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Hey, this is Sharon Srivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I'm going to make the craziest promise to you. I'm going to help you become a superhuman. Meaning how can you become the best version of yourself right now? I'm going to give you the exact strategy, the learning the tactics and the exact how to and will cost you $0. And I break it all down for you step by step, starting right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to, how to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharan Srivatha and welcome to Business School. All right, if there's ever an episode that you need to listen to to become a superhuman, this is it. Because I'm going to give you the exact framework, the exact mechanics to become essentially the best version of yourself. And all you have to do is probably listen for the next 10 to 12 minutes. And so my big idea here is that I thought about this idea of like how, how do I figure out how to become the best version of myself? And I realized that it's personal growth, right? If, if, if I gave you the same problem today, would you be able to solve it better today or would you be able to solve it better 10 years ago? Well, today, right, because in the last 10 years you become a better version of yourself. That is the big difference. That is the big difference in everything. So that is why this is probably one of the most valuable podcasts I've gonna be recorded for you. And I wanna equate this to you with the idea that personal growth in a lot of ways is just math, all right? Personal growth is just math. It's not self actual actualizing yourself. It's not the secret, it's not, you know, get what is getting in alignment. I don't know, I don't know what to do next, right? I want to give you the thing that you can do next that will make you the best version of yourself. So imagine that you could just be, you could just accelerate 10 years worth of learning right now. Would you just be a better version of yourself today? And that would give you naturally a better life, right? That's the, the big idea. And this foundationally starts with this, this this, this big idea, which is schools don't teach us much. And I, I don't mean it a negative way. I'm a product of the, the school system. I went through all grades of school. I went through college, I went through a little bit of graduate school at Stanford, dropped out to build a startup. Then I went to a business school. I have paid my fair share in learning. I pay for, I pay a significant amount of money for my children to go to one of the best schools that I know. We built our entire lives around school. So I'm a big fan of education overall. But the problem is schools teach us trivia, right? They just teach us trivia. In the modern world, the only, only thing that you get benefit from from school was trivia, which is, hey, what, what are the countries? What were the wars? What's the periodic table? You don't get the personal growth. Like, let me give you an example. If you're in high school memorizing the periodic table or figuring out, you know, that if you dropped a tennis ball and a, and a bowling ball from 10ft high and if you assume it's a vacuum, they'll hit the ground at the same time. Why? Because of Newton's second law. Like, why do I know this? Because everything you get is because of gravity. Like, that's great. That doesn't help you with. No one ever sat down and told you how to ask for a raise, how to handle a rejection, how to make decisions under pressure, how to actually date. They didn't tell you how to negotiate. They didn't tell you how to have the tough conversation on having, you know, the, the opportunity at. They didn't teach you how to interview. They didn't teach you how to get the next deal. They didn't teach you how to make money. And we are over educated on this trivia and undereducated on growth. And I'm not saying you can't learn trivia. I think trivia has been trivialized in today's world because you have access to every piece of AI. You have access to trivia at your fingertips. You don't need to know how to convert, you know, nanometers to centimeters. You don't need to know that. Like, maybe in your job you do, but if you needed to do that in your job, you probably have a calculator on an app on your desk that you can do it or the software just does it for you, just like you have Pixel software that just does the color grading for you, just like you have the Excel Spreadsheet that does the formulaic input for you, you're not doing it. You just need to know what to do right? And I think that's what's important. So I'm not bashing our education system. I'm just saying since you're not getting what you need to to become a superhuman at school, since you've never been taught how to get the skills to become a superhuman at school, you have to learn it outside of school. And the way you learn it is from somebody who at least can break down a little bit of it. I am not a superhuman. I just want to be one. But maybe I can give you a framework in which you can actually get better at it. Because I was looking at the stat. It said 17% of people use math that they learned in high school in their jobs. I will tell you that is significantly less than 17%. I was a math and computer science major. I don't use that at all. I use it thinking. But it's. You learn to learn. But now what do you actually need to know from a skill perspective? That's why I, I say that personal growth is just like math. And every experience is like a function. What do I mean by the function? So here's the big idea that I want. The big idea, number one is growth is math, right? And I just want you to know this. An input creates an output. If you just know that if you can figure out the right set of input, you will get the output that you want in life. Input are experiences, your stress, your opportunity, your failures, whatever. And the