Alles lernen können: Die richtige Strategie

0:00Someone's ability to communicate what they do is and your ability to comprehend it is basically two filters it has to go through that are different from reality. Observation is just one. And so it's just you directing to your brain, right? And so I think observation itself is also a skill of like if you want to learn what house like if you if I use sales a lot cuz it's just a such a easy skill for people to understand. It's like if I want to be the best sales person, I can ask the best sales person what they do. But some of the best sales people aren't even conscious of what they do.

0:28And so observing what they do often times has taught me significantly more than asking. And shoot, we have to do this with our own videos. It's like what makes these videos better than other videos? Well, I did something differently. So let's look at what I did. And a lot of times the excellence just comes from observing random chance in a recorded setting. It's like every time every time we make any piece of content, anytime you have any sales call, any any conversation, any presentation, any email, any whatever, they're you're rolling a dice where you have as you're trying to control as many variables as you can, but there's always going to be new variables. And so when you have these kind of outliers or these above average outcomes, it's like what was different that happened here and how can I repeat it again? And so that's because I I believe that prediction is control and so let me hedge that. But basically if you can absolutely predict what someone is going to do because you understand all the variables, then you control that person.

1:19So again, people don't like that. It's a very like people no one likes the idea of being controlled, but like I just like to use this as a natural hypothetical example. So if I'm in an auditorium of 100 people and I'm on stage and I'm speaking. If I said I, you know, who here thinks that I can get everybody to get naked? Right? Most people will probably be like, "No, I don't think that's going to happen." But what you'd have to do is you would just like lock all the doors and then you'd crank the heat to 200 and like people would get naked. And so if I control the variables, like you control the behavior. And so trying to increase the likelihood that a certain action happens uh the world is just really how well do I understand all the variables that contribute to that outcome. And the difficulty is that there's usually just a lot of variables. And so I think mastery over time is just understanding how to influence each of the variables that increase the likelihood that the desired outcome happens. And when you have that, then people are like, "Man, he's so good at telling the future. This investor is so good at predicting these outcomes." It's just like he has identified the vast majority of the variables that predict, and so his predictions are more accurate than other people's.

2:21And that's that's kind of at least how I see it. And I could be totally. Let me give you some like something useful for for everyone. So like I I deal with obviously a lot of employees, founders, etc. like throughout my days. And one of the frames that that comes up a lot is so-and-so isn't, you know, doing what I want them to do, or I have to have this hard conversation with somebody.

2:47Most times people will try to have the conversation to make themselves feel better. But if we if we flip the question to what would I like to have happen, number one, and then what number two, what increases the likelihood that that occurs, you do a very different set of behaviors. So I'll give you an example. I had a I had a um a friend of mine who's a pretty big influencer creator, whatever you want to call it. You would know they are.

3:12And um she had basically a beef with a different creator who had like stolen some stuff or something like that. And so um she was like, "Hey, what do you think I should like What do you think I should say to this guy?" And I was like, "Well, what do you want to have happen?" And she like thought for a second, and she didn't really have a clear answer. I was like, "Well, if I were you, I would want to decrease the likelihood this occurs in the future. Does that sound like a fair outcome?"

3:39She was like, "Yeah." And I was like, "Okay. Well, does you yelling at him for it decrease the likelihood that it occurs in the future, or does he just do it and then he's just not friends with you?" Um and she was like, "Huh." And what happens is often times like you go through enough of those loops and you're like, "Maybe I just don't really gain anything from saying anything." I'm like, "Yeah, probably." And so, um I have an internal joke with my closest friend Dr. Cashy, which is we call it the uh undefeated champion of the world, which is uh the third path, which is do nothing.

4:09And so many times like when you run through all the scenarios, most of the times we just want to do something because we want to feel better. But it actually doesn't increase the likelihood of what we want to have happen. Most times you'll just increase the likelihood for retaliation. And so, me yelling at someone just increase the likelihood that they yell back at me or that they try to do something to counter control me. And so, it's like well, I'd rather just like not play. This game has prizes and I don't want any of them. When is the time to play?

4:36When there's when there's prizes you want to win and you think that there's a path that you have a high likelihood of winning them. My dad used to say this to me when I was really young and I don't think I really fully grasped it until I was older. But he said, um "I don't play unless I know I can win." And I think part of it maybe cuz he just didn't want to play games with me, who knows. [laughter] That sounds that sounds ugly though, my dad's great. Um but the thing that I took that like later on and I I took that as like one, mini games are not worth playing. And two, if you are going to play a game, understand the players and understand the rules so that you can increase the likelihood that you win, right? And if you can come into a game saying like, well, obviously there's a there's risk that's always involved. There's things that happen. But I think from the moniker perspective of like that saying, um I think I've carried that with me. Like why would I play unless I know there's a strong chance that I can win. And if I don't think there's a strong chance that I can win, how can I increase my odds?

5:31Like what what unfair advantages can I create for myself? And if I don't know it, then I don't understand the game well enough, which means I probably shouldn't play until I understand it. Real quick, if you are business owner and you are not growing as fast as you like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstraint the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.