The Charged Life

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SUMMARY:

If we want to learn faster, we have to approach learning differently. Here are five ideas to learn faster:

1. You have to know what you want of your life before you become a master learner. If you don’t know what your goals are or dream life should look like, you don’t know WHAT to learn and, worse, you won’t be COMMITTED to truly learning it. Advanced learning requires clear focus and a definitive WHY for learning - without these you won’t stay disciplined enough to learn anything with real depth.

2. Avoid starting from scratch. With no model to begin from - no example or strategy you are following - you’re reinventing the wheel and doomed to waste time. So, what proven framework, person, strategy, or step-by-step instruction are you following in order to learn this new area?

3. Make a PRACTICE of mastering skillsets. A practice is a recurring habit or routine that deepens your skill in any given area. The important thing here is to make a daily practice of anything you truly want to learn. Without daily exposure and immersion in the area you are trying to learn you will never achieve mastery. Learning must be an everyday discipline. 

4. Get feedback. As you begin something new, all leaps forward, all major advancement, rests on getting immediate feedback and direction. Learning is a social process, so ask other people for suggestions and direction as you move forward so you can adjust your approach.

5. Have a deadline. Without a timeline for developing your competencies, you’ll never act or you’ll fall off track. No deadline means guaranteed distraction. So, WHEN do you need to learn this new topic or reach the next level of skill? What’s the consequence if you don’t learn it by then? Knowing the answer to these two questions will accelerate your learning.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

I get asked this quite a bit, because people come to any of my seminars or programs or they’re experts in any given space, and they’re like, “Okay, Brendon, I want to advance. I want to become a high performer in my area and I know to become a high performer I have to learn faster. How do I do that?”

Let me tell you first what not to do, because a lot of people just jump in and say, “I’m going to learn faster. I want to learn speed reading. I want to learn a new language. I want to learn all these new skills. I want to learn all these things…”

And what’s happening is that people are very transient with their learning goals. 

What do I mean by that?

I mean they’re kind of phony about it.

They really don’t want to learn.

They say I’d like to learn this. I’d like to learn that. Someday I’d like to learn this. Someday I’d like to learn French. Someday I’d like to learn how to do photos. Some days I like to blog. Someday I’d like to do video….

…and they never actually learn it, because learning doesn’t happen someday, it has to happen consistently.

And that’s the thing. If we’re really going to get to the point where you learn something faster, we have to approach learning itself differently. It can’t be these one off little goals of little things we want to learn. That doesn’t work for people. They don’t stay consistent, just like people don’t stay consistent on a diet if their goal is to only lose five pounds. There has to be a broader vision for who they are and what they want to be about and what they want their life to be about, if they’re going to stay on a diet.

It’s the same thing for learning.

If you’re going to stay on a learning habit, than you have to have a bigger vision for yourself.

Let’s start with this conversation…

1. Connect Your Life Goals with What You Want to Learn

If you want to learn something faster you must first and foremost, know the connection between what you want to learn and your dream life, your real lifestyle that you want to have.

I tell people all the time, don’t just come up with things you want to learn because guess what, we want to learn everything. By human build we are curious animals, deathly curious. We are the curiosity killed the cat sort of society.

Everyone wants to learn 50 new things immediately, but no one ever learns anything, why? Because it’s not real for them - it’s a transient desire. If you want to become a great learner it has to be attached to a dream life of yours, a true lifestyle that you see for yourself.

Let me give you an example. Lots of people say, “I’d like to learn some French. Someday I’m going to learn French. Some day I’ll learn how to talk French because it’s a romantic language, I like the food and they give lots of allowances on cheese and wine and I like that.” (I have a little French in m so I can say that.)

So here’s what’s happening, if I don’t have the vision for myself someday going to experience France, or someday going to a place where they speak French, or someday having real interactions with a humanbeing speaking French, and it’s important to me - it’s a deep dream, desire or vision for that - I’m never going to do the work to actually learn French because there’s no ‘why’ there.

You have to know what you want of your life before you become a master learner.

Until I know what I want my life to be about, what I want to experience on a daily basis, what I want my dreams to be or who I want to be, I don’t know WHAT to learn. I’m just going to be curious about things and then I’ll dabble in them.

But the path to real true mastery is the part where we say, “What do I want my life to be about?”

