ability to quickly learn skills will allow you to fly past 99 of other people now most of us don't realize this but there's actually a formula for learning any new skills think of Life as a video game where each level requires new skills first we have to get good grades then we have to do that while living in a dorm room then balance that working a part-time job and dating and if we can't keep up then every area of our life suffers we've been exploring this on the channel by building the skill of studying but
here's a secret the formula can actually be applied to any other skill we want to learn the first ingredient for learning any skill is a skill manual these can be books digital products courses in-person classes coaching tutoring mentorship workshops even YouTube like check out our ultimate study skills series I know this sounds obvious but I can't count how many times in the past I've wanted to learn something but never even tried to find a manual back when I was 18 I told myself I was going to get into music production so I torrented a copy
of Ableton Live and then it just tried to Rod it like I had no experience using any music production software and if you ever tried to learn a Daw without an instruction manual it's freaking complicated I spent months hours every single day trying to figure it out on my own a couple years in I finally decided to buy a course and it changed my entire perspective on learning skills the course wasn't Special by any means but what I gained was a Moment of clarity like holy crap I could have literally saved two years of my
life if I just invested in a skill manual how much music could I have made if I just done this sooner how much time could I have spent with friends or gone on adventures instead of struggling to figure out this skill that someone else could have just taught me a skill manual is the most important ingredient to learning skills efficiently and with how accessible it is to now self-educate on the internet I don't even Flinch when it comes to paying for knowledge 300 course to teach me a new skill for my business done no questions
asked get into the habit of investing in yourself and your time download the knowledge that someone else thousands of hours putting together so that you don't have to next we need to invest the appropriate amount of time and effort in practicing the skill Josh Kaufman's research found it takes 20 hours to learn a skill most of us spend more time than that scrolling social media every month imagine what could happen if you just carve out a little bit of that time to invest in our future self a few months ago we decided to experiment with
a Consulting service in our business and so Mike and I had to learn the skill of selling I've never worked a sales job before you know in the hospital patients just show up and over the course of a couple weeks we hopped on 15 sales calls each and by the end of it to my surprise we landed a few clients with zero prior experience now I'm not saying that we're amazing at sales but we were good enough to see results with that consistent time and effort now there's a very big caveat with the idea of
20 hours because we all know that time is a terrible predictor of ability in college I'd spend 10 hours a day in the library studying by that math I should have invented portal technology by now but if I was honest with myself what was I actually doing during those 10 hours chatting with friends snacking scrolling Instagram and when I was working I was mindlessly passively reading my notes you know making summary sheets of the summary sheets in the textbook I wasn't focused in order to quickly learn a skill we have to not only be focused
but also intentional with what we plan to accomplish during practice create clear and reasonable outcomes for yourself and you'll discover like I did that we can actually spend a lot less time doing things but still learn the same amount or even more the third ingredient is something I call Performance monitoring in medicine the most reliable way to see if our patients were improving was to monitor their numbers that's why we ask so many questions and take vitals and draw blood we're Gathering all kinds of data points both subjective ones and objective ones to make better
decisions and treatment plants so it doesn't matter what type of skill you're looking to acquire performance monitoring is non-negotiable to gather the data we use to learn skills faster because we determine whether or not we need to course correct am I getting better at this or do I need to find a different skill or try another approach circling back several months ago as we were learning the skill of sales performance monitoring was a critical part of our success we were meticulous about recording every call and at the end of the day we would watch the
calls together and help each other identify what worked and what didn't work without Gathering data we might as well have been shooting arrows into the dark performance monitoring sets us up for another very important skill called self-reflection that is a very dense and complex skill that deserves a video all on its own so I'll save that one for later so I think it's important to understand the theory and the thought process behind learning skills like this but of course it's just the beginning right this video it's a small page in the skill manual for the
skill of learning skills but if you want to take your self-discovery journey to the next step and really take ownership and control of your life we've created an entire operating system to build skills completely in notion but it's so much more than just a template studyquest is designed to be your learning companion to collect your knowledge seamlessly monitor your performance and to help you build any skill you want along the way it includes an in-depth dive into the science of learning and a complete guide for building a personalized study system that's also a fully integrated
experience within cajunco academy and our amazing Community studying is just the beginning but we're looking to acquire any skill that we want to learn I'll drop a link in the description and I can't wait to see you there
