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Hey, this is Sharant Srivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I'm going to talk to you. No, not about working harder. No, not about working smarter. Definitely don't know what that means, but learning faster. I realized that if you can learn things fast, that means you have this insane superpower of a skill. Now, we live in an amazing age of information where there's way more information than we can learn anything. So how do we learn things fast? And I figured out my favorite three shortcuts. Shortcuts in the world where there are no shortcuts. Figure out three shortcuts in which you can learn things super fast. And I break them all down for you step by step, starting right now.

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One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working 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 Trivata and welcome to Business School.

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Okay, so today I'm going to give you the three step system that I use to master any skill. But the craziest part is I was, I was pretty bad. I was never any good at this because just like everyone else, I wanted to figure out things, I wanted to learn new skills. And with this whole YouTube generation, I just feel like go down this endless rabbit hole of just binging content. And the algorithm is so good that it gives you more and more videos that are like that over and over again. And then I'm like, oh, you know, I should probably get a, a book from Amazon that is like this and the recommendation and you give you three more. So I've ordered four Amazon books on the same topic. Then I'm like, wait a minute, I know a friend that actually did this thing. So I'm going to talk to. And I've done all of this, which I've realized at the end of the day is a total waste of time trying to learn new skills. Because we all know that skills pay the bills, right? If you are skilled to doing something, there's a good chance that you are getting paid right now in whatever you're doing because you have a unique skill and you learn that doing something. And I want to show you how you can accelerate the learning of these new skills. Because in this modern age of everything Being accessible to us of you being able to vibe code or vibe trade or use AI to do whatever, or hire somebody in the Philippines to do whatever you want. The. The best idea, creation, the best skill. Knowledge is the thing that you can have. So I'll give you a quick background, right? I had a chance to build $2 billion companies. I bought over 3,500 units of real estate. I've invested in over 100 plus deals, after which I stopped counting. And I'm trying to tell you that if I had known, like, if I had kind of organized these three shortcuts for myself, all of this would have happened much faster. And I say all of this clearly not to brag, you're listening to me. I appreciate you. But to tell you that it's not the skill I work my face off. I learned all of these things, but it's not the skill I have learned. I've just learned that working harder never solved any speed of learning problems. Speed is the answer. Speed is the ultimate everything. You want to do things super fast. So I was. So for the last many years, I've kind of been on this ridiculous mission to figure out, like, you know, how do you collapse this learning curve and then find shortcuts in the world in a world where there are no shortcuts, Right? We live in a world where the world is figured out. It is a world where there are no shortcuts. So how do you figure out shortcuts in a world where there are no shortcuts? So let me give you three shortcuts to make it all work. So shortcut number one. I call this the Magic DM script. And let me explain what I mean by this. So I have always. The. One of the first things that I do when I want to learn something is I just start to follow people who are really good at that thing. So let's say I wanted to learn about the Anaheim Ducks. Well, I will. I will start following, like ice hockey commentators. Let's say I wanted to learn about options trading. I'll just start to follow people who trade options and talk about it often. And the more I start to follow them, more I see them in my feed, the more I realize, all right, cool. I. I'm getting an understanding of the language. I'm getting an understanding of the way to think about things. I'm getting an understanding of just the being in the world of things. Right? So I remember, I was really. I really wanted to meet this author. I. I thought, you know, she was fantastic, and I loved her approach to life. And so the first time I tried to reach out to her, I was kind of. It felt strange. I kind of froze. And I was like, well, what do I exactly say? What would she think of me? You know, how do I sound? Like I'm not begging. And so I wrote a bunch of drafts in my inbox, and then none of them quite felt right. So finally I came up with this DM script that actually worked, and I want to give it to you. So essentially I said, hi, so and so. Hi, name. I said, I love and admire your work. I'm working on a project and hoping you can help me. Are you open to paid consulting? So what have I done? I've reached out in a very clear way, saying, hey, I, you know, longtime listener, first time caller, right next, I'm like, hey, I'm working on something and I need your help. Third, I don't want it for free, and I don't want to insult your time. So are you open to paid consulting? By the way, it's crazy that I didn't, like, think about this before as opposed to just. Instead of just reaching out to people and saying, hey, do you want to jump on a call? Or whatever, I don't do that anymore. I just. I lead with the offer of paid consulting, where I want to write them a check upfront. And so I sent it to this author. I deeply respect it. She. She literally within hours responded to me and she's like, sure, I'm happy to help. Here's my fee. And I was remember thinking and staring at that message saying, like, this is insane. All these years of overthinking, and all I had to