outputs are what your like your behavior, right? And that you want to change the behavior, that you want to take the conditions and change the behavior. Does your output change when the inputs change? That's all this is. And if, if my f. My 9 year old or 14 were old were here and they were listening to me, they'd be like, dad, you need to stop yapping. Right? And so let me kind of give you the big idea on how to like think about this, because I think this one big idea will change everything for you, right? I want to make three definitions for you. And I think if you understand these three definitions, it will give you a great roadmap to life and how life is just like math. All right? This is not going to be hard. You don't have to remember high school algebra or trigonometry or trig or calculus or anything. Even though I will share the functions here for the nerd that is in you, the nerd dragon. But the definition Number one is, what is learning? Learning is just a function. All right, what do I mean by that? Learning is when your behavior changes based on an experience. Meaning same condition, new behavior. That is learning. Right. So if I were to same. If I were to stick my finger in a electrical outlet and I get a shock. That's condition. Tomorrow I come back and I stick my finger in the same outlet and I get a shock. That's condition. I know I'm going to get a shock. They come back tomorrow and I do that same thing 10 times. Well, same condition, same behavior. I've not learned. But if I come back the next day and I know that I'm going to get a shock, therefore, I look at the outlet and then I don't stick my finger in it. It's same condition, new behavior. And that's when you have actually learned something. Our job is to figure out how to attach a new behavior to the same condition. That is all it is. That is what learning is. If you're on a sales call and you use a script. Well, you use a script and it did not work. Use the same script, and it did not work. You use the same script, and it did not work. Well, you heard a coach give you a new script, and then you took the script the next day and you actually put it in place. And maybe it did work, did not work, but you used. You changed behavior. That means you'll learn something. So learning is a function where you replace the. You replace the thing that you do, your behavior, based on the same condition. Right. So same condition, new behavior is the learning. Well, okay, now, now let me ask you before I get into this other stuff, let me give you the second functional idea here, which is what is intelligence? Oh, he's intelligent. She's intelligent. Warren Buffett's really intelligent. Like, what is intelligence? Well, if you break it down, intelligence, gist means the rate in which you learn. That's it. The rate in which you learn. Because if I gave you a script and you took this, you had the old script, and you mentioned the same script on the call, and I gave you a new script. If I gave you the new script and the next time you came in, you still use the old script and you got rejected. Next time you came in, you still used the old script and you got rejected. Next time you came in, you still use the old script and you got rejected. Next time you came in, you made a little change, you still got rejected. Then finally, in the seventh attempt, you use the new script and you did better. Well, it took you seven attempts to use the new script. It took you seven functions to learn. So your rate of learning is seven reps. Now, let's say Jenny comes along. I give her the script on day one, after her, she uses the script immediately. Her rate of learning is one rep. So she is more intelligent. That's what this says. If learning is same condition, new behavior, intelligence is the derivative. That's all you need to know. So if you're into math, it's the integration, it's the derivative. It essentially says how fast the rate of. How fast is your rate of learning. So that's what you need to figure out. If you know a thing and you're not doing the thing, you are not intelligent. Like, I don't know how else to tell you that. If you know the thing and you're not doing the thing, that just means you're not intelligent because it takes you 7, 12, 18, 24, 36 reps to actually do the thing. If someone says you need to, like, write a plan to succeed, and you go year after year after year and you don't write the plan, that means same condition, same behavior. And then finally, after seven years, you write a plan. That means it took you seven years to actually make the change, which means you're not intelligent, you're not as intelligent as someone else who did it in one year. Now, we all have different intelligence markers in different areas of our life. Some areas we deploy intelligence faster, which is rate of learning. Some areas we don't. So, number one, I'd say this again. Learning is same condition, new behavior, which is just a function. Number two, intelligence is the derivative of learning, which is the rate in which you learn. How fast do you learn? The faster you learn, the more intelligent you are. Right? That's all this is. So what is the last part? The last part is wisdom. When people say, oh, he's wise or she's wise, well, what does that mean from a math perspective? Right? That is the integral. It is a stockpile of lessons over time is, in essence, it's the area under the curve, right? If differentiation in the derivative of learning is the rate in which you learn, the integral of learning is the area under the curve. Now, if from. That's all, those are the only three math things you need. Function is learning, intelligence is the speed of learning, and wisdom is. Is the area under the curve, which is the integral of learning, right? So, by the way, I was sitting there with my son's textbook, and I'm like, man, there's gotta be A learning method methodology to this. This. I am telling you this. I did not take this from anyone