"One skill you want to master in this day and age we live in, if you want to have an extraordinary life, is the ability to learn rapidly."

Self Improvement

Mimic and get help from someone who’s already learned it to get tips and save time.In order to achieve mastery faster, our first step should be to consult the top players in the field&nbsp;and model the path they have already carved out for us.

Don't reinvent the wheel

Problem Solving

...into its basic, fundamental components, to&nbsp;find the most important things to practice first. This shows that very few things actually make a difference in any aspect of our lives, including learning. Use the Pareto Principle:&nbsp;which describes a goal of generating 80 percent of results by putting in 20 percent of the effort.

Deconstruct the skill

Many of us aren’t able to dedicate the time it takes to learn a skill because of the countless new projects that come our way.Once you have deconstructed the subset skills that will give you the maximum amount of results, focus solely on improving those skills and avoid learning anything else until you’ve mastered them.

Stop multitasking

Expert-level performance is primarily the result of expert-level practice, not due to innate talent. Learning requires frequency and persistence in performing the same skill over and over again, until you can do it subconsciously, without having to think about it.

Repeat, repeat, repeat

The most effective learners actively seek feedback to enhance their performance.&nbsp;Feedback is necessary for a learner to confirm that s/he is on the right track.&nbsp;

Seek immediate feedback

Although it’s important to know when to quit, many potential winners don’t reach success because they quit before the dip.&nbsp;There’s a sense of euphoria we all experience when we begin something new.&nbsp; Once the honeymoon phase fades away, we experience the “dip” and our progress begins to plateau or diminish. This is when most of us quit.

Go Long

If only. For many of us, there are more things we want to learn than we have time for. And as information becomes more readily accessible online, the number of things we want to learn has only increased. That means that the only variable we can actually control is the time we spend learning them.

The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster

Most of us manage our time the same ways: by writing to-do lists and prioritizing the items on those lists, by assessing the relative urgency and importance of our tasks.&nbsp; The&nbsp;third criteria, the “time multipliers”, should emphasize&nbsp;significance: Rather than asking “What’s the most important thing I can do today?”, time multipliers ask “What’s the most important thing I can do today that would make tomorrow better?”

Time multipliers

Time Management

<ol><li>Can I eliminate this task?&nbsp;Anything that we say no to today creates more time for us tomorrow.</li><li>If I can’t eliminate this task, can I automate it?&nbsp;Online bill paying is one example.</li><li>Can it be delegated, or can I teach someone else how to do this? We can find ourselves more resistant about delegating duties at work.</li><li>Should I do this task now, or can I do it later? This strategy is called&nbsp; “procrastinate on purpose.</li></ol>

4 questions for your to-do list

Every weekday for the month of January, TED Ideas is publishing a new post in a series called "How to Be a Better Human," containing a helpful piece of advice from a speaker in the TED community. To see all the posts, click here.

Multiply your time by asking 4 questions about the stuff on your to-do list

<div data-text="What you learned...">We mistake listening as easy because it looks passive and instinctive, but in reality it’s hard work. Really listening (and not just appearing to listen) requires intense concentration and a good deal of mental energy.</div>

Listening requires mental work

Communication

<div data-text="What you learned...">Our general tendency is to:</div><ul><li>Evaluate: We judge what someone is saying and agree or disagree.</li><li>Probe: We ask questions from our own frame of reference.</li><li>Advise: We give counsel, advice, and solutions to problems.</li><li>Interpret: We analyze others' motives and behaviors based on our own experiences.</li></ul>

Mistakes we make in conversations

<div data-text="What you learned..."><ul><li>Asking great questions;</li><li>Playing attention to the nonverbal communication;</li><li>Forgoing taking detailed notes to pay better attention;</li><li>Listening with the intent to understand, not the intent to respond;</li><li>Making people feel heard;</li><li>Following up on what matters.</li></ul></div>

What makes a great listener

Listening is the unsung hero of communication. We love to praise great orators and recite lines from famous speeches, and rightly so. Words are powerful. But listening can be equally so.If you improve your listening skills, you'll probably never win an award for it or make it into...