do was just be direct and respectful. Like, that's all I needed to do. So the reason I'm telling you this is to please use the script. Because here's the best part. There is an 8020 rule when it comes to this as well. 80% of the time, I will tell you that people will just offer to help you immediately. I think they will believe that you sent them this message. It's a symbol of seriousness, and it's not a freeloading mechanism. So they know that you're not a freeloader. So they'll be like, hey, what do you need? Right? They will actually help you. And second, the other 20% of the time, they will just quote you a fee. And I will tell you for context, just so you know, I do this often. When I say I do this often. I do this every week. I pay a lot of people a lot of money on a weekly basis. The other day, I was. I found this guy who was trading options, and his Hourly Consulting was $195. I was like, this is crazy. And I want to. That's what I want to explain to you. I have received. I've yet to receive a fee that was quoted to me above, which I had expected it not once. Which should all teach us something, right? And that's what I'm realizing, that there's so many experts around the world that I don't have to go buy any books or buy any courses or buy any podcasts or, you know, do, like, binge any content. I just find the person who's great at it, and I just literally call them or DM them and ask them for paid consulting that is so much faster, and they'll give you all the cheat codes. Because if you called me and asked me all the cheat codes to, you know, doing whatever, that time and money saved is going to collapse. So much time now, there's a good chance that you probably don't want to pay $100,000 an hour or whatever like the, the fee is. But the, the. The. Because I don't want to spend the time. Because I could spend that time building our business and creating the revenue for us. Right? But my point is, I will tell you 99% of the time, whoever you're looking for is out there that can give you the answer that you want. So please use the script. The script was. Have it in front of me here. Hey, I love and admire your work. I'm working on a project and hoping you can help me. Are you open to paid consulting? If you send that script, I guarantee you you're going to get. You're going to get some pretty good responses. All right, here's shortcut number two. We talked about the 80 20. So I'm going to give you another 8020 kind of AI prompt method. So let me give you, like, a really funny story. So many years ago, almost 20 years ago, I wanted to learn the guitar so that I could write a song and propose to my wife, my now wife. So I'll tell you what most beginners do. And I kind of googled, hey, what are these beginner chords, right? And of course, thousands of tutorials came up and each telling me something different to do. I was pretty overwhelmed, of course, because I was starting from scratch. I'm also tone deaf. So I was trying all of this at that time. I didn't know what else to do. So I called my friend who's a musician and he gave me really good advice, but which helped me learn the guitar. And I yay. Proposed to my wife, which she was like, wow, just stop singing. Right? But I was thinking about the story when I was telling the story recently, somebody and I said, that's so interesting. Now that we have AI. How would AI answer the same question if I had AI today? So I asked the AI the same question that I asked my musician friend. And so I'll tell you the. I copy pasted the prompt in front of me of the exact question I asked AI and I said this. I said, hey AI to the to AI. I'm learning to play the guitar. My goal is to play three songs in the next 90 days. What are the top three high impact areas I should focus on? Avoid generic advice and explain why these matter. That's all I said. So the, the crazy part here is the answer insanely shocked me because it told me to forget all the crazy things like scales and music theory. And it just said, master these four chords. Because you can play most songs with these four chords. The G, the C, the D and the E. I think there are a couple of musicians, I think all the pop songs that are in from the last, you know, 50 years are all played, you know, Ed Sheeran said that they all play on like A four, either of these or some, some version of these chords. So let me tell you why this is insane, right? This was exactly what my musician friend told me. So the crazy part is 18 years ago, when I got his advice, I sat on my couch with my guitar I will never forget. And I could barely press down on the strings without it like buzzing and being kind of off chord. And I will tell you, I finally got it. And then switching the first score from G to C, like felt impossible. Like I'm not musically talented at all. The. My. My rhythm was like just not there. I. I couldn't make it work. The strumming pattern was off and I was tone deaf, so I couldn't even strum properly. I couldn't even hear it in myself. And I was like, do I really want to do this? Can I come up with a different way of proposing to my wife? And then I started to begin. I began to like, second guess my friend's advice. And so I'll tell you what was going through my head that time. I said, so before I quit, I decided to kind of do something unreasonable. I said, you know what would. I decided that I wouldn't, wouldn't go to bed until I could switch between two chords. I was like, there. There has to be a way. If it takes me a few hours, there has to be a way that I'm going to learn this. So hours later, I tell you, I kid you not. My fingers were sore. They were a little tender. They started to blister, bleed a little. But something clicked for me. I was. I was. I literally was able to switch from a G to a C cleanly for the first time without breaking the strum. Then I was like, oh, that's how you switch from a DG to a C. Now I know how to switch from a D to E. And I figured it out. It was like riding a bike. I just figured it out. And I was like, this is awesome. And so I clearly. I went to bed that night with fingers that hurt super bad, but I was insanely happy. And