The faster you can absorb and use information the better off you’ll be in this fast moving modern world. Gone are the days when you had years and years to master something in your job or in your life. Even in what were once considered relatively stable jobs you still have to keep up with the times. New research, developments, and myths pop up each and every day. Staying abreast of them all is important.
Not to mention that in the modern workplace you’ll be expected to have a variety of different skills. You’ll be expected to be able to adapt on the fly and learn new skills as needed. You don’t necessarily have to become a master at these skills, but you will have to have a working knowledge of them.
Wide often beats deep in the modern marketplace and modern world and as the history of earth has taught us, adaptability beats out just about anything else. Intelligence, strength, cunning, adaptability beats them all. And your career survival is not that much different then your daily survival in the world.
Remembering Pareto…
You’ve heard of Pareto I’m guessing. Italian guy, figured that 20% of people owned 80% of land or something top that extent. But anyways the Pareto Principle states that 20% of your actions cause 80% of your results. So it makes sense that whenever learning a new skill or trying to get up to speed as fast as possible, what you want to do is figure out the 20% of knowledge/actions that are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck fast.
Same with knowledge as with actions. Twenty percent of the knowledge gained with give you eighty percent of the results that’s to be gleaned from that knowledge. Same with actions. So with that being said what do we do now? To make sure that we are spending our time with the twenty percent that makes the difference and not the twenty percent that does not.
Best Practices & SOP
What you need to do is find the best practices, the things that have been found to make the difference for a certain area of knowledge or skill. For example in boxing establishing a good jab is going to be part of that, in entrepreneurship marketing and sales are going to be part of that, with being attractive to the opposite sex, hormones are going to be part of that. And so on and so forth.
What you need to do is find best practices and make those best practices your standard operating procedures. The things that you do without thinking about it. The things that you make habit. But how to find the best practices?
Books As An Answer
Here’s what I like to do. What I do is find three books on a subject area/skill that I’m trying to master. Let’s take a concrete example, let’s say that I’m trying to master sketching, something I’ve dabbled in but overall know very little about. And let’s say, for whatever reason, my boss wants me to be able to sketch a portrait of him and his family in a month’s time.
What do I do?
Well aside from looking up videos online, practicing everyday, and things of that nature. I’ll tell you what else I’ll do. I’ll go to amazon and type in “how to sketch” or variations of that phrase and then I’m going to start perusing through the results. I’ll try variations on that and see what books keep popping up. My goal here is to select three books that I’m going to tear through in the next few weeks.
How To Choose The Book
First thing is I’ll look at what grabs me. Certain titles, subtitles, covers, and the like. What stands out to me? Next I’ll check total number of reviews. For example I just typed in the above phrase on amazon and I see that there’s a book called How To Draw in 30 Days with 700 something reviews. way more than the rest on the page. So automatically it’s going to go into consideration. I end up with a list of books and let the books sit for a day.
Then I go through and pick out the ones that resonate the most for me. And then I sit down and devour them. Sometimes I’ll get one paperback book to read by my beside, an audiobook to listen to on the way to work and back, and then a kindle book that I can read on my phone when I’m in line or something of that nature.
And thus I can get to “workable” knowledge a whole hell of a lot faster than others.
Not Rocket Science But Worth It
Nothing crazy here, pretty simple stuff. But the power is in the execution of simple stuff, that’s where you really learn and get going. This may seem too simple, try it, see how fast you can start acquiring skills and knowledge that can give you a leg up in the world around you. At work, in relationships, and in life in general.
Try it and see how it works.
If anything I said here interests you I’d highly recommend you check out The Ultimate Alpha Collection which is a compilation of 16 of my books for the price of 5. It covers everything from being a man to making money to getting the right mindset to getting girls to fighting and more and is a resource no man should be without. Pick up your copy today!
-Charles Sledge