Let me develop the knowledge, the skills, the competencies, the capabilities to build into that life. And that’s where you get someone who becomes a master learner.

I have mastered almost every skill that was necessary for me to achieve my personal dream life. Everything, I said, “Gosh, if I want to do what I want to do – and for me, I want to become a writer and a trainer and an online thought leader - I must master those realms… I wanted to write books, wanted to train people live, and I wanted to do online marketing and online thought leadership so I could share my message with the world and hopefully inspire people to live more fully, love more openly and to make a greater difference.

I had the message and then I had the mediums, books, seminars and live events, online stuff. For me, that was part of my dream life so I had to learn things along the way in order to get there that I never really wanted to learn per se.

• I had to learn how to do video.
• I had to learn how to code and build web pages.
• I had to learn online marketing.
• I had to learn what to do on Facebook, what to do here on YouTube and on podcasts.

I had to learn all of that and I became a master learner because I was deeply attached to my mission.

You won’t know what to learn and what to develop real competencies and capabilities into until you know what your mission is, until you decide what a real dream is.

Otherwise you’re just playing around with skills. You’ll play around with learning something but you’ll never immerse yourself into them.

So once you know, What do you want your life to be about? What are your real passions?… You’ll learn what you have to learn along the way and then everything changes.

I’m not saying you have to know your ultimate purpose in life before you can learn anything, I’m just saying if you want to learn faster, start figuring out that purpose, start figuring out your direction and you’ll learn a lot faster.

2. Follow an Example. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel.

From there it’s really tactic. What the tactic in learning is, as we all know, al learning always begin with number one: examples.

If you want to learn something you need to be able to model something. You need to be able to see somebody who’s already done it. You need to be able to read about somebody who’s already done it. You need to experience somebody who’s already done it.

You have to not start from scratch.

The worst thing you can do in learning is start from scratch, because with no foundation of what’s worked before you’re just making stuff up and you’re re-inventing the wheel, which is the slowest way to learn.

The wheel was invented a couple thousand years ago as you know, so the worst thing you can do is say let me start trying a bunch of stuff. That’s not learning… that’s called being an idiot and being an idiot is about bumbling through life without realizing someone has already done it for you.

So go read a book about somebody who’s done what you want to do. Take a course from someone who has already accomplished what you want to accomplish. Follow someone’s online thing about who’s already done what.

There are so many examples for you to learn from and it has to begin with that. Because if you have the dream, the goal of what you want to learn and how it means something to your life, once you have that goal it’s about go learn from someone who already did it.

3. Make it a Practice.

This will give you a leg up so fast and once you learn what they’ve already done the second element is practice.

You have to make a consistent practice out of mastering skillets. 

What does that mean?

I mean daily exposure and immersion into what it is you’re trying to learn.

If you’re going to try and learn piano you aren’t going to learn it by going to piano lessons once a month. If you want to learn French you aren’t going to learn it by talking to somebody who speaks French once a month or even once a week. It has to be more than that.

If you want to learn something you have to deeply immerse in it over a long period of time. It can’t be a weekend event or seminar. It can’t be a one time course. It has to be something you get into.

For my personal development, I read a book a week on personal development and I’ve done it for 17 years straight, never missing a week, even when I was in the hospital. It was dedication to me. I was going to learn it. I was going to master my life. I was going to learn to master my mind, master my relationships, master my finances and master my health. It was so important to me that I made it a daily reality.

I read every single day, something that can further my personal growth, every day, and I never miss.

But I do that same thing with everything else I get into, any skill I want to learn. When I wanted to learn video, I immersed myself in learning how to use the cameras, learning about the lights. (And I was doing it by myself before having Mr. Shields here rockin’ it - he’s my videographer). I was alone and I had to learn those things. I had to learn, when I wanted to do web pages, everyday I was building, trying to do something. When I wanted to learn coding, every day… learning and trying. When I wanted to learn online marketing, every day.

If you’re someone who’s saying, "Brendon, I can’t give every day to learning something. Great! Then you’re giving everyday to the steady decline of your competencies!”

Don’t tell me you can’t take something every day to learn and grow.

If you don’t feel like you can take some time every day to learn and grow then you’re mismanaging your life… and somebody has to say that to you.

You probably already know it, so I’m not trying to be flippant I’m just being real.

