Handeln statt nur planen

0:00There is a group of people that just spend their whole life reading books. Yeah. Posting about it, etc. They never take the jump. Parrots versus practitioners. Is the best way to learn being a practitioner? This is widely known in the education space, but not as much in the the content world. But there are two types of uh education. There is procedural and there is declarative. So declarative knowledge is knowing about something. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. So a simple example would be, okay, I understand how private equity works.

0:28Right? Like that you can you can talk about it, you can explain how, okay, they take some debt and then they have this arbitrage and they get this enterprise value multiple, whatever. But you've never done a deal. And until you've done a deal, you will not have procedural knowledge of knowing how to actually do a deal. And so you can read 100 books on sales, but you will learn more about actually selling from your first 100 sales calls. And business is the same. Yes. And so the idea, in my opinion, for most people is that if you want to rapidly learn, you want to rapidly do those 100 repetitions as fast as you can, so that you can suck 100 times in a row and find the 10 that did that sucked the least and then say, how do I suck least on the next 100? And you keep doing that so many times until eventually you suck so little that you're actually good.

1:11Hard work. Yes. And I think, you know, this is actually really interesting cuz it ladders up to cuz I there's two types of creators. You've got entertainers and then you have educators. At least that's how I separate it. The point of entertainment is to maintain the attention of the audience. That is it. So the point of an entertainer is to literally just keep people watching. The point of an educator is to change someone's behavior. And so if you uh if you want content to do well in either of these buckets, fundamentally, at least in the education space, you are selling time.

1:45So education is I spent all this time doing this thing to learn these four things that I can give to you so that you don't have to spend this time learning it. And so education is actually, if said differently, what you do is you buy time. So when you buy it's the only thing it's the only way to actually buy time today. So if you want to basically time warp into your future, you have to buy education so that you can buy all of the life experiences from all these people and then not pay for it in your life, you pay for it with less time by consuming what they have or some money or some combination of those things. And fundamentally, we usually pay with the currency that we value least. Hm. And so interestingly a rich person values their time more than their money and so they're willing to pay with money to get time back. A poor person also pay for their time and drive around to 10 different gas stations to find the one thing that's 10 cents cheaper or drive to 10 different grocery stores to to use whatever whatever coupons. They're valuing their time over their money in that instance.

2:44And so back to the the educator if you want to be certain or have confidence in any endeavor you have to do so much volume of activity that it would be unreasonable that you would suck. And if you were to write out the equation of like, okay, how many public speeches would I need to give for it to be unreasonable that I would suck? Is it 10? Is it 100? Is it 1,000? Write the number that you're like, there's no way that I would suck after this many.

3:13And then all of your effort gets really narrowed, commitment, elimination of alternatives, focus, turn down quality and quantity of other things, to just doing that. And then and the key part of this is not just to do the 1,000, but after every 10 or every 20, looking at the top 10 or 20% and saying, what did I do well there? And that cuz you have to have the feedback loop. Otherwise, it's not just doing 100 reach outs. You have to do 100 reach outs and then look at what worked and then do more of what worked. And so for the the parrot versus the uh practitioner uh component of this even if you're starting out you can have confidence in what you're doing because you derived the solution. And you can actually answer why you do something. So if you cannot explain why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief, it's someone else's.

3:59And so most people, I would say, parrot the vast majority of the things that they say because and to be fair, that's how humans learn. You're 5 years old, you say, what's that? They say, ball and you say, ball, you parrot it back and there we go, right? But when it comes to uh skills you can describe what other people have said before, but if something goes wrong or what about this condition, you won't know what to do. But if you derived it from the ground up and there's a there's a great uh portion of this in the Y Combinator community that you or the Silicon Valley community that you probably heard is maybe like three or four months ago, it was like founder mode. Did I Did that hit the UK? Okay.

4:33It was from Brian Chesky. I actually messaged him about it after. Oh, yeah. It was like it was it was awesome, right? And so the basically the tenant is that the founder always has special powers in the company because you know what built it. And so that is basically at its core the practitioner versus parrot. The people who came later are parroting why you do what you do, but you know what conditions you were in when you made this rule and also you know how to break it. And when to bend those rules. And so if you build something, when you built it from those repetitions to distill out the few truths that exist, you'll know why those are the truths. Like I'll give you a really simple example. So if we you know, we tried to learn YouTube and we've gotten better over time. Um but in the beginning, I did this massive review and I figured out that the the videos that we had that had three things at the beginning, proof, promise, plan, was the videos that did the best. And so then all of a sudden we said, okay, all videos have to have proof, promise, plan right at the beginning, the first 30 seconds. Great. So we started doing that for a while. And then we looked at the outliers among those and we're like, oh, well, we also in some of the ones that did really well also had some sort of visual picture of of this plan. All right, so it became proof, promise, plan, picture.

5:42Then we kept looking and we found out over more repetitions that if we also include some sort of pain or problem that's being solved, that also helps. So proof, promise, plan, picture, pain. And so you're like, wait, if you keep adding to this thing, it's going to get really long. No, sometimes you can check multiple boxes with one thing. And this becomes the elegance of creation. Like, how can I how can I check off three of these boxes with one sentence? Right? And so that is by the way for if you're like thinking about this, you're like, do they really think about this when they're making videos? Yes, and that is the difference between a 10,000 view video and a million view video. And it's it's understanding that level of nuance across the entire thing that creates expertise. And also, when you're like, oh, this video flopped, when you're beginner, you're like, these videos in general don't work or content doesn't work, rather than saying, this video didn't work and here's why because we did three of the five.

6:31And so it's just like all of the I mean, the devil is in the details and you only you only you meet the devil himself by doing the unreasonable amount of work and then it becomes it goes from uninformed uh lack of knowledge to informed optimism because first you're like, I can make videos and get rich, then you realize that it's really hard to make videos that people watch, and then finally you start develop a framework of this is how I make videos that people watch. And when they don't watch it, it's because I didn't follow it. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as head count increases that you need to get through and I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate.

7:19We've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this and it works. And it's my gift to you, it's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you, all free.