Get a bunch
of different teachers, a bunch of different methods. When you find one that works, shove
all the rest out. Stick with it while that growth is going crazy, and then, when it starts
to level off, you go back to that. Okay, something new. I'm on a new stage. I need a new teacher.
That is going to help you grow extremely quickly.
Fifth thing. This is, again, one of the more important ones for me is debriefing. And I've
been thinking a lot about jiujitsu lately, that's kind of what inspired this video, but
I see things, people have a lot of pride. And when they lose, they want to act like
they, "Oh, god, I knew, I knew that I shouldn't have done that." The truth is I have no idea
what I should and shouldn't do. I'm getting out there, I'm getting beat all the time.
But whenever I get beat and I don't know what happened, I'd say, "Hey, man, can you show
me what you just did there?" He'll walk me through it, "Yeah, you did this, that." Okay,
how do I avoid that next time? And he'll say, "Well, you had your arm really far extended.
When you're doing that, you want to keep your arms in tight," and I'd say, "Okay, great."
Next time I do it, I don't make that same mistake. So, in this way, I'm limiting the
mistakes I make rather than repeating them over and over and over again, which is what
most people do. I make them once. Now, you'll notice in this story, I needed that second
opinion because I don't know what I'm doing wrong. This is true of you as well. Quick
story to illustrate the point, we had a guy in our program Charisma University. He was
doing very well with the program, but one area of his life he was struggling in, and
he was trying to get interviews for this scholarship. He had five interviews set up to get scholarship
programs for Tech, and he had four of them, and he'd missed them all, despite the fact
that he was, by far, like the most qualified candidate.
I'm talking the kid has won national awards for technology. His GPA-- every single, like,
brainiac thing was there. So I talked to him because this kid should have been getting
these scholarships. He was, by far, on paper, extremely, extremely worthy of it. And it
became clear to me in listening to him, so how do you talk about it? That he was just
listing his achievements--I won this award, I did that, I got this GPA. I said, "Pause.
I think I know what's going on here is that you're not connecting with these people, so
tell me, honestly, like what is it you love about technology? Why do you want to do it
in your life?" And he said, "Well, I think that there's a ton of problems in the world
today and that they're not necessarily gonna be solved by politics. They're gonna be solved
by groups of smart people who are building new technologies like green energy, for instance,
that makes things work for a bunch of different constituents, and that's what I want to do.
I want to contribute to the community in that way." So, pause, "That's your answer, all
right? So when they ask you why the scholarship? Do not tell them I won this award. Tell them
what your dream is."
So we worked on that. He goes back for his final scholarship opportunity and, of course,
because they could see his resume, and then, hear his story, those things together, he
blows it away and he gets the scholarship.
So, for you, you're going to need when you're screwing up, probably, a second pair of eyes
on you. And if you don't know who to ask, you don't want to ask the wrong person, check
out a video, it's called "How to Spot Dangerous Advice." It's gonna help you find the right
mentor for the situation that you are in, but I hope that you found these five tips
helpful. Take them.
Think of that one thing that you had in your head at the beginning of this video and apply
this to it. You're going to see that you'd start learning so much faster, people are
gonna go, "Well, you're just a natural. You're just stronger," you're just whatever it is,
it's incredible how quickly this helps.
So, if you found this helpful and you've not yet done so, subscribe to the channel. We've
got videos like this. We've got the Charisma Breakdowns, which I mentioned, which will
still be coming, even if we change our strategy, I'm gonna stick with YouTube. I love doing
this stuff. But go ahead, subscribe to the channel, you'll see us on your feed every
single week, typically on Mondays, sometimes on Thursdays as well.
If you haven't ever done so, go ahead write in the comments. Let me know what kind of
questions you guys have that helps these videos, that helps the Charisma Breakdowns. I will
tell you, the one you suggested, I'm still working on it, and I should have next week
is on Muhammad Ali, so that should be coming up. I can't promise it on Monday, but I'm
very much thinking it will come Monday.
I hope that you guys have enjoyed this video. I hope that you take one thing from this and
actually apply it to your life rather than watching all 60 videos, even though I appreciate
that, and I'll see you in the next video.