If you’re not taking some time everyday to learn something, I don’t know that you’re ever going to develop mastery in anything. And, if you don’t ever develop some form, some level of mastery in something, you’ll never become the most influential in what you do or the highest paid in what you do or really have a connection to it where it feels like it’s art and it’s part of you.

I think that what’s lacking for a lot of people right now is that they have a disconnection or disassociation from any sense of mastery in their life.

Because…

… if we’re not mastering something and working towards getting better at something, then we’re never going to have a sense of progress, and if we never have a sense of progress then we’ll never sense that deep satisfaction, fulfillment, joy, or happiness that comes from being excellent at something.

So you have to practice something constantly, at some level everyday.

If you check into it or you look at it or read it, or even just following somebody who is doing it and you read their tweets or Facebook everyday or you read a segment, a book or an article everyday, whatever it is, make it a daily practice of consistency that lasts over a long period of time.

And people will go, “Wow, how did you get so good at this?” You’ll tell them, “I worked at it. Every day.”

That’s why there’s no mystery. I got good at it because I did it everyday. I got good at these videos because I do them all the time. It’s natural for me and I’m not going by a script here. I’m just talking with you, and I can do that because I’ve done it so much. I’m sharing with you it’s immersion and consistency in a practice, a habit of learning that very thing that you have a goal for and a dream life for.

4. Get Feedback to Grow.

The next element is feedback. Getting feedback immediately from somebody.

You want to become a world-class sports person… then you need a coach. If you want to become a world-class person at whatever you’re doing? You need someone to look at it and give you feedback. Maybe it’s a mentor who gives you feedback on presentations or art. Maybe it’s a friend of yours who has a discriminating eye, who can look at things and give good valuable constructive feedback and you say hey, before I send this out could you look at this?

It’s about getting feedback, whether it’s from a friend, family, spouse, lover, just someone who can look at what you’re going to contribute to the world first and say, “Try this. I like this or I don’t like this.”

Lots of people will judge - and there are some things that can destroy learning and that is when people are so brutal in their feedback or they’re judgment about something that it stops your learning.

But your goal in getting feedback is to never stop the learning. Take the feedback for whatever value it is.

If it came from a dark place and a mean person then don’t listen to it. There’s nothing relevant there because it’s from the wrong space. 

But, if it’s from somebody you love, someone you know, like and trust, and it’s delivered in a way you didn’t like, well, you’re listening for the value in which you can improve something, not listening for how do you feel.

A lot of people say mean things to me all the time. Very brutal feedback on YouTube, people saying horrific mean things about me, my life or my business. They’ll make stuff up. I see it, but I don’t listen to it and it means nothing to me.

It shouldn’t mean anything to you either when people are harsh to you and they don’t know you.

But if someone does know your heart, they know who you are and they give you feedback, but you don’t like the way it was delivered or you feel they were too confrontative or rude, I don’t need you to listen to the emotion of what they’re delivering or feel what it feels like. I wonder, “Is the content of what they’re saying relevant or capable of improving your learning and your mastery?”

If it is then you have to take the content for what it’s worth. Find the nugget of wisdom they gave you, even if it was wrapped in a big turd. (Feel free to quote me on that.)

There’s probably something there where you can say, “That is relevant, and if I apply that I can probably get better.” That’s vital.

You know these things right? You have to have your dream. What is the dream you’re working towards? What is your passion, your purpose, your vitality, that legend you’re working towards or that thing you want to contribute? What is it?

Then go, “What would I have to learn to get there?” You’ll be passionate about learning those things because you know they bring you directly to your dream.

Then, within each learning element, what’s your goal there?

What do you really want to learn?

Then, get examples.

Then practice it.

Then get feedback.

5. Have a Deadline.

The last piece is to have a deadline.

How fast do you need to learn that?

How fast do you need to master that?

Is that something you’re going to master this month, this year, this next decade?

Have a timeline to that mastery so that way now you have a competency map you’re building up.

• You know what you need to learn.
• You have people you can learn it from.
• You can practice it with these habits.
• You can get feedback from these types of people and experiences
• You know you have to do it and get good at it at this certain timeframe.

Follow these things and you will start to learn faster.

You’ll be more engaged with your life.

You’ll have more enthusiasm for learning.

You’ll notice things more.

You’ll feel like you’re growing and be more satisfied with your life.

 That’s what we call feeling… The Charged Life. 

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Like this? Please share it and help a few more people learn a little more about themselves. - Brendon

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