Mastery Takes Years. But You Can Learn All You Need to Know in 8 Weeks. Here’s How.
By: Anthony Moore
Tags: Self Improvement, Growth, Anthony Moore, Mastery, Learning

The book takes a simple dish (chocolate chip cookies, scrambled eggs, chicken noodle soup, etc.) and cooks the same dish as much as 50 times, slightly tweaking their recipe each time.

They whisk batter for 90 seconds, then 120 seconds, then 60 seconds to find the best result.

They bake cookies for 18 minutes, 18.5 minutes, or 19 minutes and determine the tastiest cookie.

They use 10 grams of salt, then 12 grams, then 13.5 grams and learn the perfect amount, down to the gram.

After they’ve cooked the dish anywhere from 25 to 50 times, they settle on the scientifically-proven “best” result — the most ideal version of their dish.

It’s proven. They’ve done the work. You can trust them.

If you approach your goals this way, you become unstoppable.

If You Want the Fastest Results, Model Those Who Have Already Done the Work

One of the greatest parts of learning a new skill is that countless others have already learned it, made all the mistakes, and are willing to tell you the exact steps you need to do. Just Google it.

Unfortunately, most people are afraid of learning a new skill because they think it’ll take years to learn it.

The truth is, you can probably learn everything you need to know about most skills (i.e. to gain proficiency) in a matter of weeks. Think about that. Take a new skill — learning the guitar, baking, website design, juggling — and you can probably learn pretty much all you need to know in a matter of weeks (with the right training).

Let’s be clear — you’re not going to become a master. It could take years, even decades to truly master a skill.

But you don’t need to fully master a skill to benefit from it. You just need to be proficient.

See, it might take 20 years to learn how to cook the “perfect” pesto pasta. That’s an option, for sure.

But it only takes a few weeks to learn how to cook a “really good” pesto pasta.

At the end of the day, you can probably achieve the goals you want from knowing how to do something “really well.” You probably don’t need “perfect.”

Once you realize that, you can save years of your life.

The temperature to boil water is precisely 212 degrees Fahrenheit. You could increase the temperature to 230 or 250, but the water is still boiled. After 212, any extra energy is just unnecessary.

This is how you must approach skills — putting in just enough effort to learn pretty much all you need to know. There may be a couple of skills you’ll eventually need to truly master, and that’s where years of deliberate practice are necessary.

But for everything else, just learn as much as you need to. Don’t waste extra energy boiling water, it’s already boiled.

Mastery takes years. But you can pretty much learn all you need to know in a matter of weeks.

Here’s how.

The Standard Pace is For Chumps

The truth is, mastery only takes as long as you want it to take.

That’s because you control the two most fundamental virtues of mastery: repetition and intensity. If you practice something (correctly) 10x more than someone, you’re going to learn far faster than them. The same goes for if you practice something (correctly) 10x more intensely than someone.

The more you increase these two areas — repetition and intensity -the faster you can learn something.

In 2014, Scott Young (author of Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career) was a few years out of college when he decided on a unique goal:

He wasn’t going to speak English (his native language) for 12 months.

He was testing a new framework to see how much faster he could learn a difficult skill (foreign languages) than the average person.

He traveled to Spain, Brazil, China, and Korea, becoming fluent in each respective country. In a few short months, he had mastered conversational Spanish, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Korean — skills that normally take the average person years of practice.

But the most surprising part? Young discovered he could apply this new framework to learn just about anything, learning skills 10x and even 100x faster than the average person. Over the next few years, Young would earn the equivalent of a 4-year degree from MIT in just 12 months. He quickly mastered creative skills like photography by rigorous experimentation and repetition.

As best-selling author Derek Sivers once said, “The standard pace is for chumps.” When you decide to increase the quantity and quality of your effort, you can master just about anything — 100x faster, too.

For every goal you set, there is a long traditional path, and a shorter alternative. If you want to increase your results by 100x, it’s up to you to find these “wormholes” and exploit them.