How to Master the Art of Listening

EQ is the ability to be able to recognize and regulate your own emotions, while also empathizing with others and maintaining an awareness of their reactions.EQ can be developed with practice.&nbsp;

Emotional intelligence (EQ)

Teamwork

Having a deep understanding of yourself provides you with more accurate perceptions of how you are coming across to others.&nbsp;To increase your self-awareness, make an effort to reflect on your strengths, developmental opportunities, triggers, values, and the like so that you are intimately familiar with what makes you tick.&nbsp;

Know thyself

Weighing feedback can help you guard against blind spots. It can assist you in recognizing if your behaviors are having the effects you are intending.If they aren't, you can adjust your actions <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-16717/a-step-by-step-guide-to-apologizing-with-integrity.html?mbg_ifs=0&amp;mbg_p=a&amp;mbg_ref=body&amp;mbg_a=17573">or apologize accordingly</a> (or mindfully choose not to do either).

Be open to feedback and criticism

Do this particularly when you feel yourself experiencing strong emotions. If a co-worker makes a comment that triggers you, make a mental note of what exactly it is that you might be feeling.&nbsp;It will help you to develop your emotional vocabulary and help you to take a step back from your reactions and engage the parts of your brain associated with problem-solving.&nbsp;

Identify your feelings

Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose ... and non-judgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.By learning to observe your thoughts and feelings without judgment, you can increase your awareness of them with more clarity.

Practice mindfulness

If we can calm our body's reaction to our stress, the emotional component is mitigated.&nbsp;Nip your body's stress in the bud, and you'll find that your emotional stress will decrease accordingly. When you feel tense, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-4386/A-Simple-Breathing-Exercise-to-Calm-Your-Mind-Body.html?mbg_ifs=0&amp;mbg_p=a&amp;mbg_ref=body&amp;mbg_a=17573">breathe slowly and deeply</a>, concentrating on letting the air flow in and out of your abdominal cavity.&nbsp;

Breathe deeply

Instead of succumbing to a knee-jerk negative reaction when you become upset by someone else's actions, slow down and consider if there are other ways of explaining the situation.&nbsp;Even if you don't change your opinion regarding what happened, the additional time spent thinking about it may calm you down enough to opt for a more constructive response.

Question your stories

People who experience more positive emotions enjoy better relationships and are more resilient in response to negative events.&nbsp;Be intentional about doing things that bring you joy. Practice gratitude, engage in acts of kindness, exercise and reminisce about positive experiences.

Celebrate your positive emotions

Emotionally intelligent people are skilled at putting themselves in other people's shoes.&nbsp;Consider situations from others' perspectives to better understand those around you. This increased insight will enable you to connect with them more effectively, and may even teach you something about yourself in the process.

Empathize

Deal with conflict more effectively by tackling issues head-on in an assertive, but respectful manner — all without defensiveness.&nbsp;By listening empathetically to the other person, you will also create the space for taking your own thoughts and feelings into account.

Make active-listening your priority

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed by your emotions that you said or did something you quickly came to regret? (Can anyone honestly deny this question?) The truth is, most of us could probably benefit from learning to handle our emotions more constructively.

Boost Your Emotional Intelligence

9 Tips To Increase Your Emotional Intelligence For Stronger Relationships

<ul><li>Understand the different outcomes that could happen (both positive and negative)</li><li>Calculate the expected return or loss of each outcome</li><li>Attach a probability to each outcome</li><li>Understanding the magnitude of the return or loss</li><li>Multiply the probability by the magnitude (probability of winning * value of win) — (probability of losing * cost of the loss)</li><li>Add up and subtract all of the expected returns and losses</li><li>To get started you don’t need to know the exact probabilities. Just following the process will give you unique insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise.</li></ul>

Using Decision Trees

Elon Musk uses decision trees to make big decisions (a tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, outcomes, and resources). They are particularly useful for avoiding stupid risks and big bets that aren’t likely to succeed.Most became a billionaire by making unlikely big bets, as their expected return statistically was much higher than safer bets.

Use Decision Trees 

One of the best ways to get information is not from just being better at searching Google, it’s from learning how to build a network and get the information you need through that network.&nbsp;This network should include people’s lessons learned and hacks, topics that are too sensitive to talk about because they make someone look bad, and tacit knowledge (knowledge that people have but aren’t able to articulate).

