🚀 How to improve yourself?
A Complete Guide to Self-Development!
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🎞 New Mini Documentary: Hormozi Podcast
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Alex Hormozi said in our joint podcast that the most important thing a person can learn is how to learn.
This quote inspired me so much that I set out on a nearly 100-hour research...
And this round summary is the result!
But first, let's see...
🚀 How's the challenge?
🤖 Personalized recommendations
We've been exploring this topic with the boys all weekend. My friend Bence Babics was here in Eger and he also helped out. The basic idea was that we want to accelerate the development of humans with AI.
It came down to:
We can speed it up if you know exactly what you need and read everything in your own time. We can help you do that by giving you better and better book recommendations based on your reading history.
It also helps if there is a "Similar books" category under each book, specifically listing books that are similar to it. That way you can quickly dig into 1-1 topic.
And the Ultimate Goal - this is the plan for March - is that, the more detailed you describe your goal in a field, the more the AI will recommend books specifically related to it and sort them for you. So, you would get a personalized development plan! Good, huh?!
🎨 New designs are ready
Kokesz has finished:
The settings
The Notifications
The Challenges
And also, the Courses
Just Streak, Onboarding, Referral and we are ready xxx!
🛠️ Edu is ready with version 1
We're doing pretty well, as it's up and running:
Home
Search
Profile
Library
Reading
Listening page too
At this rate, we really will be there on time!
10 DECEMBER EVENT
Now we can start...
💭 Why is self-development important?
"School does not prepare you for life."
This may be nothing new. I have already written a comprehensive Post on the Education System, so we won't go into that now.
However, it is worth starting further away:
Encyclopaedias were common in the old days, as they were the only way to look up information or learn something for yourself. 📔
You don't have to go back in time very far, 40-50 years is enough. It seems a bit like the "dark ages" all over again, if you think about how difficult it was to acquire even a minimum of knowledge. 🌚
But luckily the 21st century has changed everything! Self-development has become a hot topic and students have the opportunity to learn whatever they want thanks to the internet. They can easily gain knowledge that used to be taught only in universities - or not at all. 😲
But self-improvement requires a different approach. 🧠
This is the concept of autodidactic learning.
The meaning of autodidactic is: An autodidact, simply put, means a person who develops himself and teaches himself.
The autodidact is a person who learns by himself. From the beginning of the learning process to the end, the learner is responsible for the whole process. She selects her own learning materials: podcasts, courses, books, summaries, etc. ✍🏼
It's a bit like being his own teacher and student at the same time.
If you've ever taught yourself anything from the internet: how to knit a tie, cook, play guitar, etc. then you can proudly say that you're self-taught, because you've taught yourself. 💪🏼
Interestingly, many prominent autodidacts - Mark Twain, Albert Einstein - have long expressed concerns about the traditional Education System.
After all, schools often want to use fear as motivation. 😈
"If you don't study hard, which meets your school's expectations, you will fail and have no future!"
💡 Side note: When our brain detects a threat, it drains resources from other areas of the brain and goes into "fight or flight" mode. This is why it is impossible to motivate someone to learn through fear! Your brain will simply not be able to absorb the information!
💡 Side note: These are called "extrinsic motivation" and include when someone offers you money or a reward. These are not very useful motivators - it depends on the size of the reward, of course - but generally speaking they are not motivating in the long term. The real motivation comes from "intrinsic motivation", when you want to learn something for yourself. To be a better you, but I'll get into that in more detail later.
It limits or completely eliminates the possibility of creativity. 😪
"You have to do what you're told, the way you're taught. There is no other way!"
These two things lead to frustration building up in students and therefore they are not interested in the subject or simply don't learn anything.
Simply, you will not be open to new knowledge because you judge learning as wrong. 🤕
To use an expression - thanks to school -: you will be narrow-minded!
Being told what to do and how to think about it is not a sustainable formula for gaining knowledge. It is simply not how learning works. ❌
Self-development, on the other hand, gives you new opportunities:
You can dig as deep as you want into a subject! 🤩
Schools have a specific curriculum to follow. You may be more interested in something but can't go deeper because you don't have the time. In contrast, with self-improvement, you learn about what you want to learn about and as much as you want to learn!
Even before we jump into learning, it is important to understand how the xxxx process works... (Because it is not exactly the way they teach it in school). 🫤
🛕 The Learning Success Pyramid
Susan Kruger has created the Learning Success Pyramid, which has everything you need to succeed in self-improvement!
The whole pyramid consists of 3 parts:
🤓 Learning
📚 Systematization
💪🏼 Confidence
At the bottom of the pyramid is Confidence, which means believing that you are capable of understanding the subject matter. 💪🏼
If you don't feel confident enough, you can simply be a bit more forgiving of yourself and try to dig into smaller topics at first. As you understand them, you will become more confident in that area.
