When excellence isn't the most important

Hi Candidate,

Sometimes I think we set the bar too high for ourselves.

Excellence is great. And for a few key areas in my life — building amazing products, copywriting, discovering the best hot sauce in the world — I want to go deep. But I've also learned that you don't always need to become the world's best.

Q: Do I need to be "excellent" at cooking eggs?

A: No. "Good enough" is good enough.

Yeah, there are some things you should never compromise on. For example, if you own a restaurant, you better pay attention to the quality of your food. But most of the time, we just need to get "good enough" and move on.

For example, I'm a CEO, I have a social life, and travel a lot. If you think about all the skills you have to learn as a CEO, there are an infinite number of them:

Recruiting
Finance
Sales
New products
Customer service
Management

But if you boil it down, you probably only need to become world-class at a couple of those. In fact, the uncomfortable truth is we can only really become world-class at a handful of things in life.

As you grow, it doesn't get easier. In fact, the demands get even more extreme.

So what do you do?

Today I want to share my philosophy about learning — because over the years, I've had to learn how to learn things fast. And I want to show you how to do it, too.

I was reminded of this while listening to a podcast interview with Karen Baetzel (listen from 36:00-40:00), a retired Navy pilot.

The interviewers asked her about how people in the military approach learning. They'd seen a huge difference between the mindsets of their civilian and military clients and wanted to know why.

Her answer on how the military approaches learning:

"Here's the rule of thumb in the military to get promoted: Go to all the schools and go to all the wars ... Lifelong schooling — career-long schooling — is considered an honor…

Every time I had the opportunity, I was getting trained to do something else, something cool. I was being pushed. Now you're gonna learn how to fly a helicopter, now you're gonna learn how to land it on the ship, now you're gonna go be a college professor, now you're gonna go fly a fixed-wing aircraft, now you're gonna go back and get a graduate degree on your own, now you're gonna go be a commanding officer. You're always being trained. Every one of those things had schools involved in it.

The military model is 'It's no shame to go to school. It's a privilege. It's a pleasure.'"

Read that again. Learning is an honor, a privilege, and a pleasure. How many of us think of school that way?

So many people see learning as a negative thing, an obligation. I was once advised to change the name of my site because Americans have a negative view of "teaching." (It brings to mind sitting in a classroom, so they instinctively zone out.)

But I refused. I actually think that the very best LOVE to learn.

Another example. My wife and I were talking about parenting styles with a couple of friends, who grew up under very different parenting styles than we did.

She said, "Yeah, of course I want my kid to do well, but it's not like I'm going to yell at them if they're not doing their homework."

I thought this was fascinating.

Do you notice the invisible script? "If you push your kid to do homework when he doesn't want to, you must be yelling at him. Yelling is bad."

Reframe: When you're pushing your kid to do their homework, you're not "forcing" them. You're not yelling. You're pushing them out of love.

Pushing — and learning — are completely normal in Indian culture. You push your kids to work harder, to develop a love of learning, because of course kids don't know that naturally. They're kids! They want to eat Skittles! When you push them — not yelling, but nudging, challenging, and pushing — you're showing your love.

We all have these deep-seated cultural beliefs, or "invisible scripts," about learning. Sometimes these beliefs are deep, so invisible, that we aren't even aware they exist.

But what if someone pointed out these invisible scripts to you? (Like I'm doing in this email right now?)

What if you realized you'd absorbed certain beliefs decades ago...that aren't serving you anymore?

And what if you consciously decided to adopt a new script, which meant you could learn more, grow more, and achieve more in life?

This is hard — don't get me wrong. Confronting your own deeply held beliefs is extremely challenging.

But just let yourself imagine for a minute. What if learning wasn't a chore? What if learning was something you looked forward to? What if you viewed it as an honor and a privilege to get to learn new things?

Notice how different this is from how most people think.

Truth: Most people graduate and never read another book in their lives.

In the military — just like in Indian culture — learning is considered a prize.

That's why I love to learn. I don't see it as a task or a chore. It's not "Ugh, I gotta go to class." It's "I get to learn from an amazing instructor today."

How to teach yourself anything

Part of my job as a CEO is to learn things rapidly. Then teach it to other people rapidly as well, in a very nuanced, credible way.

Over the years I've had to learn dozens and dozens of new skills this way. From scratch, under fire, with no time to waste learning theory or useless minutia that didn't help me accomplish the task at hand.

True, there are things I've spent years learning to do exceptionally well — like copywriting — but with most things, I realized it was OK to just get "good enough."

This is so liberating! All those fun things you want to learn and do get a whole lot closer when you just need to get "good enough." Instead of thinking in terms of months or years (and getting overwhelmed), you can learn new things in weeks or days...or even hours.

Become a master of HOW to learn... and transform every area of your life.

When you master the skill of learning things fast, you can skip months of boring practice, cut to the chase, and achieve exactly the things you want, while having fun doing it.

We've all got something we've been meaning to learn but keep putting off. For some of us, that's learning how to play our favorite song on acoustic guitar, or how to give a better presentation at work, or how to take a great photo on your iPhone camera. Hell, maybe it's even learning to do a solo takeoff in a small plane!

Today, I want to show you the system I use to learn one new skill per month (sometimes more), all while still having a life!

I put the entire system in my course: Teach Yourself Anything.

These are the tools, techniques, and mindsets I use to learn any new skill fast. If you want to stop thinking about all the cool things you want to learn and start doing them, this is for you.

Here's a sneak peek at what's included (full details here):

How to dominate difficult learning curves by leveraging your own hidden psychological triggers
One simple tweak that can overwrite 20 years of programming and install a brand new skill in less than 20 hours (with very minimal practice)
Why we're lazy — and how to work around our inherent laziness
4 simple questions that will break apart the successes of other people and isolate winning tactics you can use in your own life
How to get quick, easy wins from otherwise big, intimidating goals — like learning to be funny, speaking Italian, or becoming a great public speaker
The Personality Quiz: A simple, 10-minute exercise that can rapidly accelerate your ability to learn any skill
My "one hour" rule that helps me learn 2x faster — I spent SIX MONTHS trying to learn the drums before I started using this
How to identify amazing teachers...and skip the not-so-amazing ones
The Drinking Game strategy for learning new languages fast
Why it gets easier to talk yourself out of learning new skills as you get older — and why starting from scratch actually gives you a huge advantage
The 4-word phrase I use to turn embarrassment into a strength
How I distill new subjects down to their core principles — without reading thousands of books
3 ways to get brutally honest feedback so you can accelerate your progress in any skill
The pre-persuasion elements you can embed in your environment to persuade yourself to stay focused
The Stacking Technique: Use this to add 10 hours of learning time per month without changing up your daily routine