else. Like, I came up with this idea for myself from a calculus perspective, and I, I, I like it a lot more. Because wisdom is the stockpile of lessons over time. It is the compound interest on learning. It is the area under the curve. It is the, the sum of all of the accumulated lessons over time. That is the wisdom. If learning is just doing one workout, intelligence is how fast you maybe recover. And wisdom is the body that you built after 10 years of doing that thing. It is a stockpile of lessons over time. Right? That is the idea here. And I say all of this because you could just probably just stop this episode right now, because now you're like, wait a minute. What, in what areas of my life do I have to. Am I not deploying learning, which is same conditions, new behavior, where I'm doing the same crap over and over again, or am I not? Or I know what I need to do, but I'm not doing it, which is clearly I'm not an intelligent person or third man, I have all of these experience. I'm still making the same dumb mistake. That's the stockpile of lessons, which is the wisdom. If you're being wise, if you're wise and you're still not, like, you know, have, don't have the rate of learning, then something's majorly wrong. This is a cheat code to life, right? This is the, this is how you become a superhuman. So let me, let's actually say. All right, Sean, enough of the mathematical examples here. Tell me exactly what to do. That's good, because we need to go to behavior here. Everything that you think about needs to have a mechanism, right? A mechanism is important. How you drive a car, how you brush your teeth, how you floss, how you iron a shirt, how you do, I don't know, how you throw a frisbee, how you do a pushup, how you hold a pencil, whatever. There's a mechanism, and I want to give you the mechanism. And this mechanism is what I call the when then algorithm, all right? Not an if then but a when then algorithm. So when then algorithm is a rule, essentially, that says, when X happens, then do. Yes, that's it, right? When hex happens, then do Y. You want to turn all this vague feedback into very specific, executable behavior. That's what this is. It's a when then algorithm. So let me give you an example, and I will give you an example. I'll give you an easy example. And I'll give you a hard example, an easy example. Hey, when you're adding two numbers that are complex, stack them up in. Line them up perfectly so that you can add them up easily. When you're adding two numbers, one X, then do Y, right? So they're like, oh, yeah, Sean, that makes sense, right? It's a very prescriptive one. Do Y. But a lot of people don't realize that you can do that for behavior. You can do that for the most, the strangest things in life. So you could say, I'll give you something crazy, right? Let's say you have a friend that says, the feedback is, hey, you interrupt people too much. What does that mean? What does you interrupt people too much mean? There's no behavior there, right? Most people will just nod and they will just keep interrupting because they just say, well, you interrupt people too much. A fast learner in this case will say, hey, when someone is speaking. When someone is speaking. So when then? Then I count to three before I respond. Think about that. When someone is speaking, I counted three before I respond. What does that mean? What this does is it says, hey, instead of saying, you interrupt people too much, stop interrupting. Interrupt fewer times. Be more aware, be more empathetic. What does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. You don't give the person a behavior to work with. So now you can say, hey, when someone else is speaking, count to three before they respond, or when someone else is speaking until they stop. Do not say anything back, right? Or when someone else is speaking, then nod your head at, you know, in every 10 seconds. Count like a metronome. Whatever it is you're giving a very specific behavior. The when, then, when a situation happens, then do this behavior. Everything in our lives to become a superhuman needs to be behavior oriented. Our job is to constantly upgrade our behavior. We are what our behaviors are. You have to fix your behavior. If you don't fix your behavior, nothing will actually change. Because what is learning? Learning is same condition, new behavior. What is intelligence? Intelligence is learning faster, meaning, you know, the new behavior, you're just doing it much faster as opposed to doing the same old behavior over and over again. So when a when, then you can't just say you interrupt people. That's not the way you give feedback to anybody or to yourself. You got to say, when X happens, then do Y, right? So now you may say, well, Charon, that's really interesting. How do I find the whens? How do I know when to do something? By the way, you cannot change if you don't see the pattern, right? Awareness, if you will, comes from seeing the gap between kind of like where you are and where you want to go, some version of that. So, meaning if there is no goal, you can't see a gap. The only way you can see a gap in something is that there is a goal. Why do, why do we want to make sure you meet really successful people? You are, let's say I'm making this number up. Let's say you have a million dollar net worth, and let's say you spend time with somebody that has $100 million net worth, right? And then you see, and then you see how they talk, you see how they think, you see how they work, you see how they share, you see their generosity, you see their charisma, you see their work ethic, and you're like, okay, I see. If that 100 million net worth is my goal and I'm at a million dollar net worth right now, I see the goal and I also see the gap. And when you see the gap, you have awareness. And when you have awareness, you can then actually add the when. Then if you don't have no awareness, if you don't see a gap, you have no