The next area is Orderliness, also known as self-control. This is about using our time, energy and information to learn effectively. So, if I want to learn, I will put in the time and energy, not just dilly-dallying every now and then. 📚
If you don't feel Systemized enough, then build in habits and systems that promote it. For example, write in your calendar when you're going to study or don't eat fatty foods before studying, as digestion will make you tired and you won't be able to pay attention.
Finally, there's Learning. Well, you're here now, you have the confidence and organization, now you "just" need concrete action. 🤓
To learn effectively, you need to understand how the brain works and where information flows. Let's see:
🧡 Amygdala - This is our emotional center, it works like a doorman, if you try to motivate with fear, it fails right there. Because it takes energy away from the rest of the brain and focuses on defending or attacking.
🤖 Prefrontal Cortex - We can think of it as our personal assistant, it organizes information for us.
🤓 Hippocampus - This is where knowledge is processed, it connects information, it is also responsible for memory and meaning. It is where information is transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory.
Understanding this flow of information can help you optimize your learning strategy, which will lead to better results. 🤩
Now you see that learning itself is not difficult, but it requires a lot of perseverance and self-discipline.
That's why the question may arise: how do we persevere?
What can motivate us? 🤔
True, I have written above about "intrinsic motivation", but I have not yet mentioned Daniel Pink's idea of "Motivation 3.0".
Pink is a bestselling author who has dug deep into the topic of Motivation. I'll show you what he found!
Intrinsic motivation has 3 main components:
🪽 Independence: a sense of freedom is a powerful motivating factor.
🏆 Excellence: the feeling of knowing you are good at something.
🧡 Impact: it is true that one meaning of intrinsic motivation is doing something for yourself, but it is also strongly equated with doing something "for a greater cause". Volunteering, etc.
To give specific examples:
📈 I study Marketing because it interests me and because it promotes my Freedom.
⚽️ I play a lot of foosballs with my friends because I'm good at it.
✍🏼 I write this blog because I want to pass on knowledge that I have struggled to acquire.
I know-I know it was very serious at first, but I needed to get you up to speed on the theory. Now for the practical part!
Did you know that: For every person you send the Blog to who subscribes you will receive gifts! And quite valuable ones at that:
1️⃣ invited - 🧭 Guideline Targeting Ebook
3️⃣ invited - 📙 Exclusive Workbook with Practical Tasks (with the most useful books I've read)
🔟 Invited - 🎥 Self Confidence Course with 11 videos (showing you specifically how to be more confident in business, meeting people and making friends)
Thank you! 🧡
🧐 How to improve yourself?
Get ready, because this is going to be a long one!
1. First you need a goal 🎯
The best way to do this is to use the S.M.A.R.T. goals framework. So have your goal:
S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Achievable
R - Relevant
T - Time-bound
❌ Bad example: I want to study marketing.
✅ Good example: I want to complete 3 books on marketing psychology by 31 December. xxx
2. How in-depth would you like to go in the subject? ⛏️
Moritne Adler - philosopher - created the 4 levels of reading. According to him, these are the levels at which you can read a book.
👦🏼 Basic - This is literally learning to read, understanding the meaning of any technical terms.
⚡️ Checking - When you just skip through the book, you scroll through it quickly, remembering 1 or 2 things, but not gaining the full knowledge of the book.
🔍 Analytical - This is the most in-depth way of processing 1-1 book. Typically, where we highlight text, underline, ask questions and write into the book. So, when we really want to understand the whole book.
💡 Side note: Many people don't even get that far.
📚 Synoptic - When you try to understand the point of a topic from more than one material. Typically, when in movies the detective has a board with all the evidence and threads like this tied together. Now that's synoptic reading.
💡 Side note: That's what I'm doing now to understand the meaning of Product-Market fit, which I wrote about in my previous letter.
So, you have to choose the depth you want to go into, based on your goal? 🤔
Do you just want to get a rough understanding? - Because then the Verification mode is enough
Specifically interested in 1 book? - Then choose the Analyst
Do you want to understand the whole topic? - Then the Synoptic is your way, but be careful because it's the hardest and takes a lot of time. However, it also gives you the most knowledge.
Once you have that, it's time to move on to the next step...
3. How should we choose the learning material? 📚
The best thing to do is to ask yourself first: what is it that you want to learn?
Find as many sources as possible ⛲️
We can type the topic into Google, Amazon or BookBase and it will throw up the best recommendations.
💡 Side note: You can also type it into ChatGPT: "I would like to gain knowledge about ____. Please write me 10 books that suits the best for this task."
