How I Learn New Things

everyone same happens here and in today's video I want to tell you and show you how I learn new things and the reason I want to do this video is because a lot of people have written in and asked and also commented on videos and said Sam how do you learn new things and you know learning things as a as a real skill and if you think about it you really have to learn how to learn which is kind of a different dimension that most people haven't thought about most people want to know what should

I learn and how should I learn and if you think about it what they're really trying to do is learn how to learn and once you've learned how to learn then you can pretty much acquire any skill that you want because that's the one most important thing it's kind of like a cheat or a hack because once you learn how to learn then you can learn anything but what I've noticed is that most people don't know how to learn and they've treated learning is kind of like this thing that happened back when they were at

school or college or whatever and now they're not learning anymore and let me tell you what like my process is I'll just make it real simple because you know in this process I didn't I didn't have at the beginning I didn't just think okay I'm gonna make this process and then follow this like I learned through trial and error and making a lot of mistakes and over time this process kind of emerged out of like what I was doing and I've honed it and refined it since so this process should be able to help you

right away so the first thing I do is you know I don't just want to like learning takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of energy and you know you want to be careful what you put into your brain and what you learn because you don't want to learn something totally useless alright and so the first thing I do is I think well what am I trying to achieve this is the number one question this is where all of it begins what am I trying to achieve what is the end goal I

have to think out into the future like what do I want to achieve and I get that clear crystallize it define it and then I come back to now and I think okay well what do I need to do in order to achieve that goal and quite often it's well I need to learn how to do this thing in order to achieve this goal because the goal is going to require action in order to achieve it but the action is going to require some sort of knowledge and strategy and process and tactics in order to

implement it properly to achieve the goal all right so this is pretty much what I do in my brain I just think about the goal then what actions need to take place and then what knowledge do I need in order to take those actions in order to get their goal that's pretty much the process and then very quickly I'm specific I've gotten specific about what it is that I need to learn now let me give you an example of this so let's say that I want to learn how to like I'll tell you one recent

write because it'll be it'll be easier for me to remember because I've been dealing with it like right now so this year and last year a huge focus of mine has been hiring great talent and also managing great talent like really smart people and so what I want to have what's the goal that's it's a team of really smart talented people working hard and doing great work okay there's the goal now how do I do that well I need to hire them and then I need to manage them and make sure they're doing good work

now of these actions which one is like a prerequisite to the others right well there's no point in learning how to manage great talent and make great talent productive unless you have them so the clear obvious one is hiring that comes first okay now we've got a prior to prioritization now how do you hire great talent now this becomes very very specific I need to hire great talent all right that's the action I need to do but how now I need some knowledge because that library of information is into my mind I know I need

to take that action if I take that action I should get that goal but I don't know how so this is this is how I typically arrive at something and then I would think all right well who they're beat this is the best thing to do you don't go try finding the most popular books on it you don't go try finds the fanciest guru on it with the most cars what you do is you think what company is actually doing it that's that's the best test because you know the the person who is like I

always think about it this way the person who's best equipped to teach you how to ride a bike is not like somebody with a bunch of cars in a fancy Instagram and a bunch of followers who claims they know how to teach you how to ride a bike it's not the person with seven PhDs from Stanford on bicycle riding who sees that they can teach you the theory of riding a bicycle it's the person who you see riding the damn bike that's the person so what I do is if I want to learn how to

hire great talent then I look at what companies have great talent right and then I make a list of them and then what I do is I want to find what people within that company are responsible for the hiring of the great talent and then I find those people and then I research those people and I dig into it and quite often really talented people they have recommended books or they have philosophies like what makes someone really good at taking actions is they're like people who are highly skilled they have something called like conceptual integrity

and what that is is they will have their own philosophies beliefs and principles that it's kind of like a belief system that they hold in their mind and all of their actions and behavior are an alignment to this belief system this is how really talented people do things not so talented people just kind of do a whole bunch of different things and there's no conceptual integrity between these and they're constantly changing right so these people are chaos to learn from because they themself are cows any - cows you don't want anything from that library it's

corrupt so you look for the people that are within good companies responsible for the thing that is actually being achieved and we try to pick apart their philosophy what are the principles what are the heuristics like given this situation would they do X or Y and what are the parameters for these different decisions and then we want to trace back the nodes in the map where these people learned because in order for this person within this company who has talented at hiring people then who has this belief system which seems to be very good at

taking actions that relate to hiring good people how did they get that belief system because people aren't just born with some belief system and people don't just wake up one morning to be like oh I now have a new philosophy of hiring telling people it doesn't happen like that they have to go out and get it they have to consume information and they have to be influenced by different people and different things throughout their life in order to learn this philosophy and so I want to learn where they learned that from and quite often these

people they leave a lot of clues and quite often on purpose because really telling to people like to share information and they'll often say a lot of them even have books and so you can go and find these sources and then I will that is how I'll find my way to the information all right and this is pretty complicated but it's pretty simple at the same time because before I read a book I want to make sure that my logic to arriving at their book is sound I don't want to go on and ask some