the next day, those four chords that I had turned into music and turned into a song and that. What I'm trying to tell you is that is the 80% in action. So my point to you here is, in the second shortcut is ask AI to only lay out a plan for you based on the 20% that matters. So you just want the 8020 rule. Just say, don't show me anything else. Just show me the 20% that matters. And just keep calling it down. Culling it down. Culling it down. Because it takes so many people years. It'll take you, like, you know, reading three to four books and watching 10 to 12 videos to finally get the 20%, which you won't even know is a 20%. And the top 20%. So now if you just ask AI, it'll give you the top 20%, which is exactly what you want to know. So that is shortcut number two. All right, here's shortcut number three for learning much faster. And I call this the learning dogma. I came up with this kind of framework for myself, and it really helped me. So let me explain it to you. So I realized that if I didn't write down things, what. Whatever I had learned, I didn't remember it for very long. And I. I kid you not, I felt really dumb. If I read a book, unless I highlighted half the book, I would forget everything in a week. So I had to kind of, like, fix this thing, fix this issue. Because I was spending all this time learning, and I couldn't really, like, retain much. And if you learn stuff and you can't retain anything now, like, I've read hundreds of books. I can't retain much in which Or I can't. Retention is not the answer. Recall is the answer. So I was like, all right. So I realized that I was solving for recall. So I, I made this rule that I wrote down, which I called the learning dogma. And I said, hey, when you listen to something, you get to learn it once. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice. That's a Jim Kwik quote, by the way. But when you document something, you get to learn it forever. Okay, so, so by the way, when I say document, I don't mean you write and memorize this thing. That's not what I'm saying. I specifically mean kind of building a framework for it so it's easy to think about it and think about the complexity around it. So I'll give you an example. So a few years ago I sat down and I kind of like mapped out my entire approach to lead generation because I was doing a, like a Q and A at a conference. So after putting, I don't know, I had like a hundred plus ideas. After putting all my ideas in the whiteboard, I decided that I would just map them into the categories. And then I realized they all fell into four buckets. Bucket number one was organic, where you make content or you use media in some ways that is a one to many. Bucket number two is paid, where you run ads or you pay to get, you know, distribution. Bucket number three is partnerships, you recruit others to promote you, like affiliates or your, your clients or your sphere of influence or what have you. Number four, you do activities, which is you do things like doorknock and cold call, etc. Where you go do something. So I realized that there's only four ways to actually get somebody to raise their hand and generate and generate leads. So I was like, well, if these are the only four ways, that's good. So now I know this. These four ways are in a framework for me. So now when someone asks me about lead generation, I just kind of go through the four ways in my mind mentally as part of the conversation, because I'm not going to be able to remember the 112 ideas I put on. Put on a whiteboard, right? And I will tell you that I've learned that when you have a framework, what is the framework? It is just a, it is just a well defined container of your thoughts. It allows you to think through and filter. It's a diagnostic in a lot of ways. It's a filter and it's almost like you're putting a filter on something so that you can think through it more clearly. And the nice part about a framework, you can shove a lot of complexity into the framework. Like I told you, there were only four buckets of lead generation. It was organic, paid, partnerships, and activities. But in all of those, I could shove a lot of ways of doing those things. And if they tell me, well, I can't do any organic because I'm bad at content, I just shut that piece down and I can instantly go to paid. If these days they can't do paid, then I can instantly go to activities, right? So now it gives me a lot more of a way, a lot more thoughtful way to actually answer the question without just saying, oh, gosh, I need a new marketing hack. Like nobody needs a new marketing hack. You just have to figure something out that you can actually do. And the thing that you can actually do is entirely based on what you're already good at doing. So that's why I have a framework. So make a framework to kind of supercharge your recall. Because if you can't recall the things that you've learned, then why are you learning the things? Right? So those are the three big ideas, the three shortcuts to learning to anything super fast. Shortcut number one is the magic DM script. Just tell people that you want paid consulting. Shortcut number two is the 8020 rule with AI. Just ask AI to give you the top most 20% of the thing that is most valuable that you need to know right now. And you don't need to know anything else. And just tell them, hey, I have 20 minutes to learn this topic. I want you to make me an expert. What are the. What you know, what would you teach me? The third is, you know, learning dogma. So when you listen to something, you get to learn it once. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice. But when you document something and you make it a framework, you get to learn it forever. And the reason I want to share this with you is in a world of where there are no shortcuts, if you can find a shortcut, some pretty cool things start to happen. So this is how to learn any skill 10 times faster. And if you like this, can you screenshot this and post it on social and tag me? That way I know you like this, and I can make more like this for you. So screenshot this, tag me, and I can make more like this for you.