Kind: captions
Language: en
first question is you've reached a high
level of ability slash
expertise in a number of fields martial
arts ai
music etc i'm curious to know how you
think about the learning process when
juggling all of these things
it takes a huge amount of time and
dedication to master any one of these
skills
where do you draw the line between
balance and obsession
put another way how deeply do you
immerse yourself
on learning something how do you
schedule your day
for work slash learning is it
appropriate to spend nearly every waking
hour learning and developing a skill
do you try to learn a number of things
at once or
narrow your focus to one thing so first
of all obviously i have not achieved
mastery in any of these things
and i should also say that i don't think
i've figured out the art of learning
very much but i can give my two cents of
the way i see it
so one passion i think is exceptionally
important for learning anything and if i
look back at my life i certainly
have spent days and weeks and months at
a time
really obsessed with things now to me
that's not necessarily useful
on the long journey of learning a skill
from the beginner to mastery what has
been useful to me
and if i have a philosophy on it is
probably centered around
the rigor of discipline so making sure
that every single day you do a minimum
amount
of that particular thing and you do it
for weeks
months years and also
the way to remove motivation from the
picture is to build a habit
when i'm first learning something i try
to set the goal of doing a minimum
of two hours a day of that thing
for a year to build the foundation so
that first year is really important it's
so easy to kind of
skip out on a few days and then days
becomes
weeks and weeks become months and you
lose completely that
uh initial hook that like pulls you into
the depth of the particular topic so
i really want to be a stickler of
putting in i would say one to two hours
but if i look at my life
successful things like music have been
at least two hours a day
for a year to build the foundation then
looking out farther into
let's say a five-year range you can
lower that to
about one hour a day and that's to uh
build the what i would think of as
expertise i think you can get pretty
good at something in five years if you
just do it one hour a day
i don't know if this is true for
everyone but i think for me
not even an hour just 10 minutes a day
it's been really surprising how good i
can get
at a bunch of little things from just
doing every single day
at not even 10 minutes like one minute a
day because
it's rarely becomes a one-minute thing
you it usually blows up into a thing
that takes an hour
but if you just set a hard lower limit
and make sure you do it every single day
no matter what no matter where you are
you end up forming this habit and
there's an accumulation effect of skill
that's just fascinating
so that's five years and i think at that
point the skill is solidified nicely i
don't think it's mastery by any means
but
there's a level of expertise that seems
to persist for a long period of time
what i found like with music for me not
singing just music
i haven't actually practicing i suck at
singing but the
the music part i think i've achieved a
sort of
minimal kind of understanding and at
this point
just even 10 minutes a day for the rest
of your life
is one way to i think take further and
further steps into mastery again i think
mastery is impossible
but to increase the skill
over time i think a very minimal amount
of time but every single day is good
the other magic thing about it is you
can at this point at least for me
take off months at a time and when you
return to it
you pick up almost right where you
started i don't think you want to overdo
it
but i think after you put in the first
few years of every single day of an hour
or two
there's something about the mind that's
kind of solidified in there
you know i've certainly had months where
i don't play guitar at all and i return
to it
maybe it'll take a day or two and you're
right back into it
so but still if you really want to grow
you want to put in every single day
for me 20 minutes is just the right
minimal amount to
give me time to get pulled into the task
fully get immersed
fully enough to where i can pick up
little tidbits of new
stuff new ideas that kind of uh get
going
ready for the next day for me there's
always a kind of fascinating dance here
between passion
and discipline i think passion
goes up and down and that's where
discipline is essential to keep carrying
you forward to keep doing the thing
every day
and i'm not a big believer of uh
resting and then returning to the task
i'm a bigger believer in
when you don't really want to do it
still grinding it out
and days later your passion for the
thing will return
people are different but that's how i am
because the the greater danger for me
is when you take a break when you rest
is you're going to destroy the habit
that you've built
and once you destroy the habit it's too
easy to never return
to the pursuit of expertise
that you are on for many years before
also a related question was asked
i loved your video and recipe for
success in ai
do you have any advice for dealing with
slash difficulty in making progress
i'm learning high school math right now
with a proof based
course and sometimes it gets hard i feel
like crying
do you have any advice for pushing past
frustration and dead ends
thanks i personally think that struggle
is a sign that you're on the right path
so all the things in my life that i've
gotten the most meaning from learning
i've struggled through it
i think the biggest reward at the lowest
level your brain like the things you
actually remember
and just the self-satisfaction and
happiness you feel about life is when
there's something is really hard but you
stick
to it and then you eventually succeed
that locks in the lessons into your
brain
that makes you feel good about yourself
that gives you more confidence for keep
doing that in the future also i think
this is helpful for
a bunch of people like david goggins
it's not as helpful to me but i'll just
give it to you because i've tried it it
doesn't really work for me but a little
mind hack which is
imagining that you're kind of a
competition with everybody else in the
world
and so if something is difficult for you
imagining that it's probably going to be
difficult for a lot of people
and if you just stick by it you're going
to leave all those people
behind you and eventually if you keep
doing it long enough you'll be the best
person in the world at it
so kind of uh seeing struggle
as a sign that most people would be
quitting at this point and it gives you
motivation that like
a struggle is a sign that you're on the
path towards being number one
if you enjoy the kind of uh idea of you
being
at that top tier of excellence in a
thing
then um then that kind of mind hack can
help i personally don't often
like to think in that way especially in
competition with others
i just like the art itself so i enjoy
the idea of pursuing mastery
not in comparison to others but just for
myself
so in that sense that mind hack doesn't
really work for me i kind of tend to
believe that
if i embrace the grind of habit of every
day doing something
that months from now years from now
as i've had many times in my life
i will experience these moments these
long periods of
flow of truly enjoying the process of uh
practicing that thing so for me music
now that i've achieved the level that
i've achieved
on my own personal quiet private moments
i can truly enjoy feeling
the music i'm creating on the guitar
playing
jimi hendrix playing stevie ray vaughan
improvising different blues
or even just like much simpler songs
like these uh crying melodic songs of
air clapton
wonderful tonight or
or even just strumming in a way where i
can also sing
just it allows me to enjoy the
the both the musicality and the deep
meaning and the words and all that kind
of stuff
and that was only possible because i put
in that
time in the early years of the
foundation that i built
it allows you to enjoy life and i
believe in that if you form the habit
if you do the thing every single day
eventually you'll get to
a set of uh a set of activities
that you enjoy partaking that are a
source of a lot of meaning and happiness
in your life
so you can think of it as a mind hack
which is
believing that discipline eventually
leads to a meaningful life
hope that answers the question good luck
you