dude like on Facebook or go into a Facebook group and say hey what's the best book on this it's not a good idea what you you don't want to just ask your friend who has a shitty e-commerce business making 20 bucks a month with no talent other than himself who isn't even really talented so really nothing like how do you hire good talent and then aw dude you got to read this book like no don't do that ever you have to find these sources of information by going through like the correct path so I'll just

say it again so it's crystal clear for you to find the goal then break it down into the actions you need to take to achieve that goal then the knowledge that you need to have in order to take that action in order to achieve that goal then once you know what knowledge you need to to know then what company is taking that action and achieving that goal really well then who within that company is taking that action in achieving that goal really well and then what is that person's belief system and philosophy really understand that

write it down and then how did they acquire that belief system in philosophy we want to find their source materials and then we want to read those things right and then after we've read these different things like that say there's four or five different books then we're able to really understand in depth how this person built their belief system and then we're able to build our own kind of belief system on the on the subject of hiring great talent and make it our own and tweak it a little bit because we don't just want to

copy these verbatim not just because it's not because of any reason like oh you shouldn't copy people like if you're if you could just copy them and it worked I would just say do that and I would do that but the thing is is it doesn't work because every person has their own unique style and there's a lot of similarities and things but you know it's never just a carbon copy like a company that carbon copy someone else's thing that never works the same but you have to borrow some things but add in your own

kind of unique twist to make it your own and then with reading all of this information from these different books or articles or whatever and studying this person who's really successful and maybe a couple of other persons who are successful and they're different libraries we're pulling all of that information together synthesizing it and forming our own belief system and then once we have the belief system that's built with you know solid foundations from these good sources of information then we now have a philosophy and a point of view and principles and now we also have

some strategies and some tactics and now we can actually start applying those and practice that is when we switch from like the theory to the practice that's the action and then they say in this rolling example that I've got going here the talent 1 so I'll give you I'll just make this very real for you by telling you the actual kind of path that went through so with hiring great talent I looked at a company that has pretty decent talent and Netflix Google Amazon and but I pretty much say Google as number one and that

Netflix is pretty good and then when I looked at Netflix I noticed that they had there there was this woman who worked at Netflix who was head of like head of people I'm pretty sure that's what they were chief people officer or something like that or chief talent officer it was one of those one of those ones and I've actually forgotten her name I'm really bad at remembering names but she's written a book called powerful and it's really good and you should read it if you want to find if what you want to do is

hire and manage great talent then this is a good piece of information and then I bought their book I read it and then I found Netflix's culture dick and they've actually got this thing called a culture dick and it's like a slideshow presentation you can get it online it's a PDF and actually I'll put it beneath this video in the resources section for download as well as a link to that book but this culture dick is what they found that they had to create to hire top talent so they were having issues with hiring the

wrong people and with also people behaving in different ways shapes and forms and what they quickly realized is that they had no conceptual integrity at Netflix for hiring people and for also managing people and what their standards were and it's a big problem as soon as you start hiring people conceptual integrity and talent becomes the number one thing it's the number one thing on my mind these days in for the past year it's pretty much what I spend most of my time thinking about in doing is managing telling people hiring telling to people and thinking

of ways to do that at a higher degree so I found those two sources of information which were really good I also looked at Google and I found a I found a great book there too I looked at Google's principles and the mission statement and I looked at their kind of culture and things and I looked at a bunch of companies different strategies and in the people within those companies and what they did and then their culture and then also books that they had written or books that they had read and then I understood their

belief systems and everything and I kind of created a hybrid I I researched about five different people and all of their source materials in belief systems and then I took those five and I collapsed them and refined them into my own and then once I had my own one I started implementing it in practice by taking actions and trying to hire talented people and this is where we kind of go into like stage two stage one is like the theoretical side of things you're you're not actually taking action in terms of trying to hire telling

two people you're trying to learn how to hire talented people which is kind of the same thing but it's it's a little bit different and I noticed people miss this step a lot like a lot of people they try to jump straight into the action and you have to start with a little bit of theory seriously because the theory guides like everything and it shows you why you're doing what you're doing in it's just not then you know that you're you're not just taking mindless action or going around in circles you've got some kind of

theory and hypothesis behind the action that you're taking and so that stage one is really finding those telling to people like looking at their source information understanding all of that stage two is implement implementing it in practice and then as you're actually executing it day to day you'll notice that little things that off and you have to tweak things and this is tweaking your belief system your principles in your philosophy right and then you start tweaking this in practice and you're going back and forth a bit between the theory and the practice and then it

gets really sharp and then you find a groove and it gets very effective so for me it took me about I would say I was working through the theory stage of how to hire and manage selling to people for about a month honestly I read a lot of books that I studied a lot of people I was just devouring information for about a month and theory I kind of got the belief system together and then I've been taking action for like six seven months on this and honestly I didn't get to a spot where I

was actually good at it and where we actually started succeeding with it until about six months and I was implemented this stuff like every day so that shows you there that's kind of like in to end how I learn things and that's a universal kind of framework or concept that you can take and use to learn anything and so just run through it real quickly again first of all define what you're trying to achieve what is the end goal then what actions need what actions do you need to take to achieve they didn't go then

