I was thinking and realizing that the best principle would be to learn anything other people need 6 months to learn in just 6 days. Life is short and there is not much time, right? But how can I pull it off? Life is too short. It’s like playing chess. You can play chess in two ways. One where you have a timer and one where you don’t. But life is like the one with the timer. You have five seconds to make your move.
The average person buys 17 books a year, they only read 2 books though. This means, the average book reads one book in 6 months. Why don’t you read one book in 6 days? It’s not hard. Lately I was starting out to read one book a day and at first I thought I won’t have the time to do so. But as it turned out, I do. The average person who wants to quit smoking struggles for years, what if you do it in 6 days? The average person struggles with their weight their whole life, what if you can learn in 6 days how you can revolutionize your habits?
“That’s impossible! Nobody can learn that fast!” – Who says? I can prove to you that this is not true. Peter Drucker says: “Don’t have disempowering beliefs.” Don’t make up beliefs. Of course you can learn in six days. Tony Robbins says: “All change happens over night.” I had a friend of mine who read a book about smoking the one day. And she learned that it is bad for your health (wait, what?). Then she quit over night. Based on the new information and facts. Her friend who was also a smoker is still struggling with it today. Why? Who knows. Maybe he loves it too much, but I doubt it. I assume he just lacks information about the long-term consequences. Also, he might be following his primal impulses too much.
Now, I will prove to you how fast you can learn and how fast you have learned in the past already. For most of history people thought the world was flat. Smart people, Socrates, Plato; they all tought the world was flat. They spend their whole life and went through their whole lifetime to figure out the truth. But you and I, we sat in a classroom and learned it by reading one sentence. And in 30 seconds we learned the world is round. That’s how easy it is. Remember the dutch saying: “We are too soon old and too late smart.” You don’t want to be 80 years old and smart about money. You don’t want to be 80 years old and finally figure out how to control your diet. You don’t want to be 80 years old and learn to be happy. You wanna be happy young. Because remember in the world we live in opportunities come quickly and then they leave and you will never get them again. If you are a fast learner you can take advantages of them. In one of my favourite quotes of Charlie Munger tells a story in which his grandfather told him: “Charlie, real opportunities that come to you are few; it’s a very fortune life that is just bathed in opportunities all the way. Most people just get a few times where they can make a huge difference. When you find one of those and you clearly recognize it, seize it boldly and don’t do it small.” Your life and your success is on a timer.
Even business operates this way. Seth Godin wrote in The Purple Cow: “In the competitive world things only last for a couple of years; the person who is able to learn quickly is ahead.” You don’t know how much time you have. You don’t know if you will live long or short. Also, some people have done in 20 years more than others do in their whole life. Life is like the chess timer. So you must have the right philosophy. And here is the right philosophy. There is an old spiritual saying – I’m not that religious but I love that saying – “It’s easier for a camel to go through an ear of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” What does this mean? Simple. If you are not humble and if you are rich and proud it’s impossible to get to the truth. It all starts with humility. So I can tell you now a simple way how you can measure your level of humility. Humility is not an emotion, it’s a way of life. So today, how humble are you in listening to people who are 20 years ahead of you? Did you read a book of an export? Did you listen to an audio? Did you go out and seek a mentor who is years ahead of you? You don’t want to be like somebody who tries to learn right now that the world is flat or round. Just take it! That experts have figured it out already. Isaac newton said: “It’s not that I am great, I am standing on the shoulders of giants.” You wanna stand on the shoulders of giants so that you can reach further than ever has been reached before.
So make sure you have a habit. Every day, while you eat breakfast, read. And read from the best. When you answer your emails, have your YouTube going. Listen to the smartest people in the world and make sure to listen of the best. And when you want to become an entrepreneur find somebody who is 10-20 years ahead of you and be humble about it. “Will you show me what you have learned?” Warren buffet said: “We all learn from mistakes, but its a lot easier to learn from other people’s mistakes.” Don’t learn from your own mistakes. Life is too short to do so. Cut your learning curve from 6 months to 6 days. You can do it. Of course you can’t become a concert piano player in 6 days. But you can’t become one in 6 months either. But I can tell you this: the average person just plays around on the piano does not know what they are doing and you can learn all that in 6 days. You can at least get the start going. Of course it’s gonna take practice over time. But you can change the direction of your life over night. You can get rid of a bad friend over night. You can get out of a bad relationship over night. You can stop eating junky food over night. You can start working out over night. Remember: your life is just the accumulative effect of little decisions. Learn to make good ones.
To make good decisions you need information. Therefore read a lot. And read from different sources. Steve Jobs talks about how he took a class in calligraphy. This was before he was starting out with Apple. And guess what, years later when he was making the Apple computer beautiful, he drew on this experience. So you must go out. Like I said: there are 125 million books. Find the top 100 from the greatest people. Find the ones which are relevant to your life. Read biographies and download them to your brain.
Well, some may say: “Dude, I can’t read that fast!” Follow the same principle. How can you learn to read faster? Learn from the best. You have to go faster. Life is too short. I don’t want to be all dramatic here, yet it is quite true. How fast have your last 10 years past? You can double your reading speed in one week. I tried it. It’s not that hard. I wish somebody had taken me by the shoulders and shaken me and said: “What’s gonna take you 10 years to learn I want to show you to learn in 1 year!” It takes humility though to reach out to other people and admit that you know less than them. Your pride has to go out of the way. And most of us cannot do it. We want to take the bow and arrow and shoot at the target and we don’t realize that only one way hits the target, millions of way miss it. Go and hit that one way. Have somebody stand behind you and let him show you how to hold the arrow the bow, so that when you let loose its got a good chance of hitting.
If you do that enough over and over in every area of your life, in your physical health, how you work out, how you eat, how you sleep, the water you drink, the foods and the beverages you let into your mouth, the way you stretch, the way you do cardio, if you listen to the greatest people, you cut your learning curve from 6 months to 6 days. If you don’t know how to make money and don’t have any money in the bank account, go find the top 50 people who know how to make money. Go ask them in person or read their books or listen to their YouTube. That’s a way to do it. You cut the learning curve. What took them months of trial and error and losing money, you can learn in 6 days. Charlie Munger said: “I made a lot of mistakes, just less than most people.” Make fewer mistakes, let other people make the mistakes.
When it comes to love life and you don’t like your love life, find somebody who is 10-20 years ahead of where you want to be. Somebody who is living the life you want to live. Ask them or read about them (maybe they are dead). Read their books. Take that attitude and be humble. And the learning curve will be reduced. If you are not happy, if you are depressed a lot, that’s probably your body telling you that something is wrong. Go and find somebody happy and ask them on what they do differently. There are so many books on how to become happy. Read Instant Happy for example. We have already figured out what makes us happy. We know all that. You just have to take on the given knowledge. Be humble and the learning curve will shorten.