awareness. And if you have no awareness, you can't install any algorithms. I'll give you a crazy example. Let's say you're a person that wants a, a promotion. Or say you're talking to somebody that wants a promotion and it's keep, get, kept getting, keeps getting passed over at work. Okay, well then they personally finally notice that they don't speak up in meetings. And then they're like, okay, that not speaking up in meetings is the when. Now you have to kind of shift it, right? Like that is the when. I'm not talking about the then. At least now I know the when. If you don't know the when, you can't implement the then. Right? That's what learning is. Same condition, new behavior. If I don't recognize the condition, how am I going to change the behavior? This is how you become a superhuman. You realize that in this condition, do that thing. So now that you have the when, hey, I got to do something here. Then how do you come up with it then? The then is just the behavior that you install. And the easiest way, I will tell you this, I don't know a faster way to do this. The easiest way is to model someone one level ahead of you. If I want to do something better, I just try to say okay, instead of me trying to figure out the Best way to do this. The first thing I'm going to do is model somebody that is already doing this well, because they clearly have figured out all the nuances that go into that. If I really like the way someone speaks and I want to be a better speaker, I just study them and I'm like, okay, how do they do their opening? Where do they show up on stage? How do they hold the clicker? In which hand do they walk? Do they not walk? Do they stand? Do they not stand? Do they sit, stand, sit on a couch? Do they stand behind the lectern? Do they not. Do they show a slide? Do they not show a slide? Do they talk to the audience? Do they make a joke? Like, what do they do? And I just try to find the pattern and then I just model them. I see if it works and then I can. I need to nail it before I scale it, right? I need to figure out how they do it. I need to model it first and then I can improve it. People try to improve it before they model it. So model it before you improve it. So let's go back to that person that wanted to, you know, get, get promoted. Say they realized their when was not speaking up in the meetings. Well, you watch somebody who got promoted before you, you observed how they spoke in the meetings. You realized that it wasn't about the brilliance, it was just about doing, about consistently voicing your opinion, opinions. So now you install that behavior because now you know that when in a meeting, then say X. So now you know the behavior because now you clearly know exactly what to do. And the other person ahead of you actually did that thing and got the result that you want, which makes perfect sense. So a lot of people are like, you know, life is too hard. Well, there is a, there is a clear roadmap to making a million dollars. You just have to say, okay, who's done this? What is the formula? What are the steps? Let me go do the steps. Hey, I want to go get a private pilot's license. Great. Who has done this? What are the steps? I'm going to go do the steps. Hey, I want to get six pack abs. Great. Who's done this? What are the steps? I'm going to go to the steps. It's not about, it's just about, you know, once you know the goal and you know the steps, then it's just doing what is required. Required. Most people can't do what is required for two reasons. They either don't want it or they don't know the steps. I Will tell you almost all the time, when you give people the steps, they will choose whether they want to do the thing or not want to do the thing. If I told you that getting six pack abs required you to have this massive caloric deficit and rock and run and work out and not eat your favorite chocolate chip ice cream on every, every night of the week. And if I told you that if there's no way you can do that to get six pack abs, now you have a choice. You know what the steps are and you have chosen to not do the steps you've chosen. Same condition, same behavior. Therefore, even though you learned it's okay because you used an intelligent call to realize that you're not willing to make that change. And it's super important, I really want you to kind of know this and I think this is super, super important. The, the, the whole math. Like let me wrap the whole thing up in English for you. You gotta change behavior by installing a when then statement. Because if you change, the change happens way faster. If you diagnose that you need more awareness or need more skill. Awareness gives you a chance to recognize when you need to do something. Skill gives you the new behavior to install to do the thing. And when you do that over and over, you get wisdom because it compounds naturally. And then one day you wake up and you sound like Yoda. And that's when you know the math actually worked. That's what actually happens. I will tell you, give you the last thing here. I was talking to one of our executives in one of our companies, this is the real story, by the way. And working with a leader in one of our companies. And he wanted to get to the next level in his career and he asked me for feedback as to how to get to the next level in his career. Now, it would have been easy for me to give him random bullet points, feedback. But I sat down and wrote like a three to four page memo of a very specific feedback. And every piece of feedback I wrote centered on one thing, behavioral change. I actually wrote the feedback and then I put it into AI and I essentially said, hey, ensure that every recommendation that I'm making has a very tangible thing that he can do. It's a specific behavior change. That way, two things happen. One, when the situation occurs, he knows to implement that feedback. Two, when the situation occurs, if he doesn't do it, he also knows whether he did not