what do you need to know in order to take those actions to achieve that end goal then once you find out what you need to know if there's multiple pieces which pieces must go first prioritization then with that one piece that must go first who or what company is actively doing this in reality like not someone who's got a New York Times best-selling book on talent no not someone who's got a lot of Facebook followers on talent no not someone who just sees this like you want to look at a company that actually has talented

damn people and then they must know what they're doing right just like the guy riding that bicycle he knows how to ride a bicycle because it is he is writing it so just finds those people and then who within the company has that information then what is that what is their belief system and philosophy oniton principles where did they acquire those raw materials to build that go learn those raw materials sometimes those raw materials will lead you to other all materials and other people go study those ones too and then look at a few different

people and then collapse all that information together form your own that stage one which we're working in the theory stage two then we're going into the practice then we're going to be making changes to our belief system in only going back and forth between these until we arrive at a point where it works really well and that's when you've got something that's like a proof of concept now you have a theory that when applied in practice works when you have those two things you have likes you have something very powerful because you know no theory

I don't I think theory is useless unless you can apply in practice and it works as intended pretty much every time and so that's what you're aiming to get not things that you do and work but you don't know why and not theories that sound great but when applied don't work you must have both a theory that when applied and practice works and when you have both of those things you've successfully learned something and at no point before that have you actually learned anything because you could go read some books on something doesn't mean you've

learned it well you could go get a degree in something doesn't mean you've learned it or you could get famous for for something doesn't mean you've learned it you've only learned it when you have a theory and you apply and practice and it works that is the definition of something that is learned and then you're never done either it's always continuously you know you have to get better better better better better plus the environment and the world we live in changes and so we have to adapt and move with time as well so just because

you've learned something and it's working never make the mistake of thinking that this is now completely done you know you'll probably be able to get a good life out of that but then it will need tweaks in maintenance along the way to keep its edge and keep its sharpness over time and you want to you want to be aware of those when things are getting a bit tired and not working as they used to you need to update that library of information in your mind update your theory make some tweaks and then get back to

that level of performance and then it's good again and really what you're trying to do in business as you're trying to collect like a latticework of these theories and concepts in your mind so that you can handle anything so you know when it comes to accounting and tax when it comes to hiring management when it comes to like your your organizational structure how you structure your teams and how you structure the workflows and how you partition tasks and everything and load-balanced them within your network of people and then also how you do your marketing how

you do everything you want to have these concepts and these theories about how to do everything and they should work and actually get the intended result when implemented and practice and when you start to get a collection of these things that's when you start to make leaps and bounds and business because when you arrive at these different situations day to day you're no longer guessing you're and you're no longer having to just go and read books all the time before you can do anything like you start to get into a zone where all of these

things that you've learned they start to come together and you're able to apply them to all these different areas in life and business and that's when things get powerful and I know early on when I was an entrepreneur I'd learn these different things I could learn sales at learn accounting at learn tax I would learn marketing funnels landing pages Facebook heads Google AdWords SEO websites copywriting and you know I'd learn all sorts of different things and quite a lot of the time I felt pointless I was like why am i learning this thing and man

is taking so long to learn this thing but in hindsight like all of this stuff they were like kind of building blocks like little Legos right and each one didn't seem they're important and I kind of wondered am i real is this really going to be they're important but once I started to get like a collection of these illegal blocks together they became more than the sum of their parts so if we look at like five blocks right well there's just five blocks but when we look at all the possible combinations of five blocks there

is many and that's what you don't see when you're learning the things you know you just see them as the individual parts but when you combine them together over time they become a lot more than the sum of their parts it grows exponentially in the moves and strategies and things you can deploy gets like limitless and that's the point where you know I don't think most entrepreneurs hang on until they might learn a little piece here a little piece there but they don't keep going they don't keep building up their little Lego blocks and my

advice to you is to use this process I just shared with you to learn things it works real well and it's a good just no-nonsense way to do it you know you're not looking at what's popular you're not looking at some idiots recommendation who shouldn't be giving a recommendation which is what a lot of people like to do you know a lot of people like to give recommendations doesn't mean you should listen to them and also it's not about what's famous or what's popular or trendy or anything like that it's just about grounding our grounding

it in like reality so if somebody is actually doing it in practice then we want to learn what they're doing what their philosophy is behind that doing and the building blocks on which they built their belief system of how to do the thing they're doing successfully right we're just tracing it through and then when we know that we're grounding everything we learn in like solid evidence because in the modern day you there's too much information and there's too much to learn so it's not about learning in the modern day it's about learning how to learn

and learning what to learn the what and the how is so important you know because anyone can learn something but knowing what to learn and how to learn it those like the key pieces and hopefully with this strategy I shared in this video you're able to go out and use it and learn things and improve yourself your life and your business a lot faster so if you liked this video just click that like button and also click Subscribe I release a video like this once every week as well as customer interviews live stream q and

A's and other things like that so thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next one soon