In 1995, Matthew Syed (author of Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice) became the #1 table tennis player in England. He described the common response he heard when people found out about his Olympic-level talent: they’d say he was “talented,” or “lucky,” or had something others didn’t. Obviously, right?

Not quite. Syed explained that he had the perfect conditions around him to succeed — he had a brother who was also excited about table tennis, a great coach, and a 24-hour practice table where he was able to put in thousands of hours practice as a teenager. As a result, he was uniquely positioned to succeed.

Here’s another example. In Essentialism, Greg Mckeown described a smart individual who created several extra hours in his workday by skipping meetings. After the meeting, the individual simply asked his colleagues, “Hey, what’d I miss?” Since most meetings are largely irrelevant to many attendees, he was able to learn in 2 minutes what it took everyone else 2 hours to learn.

Look around you. What’s your “unfair advantage”? How can you find a wormhole and speed up the process? What context are you in that nobody else has access to? How can you use that to learn ultra-quickly?

Most people stick with the traditional path — it’s safer, familiar, and just about everyone’s done it that way for a long time. It seems to work.

But if you want to learn a new skill 100x faster, there are several ways to do it. And once you begin taking these “wormholes” — shortcuts that take you to mastery in a matter of months — you’ll start seeing huge increases in income, focus, and opportunities.

If You Can Endure the Pain of Evolving, You Can Have Things 99% of Other People Can’t

“Arrogant or critical people are often people with low self-esteem who are afraid of taking risks. That’s because if you learn something new, then you are required to make mistakes in order to fully understand what you have learned.” -Robert Kiyosaki

Evolving is painful.

Becoming a better version of yourself and learning new skills requires time, energy, humility, and study.

Evolving means constantly becoming a child again. You must become a young, teachable student again, over and over.

You must constantly be admitting, “I don’t know.”

There is so much you don’t know that will be revealed to you over the course of your studies and self-discovery. And the most helpful way to “grease the wheels” of this journey is to remain humble and open to correction and teaching.

The worst thing you can do is insist you already know everything.

Michelin-star chef Gordon Ramsay had a show called Kitchen Nightmares where he would audit a struggling restaurant’s food processes.

There was a particular episode where a failing restaurant was led by a stubborn and arrogant chef who refused to change his menu or learn how to cook new dishes.

Ramsey came in and began cooking marvelous new dishes for the restaurant. He prepared a sea bass dish for the owners, which they loved.

However, the chef refused to try the dish. “I already know what sea bass tastes like,” he argued dismissively. “I’ve been cooking for 38 years.”

Instead of learning a free, valuable lesson from a world-class expert, this man chose pride over growth.

The chef was later fired and replaced by a younger, more dynamic chef. The new chef was less skilled than the 38-year veteran but was more valuable because he quickly learned all the new recipes and adapted to the changing restaurant.

This is how most people react to criticism — defensiveness and immaturity.

Instead of humbly admitting they don’t know everything and gratefully accepting wisdom and teaching from experts, they choose pride and stagnation over humility and massive growth.

Evolving is painful. Most people simply choose not to do it.

But once you decide to become someone who is open to correction and teaching, you become an unstoppable force.

If you shift your mindset into being an open, thirsty mind that is hungry for knowledge (and humble enough to accept correction), you’ll become more capable than 90% of the population to achieve massive success.

“Every next level of your life will demand a different you.”-Leonardo DiCaprio

What got you here won’t get you there.

Mastering success means mastering the art of constantly becoming a better version of yourself.

This is done through slow, deliberate choices, and is sped-up exponentially through being humble enough to accept correction and teaching.

In Conclusion

A championship-winning soccer player needs to know more than just how to kick a ball well.

They must learn contract negotiations, team leadership, strengths and conditioning, nutrition, brand management, mental fortitude, public speaking, and a dozen other non-soccer skills.

They don’t need to master these skills — just the soccer skills.

But they do need to get pretty good at other skills.

This doesn’t have to take long. The more you increase your repetition and intensity, the faster you can learn new skills.

Don’t waste time trying to be “perfect” when “really good” is good enough to achieve your goals.

Mastery can take years. But you can learn pretty much all you need to know in a matter of weeks.

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