did it or did not do it. And it allows me to call it out, because I can call out very clearly that hey, the when Then didn't happen. The feedback is not about criticizing somebody. The feedback is not about putting somebody on a pip. It's about giving someone a chance to actually demonstrate intelligence. The same conditions, different behavior, right? They're learning through that process and how fast they can do it. By the way, if it can be taught, it's a skill, and if it's a skill, it can be learned. Therefore, anything is possible. Therefore you could become a superhuman. By the way, even in therapy, like, you may know somebody that's like, oh, that person's, you know, that person needs to be warmer. That person needs to have more empathy. That person needs to be more kind. And I, you know, I left that person. I'm not friends with that person anymore because, you know, they just don't have the emotional maturity. Why do you think people go through therapy? What do they do there? They develop the same emotions by realizing that in the same situation, I can act differently. That's what it is. Same conditions, new behavior. That's why when people go to therapy, they're like, oh my gosh, I understand this about myself. I understand the when. I need a when then. So I have the same conditions and I've got new behavior. And that's super important. And that learning, when you do it, sometimes you can't do it yourself. And when you do it fast, you have great intelligence, right? And so the reason I'm suggesting that is when this situation happens, it makes me like, I'll give you a really simple. If you want, if you don't want to listen to anything that I share today, just take this. If somebody, if you have a friend or a spouse or a partner or what have you, and you want to talk to them about, want to better your relationship, and let's say they're doing something that is irritating you, bothering you, and you're just brushing it on the rub and grog and causing resentment, you can say something like this, you can say, hey, when this situation happens and you do this, it makes me feel this way. Hey, when, you know, when you come home tired and you, you know, you just go straight to bed and you don't recognize anybody in the house, and you leave the house dirty and you leave a wake of things around you, it makes me feel like you don't care about any of us. I would really appreciate it when, if this situation happened again, you do the same exact thing, but you walk in and you say, hey, guys, I had a really, really tough day at work. I don't want to speak to anyone right now. Because that will be rude. If I can just take a nap for 30 minutes, I will take care of everything else after that. Now what have I done? I have said, hey, when you do, when this situation happens and you do this, it makes me feel this way. Therefore, in the future, when this situation happens, I would appreciate if you did this. You're not telling them, oh, you don't care about me. You're not telling them you're rude. You're not telling them you don't take care of the house. You're not telling them you're selfish. You're not telling them. You only care about yourself. You're not telling them you don't care about your family. You're not telling them you work too hard. You're not telling them any of that. That's what most people do. When I say Most, I mean 99.99%. That's why most marriages like are on the rocks. That's why, like, by the way, I struggle with my wife the same way too. Sometimes, like I have to snap myself out of it and I have to find a opportune time to actually give her the when then, now. If I told her the hey, if I told her that right when she was tired, she would like punch me in the face. Like, she'd be like, I don't want to talk to you right now. I have to find an opportunistic time to actually have the conversation when I know she's in a stable place. Otherwise it like now I don't have any awareness. Right? It gives people a chance to do two things. One, it gives them a chance to change their behavior because they get awareness of the situation. And two, it gives them a chance to self diagnose because they know when they did it and you know when they did it. And you can both grow and appreciate that growth, which makes your relationship better overall, which is amazing. Right? So what I want to take, what you take away from all of this is exactly this. Personal growth is just math. And feedback is a formula that makes it work. Because same condition, new behavior is the answer. If you just change your behavior, everything in your life will change for you. And so the three things you have to remember are, number one, learning is just same conditions, new behavior, that is just a function, input, output. Number two, intelligence is the rate of change, how fast you can actually learn something. So the fewer the reps you need to actually learn something, the more intelligent you are in that thing, not overall, not your IQ in that thing. And third is the stockpile of lessons that you accumulate along the way, which is the integral of learning is wisdom. The more stock more lessons you can stock bio, the more ideas and learning you have that you can move faster with, you can advise people with, and you can gain awareness with. Overall, this is probably the foundational piece to become a superhuman. I wanted to outline the pieces for you so that you can iterate on the pieces yourself. I hope this is helpful to you and if you like this, do me a favor screenshot and tag me. That way I can make more like this for you. All right, screenshot, tag me. I can make more like this for you. Hey this is Sharon. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build 2 billion dollar companies hard way. So if you like this episode you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three and build the next billion so everything's free at my next billion dot com. Please check it out. My Next billion dot com.