Build Deep, Long-Term Relationships

Having a powerful vision is essential for all entrepreneurs, but if you are going to excel, your stakeholders need to buy into your vision.Storytelling is a learnable skill and can help you transmit your vision to such a degree that others feel it’s inevitable and critical. Great stories transport people into another world and, in doing so, alter their beliefs, evoke emotions, and significantly reduce their ability to detect inaccuracies.

Use Storytelling

Become the best in one core area by continually investing in it over time, rather than jumping from trend to trend and starting over each time.To apply this principle to your business, identify a core customer need that will likely stay the same (even as technology and culture evolve) to which your company is uniquely positioned to cater, and build your company around it.

Invest In What Will Not Change

Your analytical skills have to be honed in and this involves frequently brainstorming, preparing for worst-case scenarios and working around your own limitations.

Developing An Analytical Advantage

<ul><li>Get close to people who have accomplished what you want to accomplish.&nbsp;</li><li>Learn from other fields and bring insights into your own to find unique perspectives.</li><li>Build a lab, not an experiment. The more experiments you make the more you learn.</li><li>Be good at pulling out the wisdom of others, as many are not able to articulate how they succeed.</li></ul>

Developing An Information Advantage

We are wired to want to fit in socially, meaning not going against the flow. But courage is a skill that can be practiced by doing little things that cause you to feel uncomfortable and socially awkward, but with zero real negative impact.

Standing Up Against The Herd

Doing what everyone else does is going to bring you average results.&nbsp;Whenever you’re betting against the consensus there’s a significant probability you’re going to be wrong, so you have to be humble, seek out and understand relevant information and learn to analyze things differently.&nbsp;

Think Independently 

<ul><li>Brainstorm as much as you can to avoid availability bias (choosing the first solution that comes to mind rather than the best solution).</li><li>Test as many potential solutions as you can afford to. This avoids the confirmation bias of rationalizing the one solution you chose.</li><li>Evaluate the criteria for each experiment.&nbsp;</li><li>Learn from every experiment, successful or not.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Checklist To Avoid Stupid Mistakes

Warren Buffett attributes a large part of his success to consistently avoiding preventable mistakes by religiously following basic tenets and ideas he knows will work.To counteract the often negative influence emotions can have in investment decisions, Buffett uses several checklists, including ones for investing, problem-solving, and psychological biases.

Use Checklists To Avoid Stupid Mistakes

Things constantly go wrong no matter how smart and hardworking you are. So, continuously and methodically consider ways a plan could go wrong and plan how to avoid each obstacle.Make a list of how to fail, so you will be prepared when roadblocks come. Apply this principle by listing the ways the project could fail by probability and prioritizing actions that can be taken to avoid failure.

Analyze What Can Go Wrong 

Leadership

Fascinated by this question for my whole career as a serial entrepreneur and writer, I've read more billionaire entrepreneur biographies than I can count, researched what they have in common, and met and interviewed several. Without a doubt, luck plays a central role.

Career

7 Things That Self-Made Billionaires Do Differently

The “best” diet is a theme: an emphasis on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, and plain water for thirst.&nbsp;That can be with or without seafood; with or without dairy; with or without eggs; with or without some meat; high or low in total fat.

There is no "best diet" 

Health

Because they are just one ingredient: avocado, lentils, blueberries, broccoli, almonds, etc.

Best foods don’t have labels

The best vegetables are likely to be fresh and locally sourced, but flash frozen is nearly as good (as freezing delays aging). Those “fresh” vegetables that spend a long time in storage or transit are probably the least nutritious.

The "Age" of vegetables

﻿...are closer to junk food than they are to real food.&nbsp;Many power bars have nutritional profiles similar to Snickers.

Power bars

The body detoxifies itself daily; that’s a primary job of the liver and the kidneys, and they are really good at it. The intestines, spleen, and immune system are in on it, too.&nbsp;Take good care of your liver and kidneys, gut, and immune system. Far better “cleanse” than any juice.

Detoxing and Cleansing are Myths

﻿A diet that starves the body of glucose sources so that it’s forced to burn ketone bodies — products of fat metabolism — as fuel. There is not a lot of evidence to show prolonged ketosis is good for health.&nbsp;

Ketogenic diet

Highly processed grains and added sugar are bad because they’ve been robbed of nutrients, they raise insulin levels, and they’re often high in added fats. But most plant foods are mostly carbohydrates: vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts, and seeds, which are quite healthy.&nbsp;In conclusion: Carbs are not evil; junk food is evil.