The more books we find, the better! This does not mean that we will read them all, BUT! ❌
We will just pick out which ones are worth reading.
Filter out the interesting resources 🔍
Usually 25-30% of all sources are really worth reading. 'll show you how we can filter it out:
Check out the selected books online. Usually, you can read the first 10-20 pages, which is enough for us! 😉
Read the short description of the book
Read a short summary of the book
Read the table of contents
Look at the introduction, it tells you what the book is about
This should give you enough knowledge to decide if the book is for you. Go through all the sources you choose and keep only the best ones (25-30%)
4. How can you read faster? ⚡️
First, it is important to understand reading speed, usually measured in words per minute (WPM)
👨🏽 An average person reads at - 300 WPM
👨🏼🎓 A university student - 450 WPM
🤵🏽♂️ A CEO - 575 WPM
👨🏼🏫 A university professor - 675 WPM, more than double the average person.
If you can speed up, you’re reading by 2x xxxx, that means you can finish your studies in half the time, a real superpower in today's fast-paced world!
I'll show you 4 techniques to easily speed up your reading:
Don't repeat the text to yourself ❌
This is by far the most difficult technique, but it can make the biggest difference. If you can't get this down over time, you'll lock yourself in a 400-500 WPM frame, because your mouth is slower than your brain.
You can help this by:
🍬 Chewing gum while you read
🫢 "Hmmm" while reading, I know it sounds really stupid, but it works and you only need it at first
🐝 Imagine the meaning, for example if you read "The bees are coming" you can picture it in your mind like a movie playing in your head.
If that would be too complicated, let's go for the simple ones...
Train your eyes 👁️
As silly as it sounds, you can train your eyes too. 6 muscles move your eyeballs and you can strengthen them. You can also help them work. 💪🏼
There are 2 ways to do this:
👆🏼 Use a guide or your finger to follow the text you're reading.
You know, like in first grade. This will help keep your eyes from bouncing around and keep them in constant motion. Extra tip, if you drag your finger a little faster, your brain should pick up that pace. The key is just to NOT stop and slow down, because you'll break the momentum.
👀 Develop your peripheral vision
If you don't read text 1-1 word at a time, you'll be significantly faster. But you need to be able to focus your eyes on several words at once. These are called word clusters. 🌺
You can develop this by stretching both arms out to the side and giving a thumbs up, looking strictly ahead with your head and moving only your eyes. You look to the right and then to the left to see your finger. Repeat this 10 times and for 3 sets. You will get brutally tired of your eyes, but you are training your peripheral focus. 😪
💡 Side note: Please excuse my drawing skills, this is the simplest way I could illustrate it.
Strategically run through the material ⚡️
Not all information is of equal importance. Look at the parts you can easily skip. Ideally, you can skip 25% of the whole course and still get the gist of the book. Here's an example:
"It's raining really hard so I need a red umbrella." 💦 🔴 🌂
10 words, but of these, what is important for understanding: "Rain, raining, red, umbrella."
I shortened it to 4 words and kept most of the meaning.
There are a few techniques for that too:
✂️ 3 words here, 3 words their technique: start reading from the margin inwards at the 3rd word and stop at the 3rd word before the end, so you cut off the beginning and the end of the line, but your brain can put the information together that way too.
❌ Skip the unnecessary words: a, the, a, and, etc.
🔍 Look for important words in the sentence, like the example above, "Rain, raining, red, umbrella."
Finally, the last element of speed reading...
Exclude distractions 😵💫
🙏🏻 Find a quiet place where you are not disturbed by people.
🔕 Turn off your phone or at least mute it.
💡 Side note: I have my phone on "Do Not Disturb" mode while writing this blog and it automatically turns the screen to black and white so I don't accidentally, or even make a phone call.
⏰ Most importantly, take breaks to xxx your brain to recharge. Peter Drucker wrote in his book that the perfect study to break ratio is 50-10 minutes.
Peter Drucker's Managing Oneself is a must read on this topic! You can find it in BookBase!
🎮 An extra tip that might help: make speed reading a game!
Grab a stopwatch or your phone, set it for 10 minutes and see how many pages you can read in that time. People like games and challenges, so it's easier to get your brain in the race.
The next element is note taking!
5. How to take notes? 📝
I have to say, this was probably the most useful thing I've learned in the last 3 years.
It's called "Cornell Notes".
The idea is to record information in 3 depths and summarise it better and better. This makes it easier to repeat and it gets stored in more places in your brain. 🧠
In the big section on the right, we write our notes, everything that comes to mind. It will be a complete mess here at first as we progress. 🤯
In the left section, we organize and shorten these notes a bit to fit in the box. 🤏🏼
Then at the bottom, we'll summarize the point of the whole page in 5-7 lines. 🤓
That way, if you want to repeat yourself, just read the bottom and left column!