Good Carbs, Bad Carbs

Only 10% of people have problems with tolerating gluten.&nbsp;About one percent of people have celiac disease, and perhaps 10 percent have lesser forms of sensitivity, which may be related to other factors, like a disrupted microbiome.&nbsp;

Gluten intolerance

It's much easier to outeat running than to outrun all of the tempting calories that modern marketing encourages us to cram in.&nbsp;Both diet and exercise are important to health, and exercise is important in weight maintenance. But to lose weight, the preferential focus needs to be on controlling calories in, more than calories out.

To lose weight: diet>exercise

﻿No single food, separate from the overall quality and pattern of diet, exerts a major health effect.&nbsp;

There are no superfoods

It's beyond strange that so many humans are clueless about how they should feed themselves. Every wild species on the planet knows how to do it; presumably ours did, too, before our oversized brains found new ways to complicate things. Now, we're the only species that can be baffled about the "right" way to eat.

The Last Conversation You'll Ever Need to Have About Eating Right

The reason we are afraid to open up, to share some things is the fact that we are afraid of how others will react.
If you want to make someone be comfortable in your presence and feel safe to open up, consider reducing the filter you use for &quot;judging&quot; the world around you.

Reducing your personal filter

Love & Relationships

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">Because we are afraid of being judged, we keep out a lot of ideas and feelings.</div>So instead of talking about what we really want, we put on a sort of filter and spend the time discussing the weather, classes or sports, because all these are safe topics.

Why we use small talk

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">To show that someone is safe to open up with you, share something that is considered to be somehow weird. Just be careful to not seem too crazy.</div>Sharing something slightly odd about you will signal to the other person that you don't really care about what others think and also that you are not a judgemental person, so they'll feel safe in your presence.

Share something weird

<div class="insight_content" data-text="What you learned...">Before sharing something weird about yourself, make sure your value is high enough; this means you have proper hygiene, you have a decent amount of social proof,&nbsp; you are in decent shape, you dress well and make eye contact.</div>The higher your value, the easier it is to get away with saying something weird.

Make sure your value is high enough

You can use them to guide the conversation in a way that leads a person to open up.
How they work: you make assumptions about someone based on your observations and see if you are right or not.
How they help you: these questions show that you pay attention and care about what is being said. And if the assumption is wrong, they will react to it; you can use this reaction and start a new related conversation.

Assumption questions

Learn More About My Habit Builder Program: http://improvementpill.net/programs Welcome to the BeeFriend course. In today's lesson, I'm going to share with you the mindset I have when trying to have deeper conversations with people. I'm often on the receiving end of many secrets and bottled up emotions from the get go. And this is because of 2 things that I tend to do while talking to others. This is how I get others to open up to me. Start From The Beginning (BeeFriend Course Playlist): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHfGgOfmbx4&list=PLE_vQWWxgaiHbUFDuNnqxfui3lrE2jjwO&index=1 Tamed Course (FREE Habit Building Course): https://youtu.be/m8JjuyRIxOg

How To Get People To Open Up

<ul><li>50% of your income goes toward essential expenses: rent, bills, minimum debt payments. </li><li>15% percent goes to retirement savings. They also suggest you increase this by 1% each year. </li><li>5% goes toward unexpected monthly expenses or building an emergency fund.</li></ul>What you do with the rest of the money it’s up to you.

The 50/15/5 rule for multiple financial goals

Money & Investments

When you're trying to get your finances together, there's usually a question of trade-off. Do I pay off debt or save for an emergency? Do I save for retirement or a home down payment? Fidelity's 50/15/5 rule addresses the most important financial goals by allocating your paycheck accordingly.

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TONY ROBBINS

The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster

Discover & share ideas that matter

Deepstash is where

smart people like you

collect & share ideas

from articles & books they love

Trending Ideas

.css-d7z4j9{font-family:'Source Sans Pro',sans-serif;font-size:2rem;line-height:2.5rem;letter-spacing:-0.125%;font-weight:700;}TONY ROBBINS

The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster

TONY ROBBINS