I can't tell you anything, it just works and that's it, try it out!
And then, with great difficulty, we come to the last point of "How to improve yourself"...
6. Understand what you have learned 🤓
Richard Feynman was a pioneer in this topic, he was famous for understanding Mathematics so well that he could explain it to anyone in 3 pages: from numbers to Calculus. 😳
He is the name of the Feynman Technique, which is all about testing yourself to see how well you understand the material.
There are only 4 steps:
🔍 Choose a topic you want to understand.
👦🏼 Explain it in a way that a 5-year-old can understand - if you don't know it, this will help you find your "blind spots", i.e., what you don't understand exactly.
❌ Find the "blind spots" if there are any. - Go back and study until you have blind spots on this topic.
🔄 Explain with a simile. - If you can explain with a good simile, it means you really understand the topic.
For example: learning to read faster is like getting from a car to a plane, you can do the same journey in less time. 🚗 → 🛩️
You won't really understand the subject until you can go through these 4 steps without a problem. And then there's no problem, you don't need to understand everything 100% to apply it.
But, if you really want to understand something, this will help you! 😉
I know it's been insanely long and you'll be tired of it by the time you read it, but one thing's for sure, if you apply it and combine it with persistence, you'll be an unstoppable autodidact!
✅ What exactly do you do?
[ ] First, set yourself a goal of what you want to learn. 🎯
[ ] Step two, see how deep you want to go into the subject. ⛏️
[ ] Step three, find as many resources as you can. Google, Amazon, ChatGPT, BookBase. ⛲️
[ ] Step four, filter out good resources using the techniques mentioned above. ✂️
[ ] Step five, practice speed reading. ⚡️
Use a guide
Work on your peripheral focus
Skip irrelevant information
Block out distractions
[ ] Step Six, use the Cornell Notes Technique for note taking. This will help you get the point across. 📝
[ ] Step Seven, once you're done, start testing yourself with the Feynman Technique. 🤔
[ ] Step eight, if you have "blind spots", go back to the material and fill them with knowledge, then try the Feynamn Technique again. 🔄
Remember - which I posted in another Insta Story - how much of the knowledge is locked in, for certain activities:
Now that I have passed on my knowledge and taught you with it, the knowledge is much more ingrained in my mind as well. So, I have created a win-win situation. 🙏🏻
Transferring knowledge is cool! It's something that can never be taken away from you and giving it to someone else doesn't make it less for YOU! 😉
In fact, ...
Thank you for your kind attention!
If you like it, send it to a friend:
Have a great weekend! 👋🏼
🔥 Biggest challenge
Juggling my personal life and helping the guys through this difficult time. It takes a brutal work ethic for a team of 3 people to launch an app from scratch in 2 months that is at least as good as the foreign competitors that have been developed by 20-30 people for several years. 🫥
Remember when I quoted James Clear:
"You don't rise to the greatness of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems." ~ James Clear
If it weren't for specific systems and routines in my life right now, it would have all collapsed like a house of cards a long time ago. 🌬️
So, it is with the guys and the workload, gradually the responsibility increased and so did the workload. If I had thrown a project like that at them on day one, they might have cracked under it. Now we are working day in, day out to make this dream a success! 🙏🏻
I couldn't describe it better than with a quote from the Bible:
"Where there is a will, there is a way." ~ Jesus
👷🏼♂️ Fix It Friday
There was a bug that caused a gray image to come up in search and on some book covers. 😵💫
✅ Edu fixed this quickly.
However, we got a few bugs in one of the Insta Story issues, so I added them one by one to Edu's Slack, now he will work on them:
⚠️ Playlists not always working
⚠️ Histories don't load anything
⚠️ Challenges covers load slowly
⚠️ Books don't always check out after reading
It's a difficult time right now because we're simultaneously fixing bugs in the old app and coding the new one. It's like taking 2 apps at the same time. But it's only temporary and you have to work for success! 💪🏼
📖 What have I read now?
"The Science of Self-Learning" by Peter Hollins, the whole post was inspired by this book and I've squeezed almost all of his knowledge into this article. 🙏🏻
Next to that I've read about 7 long blog articles now in the Product-Market fit category and I'm finally starting to really understand this concept.
🎧 What have I just listened to?
Chris Williamson has a brilliant podcast called Modern Wisdom, I just found it recently but the quality is something brutal. In this episode he invited Sadia Khan, a relationship psychologist and they talked about modern day dating, porn, escorts and why women cheat on men. A brilliant show! 🎙️
✍🏼 Top quote
"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"