Welcome to episode number 72 of The Growth Booth, where today I want to talk about explosive learning tactics and how you can hack learning to learn faster and break through different plateaus that you may otherwise be stuck on. Now, I'm going to give you a real example of what I'm doing right now. I've set myself the ambitious challenge to get to a beginner level of fluency in Italian in eight weeks. But the topic could be anything. It could be related to building an online income stream for the first time in the next eight weeks, mastering some online video game, learning new business skills, learning about investing, personal relationships, absolutely anything.

Now, I think this concept of rapid learning is important because it's a missed opportunity and there are so many ways to upskill. This is one way that, like I say, you can break through plateaus in a systematic manner by almost shocking yourself into achieving new things. We'll get to my plan for learning Italian shortly and exactly what I'm going to be doing and what my approach is, but first, I wanted to share some of my favorite rapid learning techniques with you. These are things that you can apply to pretty much any kind of project that you may be working on.

The first and one of my favorites is the Pareto Principle. This is the 80/20 rule where 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. In terms of learning, for me, learning a language, it could mean focusing on the most essential concepts. So for me, learning a language that might be speaking and listening over writing and reading, because that's where I want to get to in the next eight weeks. But for you, if you want to apply this to what you're doing, just think about the most essential concepts or skills that are going to have the highest or biggest impact on the end result. That's applying the Pareto Principle. It works every time. You can take this even further and apply the 64/4 rule where 4% of the effort gets 64% of the result. I'm also going to be trying to apply that myself here as well.

Now, the second idea that I've got to share with you is about spaced repetition, and that is where you repeatedly come back to an idea before you forget about it. Typically, humans will learn something and then over a period of time, if you don't use it, you'll just forget about it. But if you're able to systematically come back to an idea and review information at regular intervals, you can relearn it or re-remember it before it's erased from your memory permanently. With learning languages, you can do this in lots of different ways, using flashcards, using lots of apps. There's like the Duolingo app, and there are many, many other tools out there like that. 

You can use this idea in almost any area or any project just by repeatedly coming back to it and practicing what you're learning and reminding yourself of the concepts. Another example for you here is I do this with swimming, with swim training. I've been swimming for many years, and I will regularly come back and do different drills to make sure that I'm swimming with the right kind of technique. This is something that gets built into you and grained into you over a period of time, but when you're learning something new by coming back to it regularly, that's where you really become a master at that craft. 

There's another technique called the Feynman Technique. This is basically about explaining concepts in your own words and getting to a level of understanding where you can explain something to someone else. And so for me, with learning Italian, I can explain to my six year old and my four year old, my kids, different words and vocabulary that I might learn in Italian. It might be learning a simple phrase. By explaining something or teaching something to someone else, it's a great way to cement knowledge for yourself. I'm going to be actively using the Feynman technique over the next eight weeks or so. 

The fourth tip I've got here for you for explosive growth and learning is to adopt a growth mindset, which this whole show is about, adopting a growth mindset, really. That's why it's called The Growth Booth. There have been a lot of studies around this one by Carol Dweck from Stanford University states that the growth mindset is the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed with some effort. So via brute force, via deliberate actions, you can grow. And this is something that I absolutely believe because I've seen it for myself many, many times over. 

There are five different parts to this. The first is embracing challenges. People with a growth mindset embrace challenges and see them as opportunities to learn and grow rather than just as insurmountable obstacles. So for me, I'm traveling to Italy in eight weeks. That could present a problem or an opportunity. I'm seeing it as an opportunity to quickly learn a new language. 

Persistence in the face of setbacks is another one. People with a growth mindset understand that setbacks and failures are a natural part of the learning process and not a definitive judgment of their capabilities. I'm going to make a ton of mistakes when I'm trying to learn Italian. I'm going to have conversations where I say things which might be downright embarrassing, but I'm going to learn from those and I'm going to persist in the face of those mistakes. The same is true for online businesses or any other projects. When you're learning something, you should expect to make mistakes and understand that they're part of the process. 

Effort is the path to mastery. Now, people with a growth mindset believe that effort is what makes us smart or talented. Not necessarily something that you're born with, but practice. Consistent practice leads to mastery and success. 

Learning from Criticism. Learning from criticism is something else that people with a growth mindset tend to adopt. This is where you are open to constructive criticism and actually work and actually welcome it. Don't look at criticism as a personal attack, but rather see it as valuable information that you can improve upon. 

I see a lot of people oftentimes are quite defensive, and if they would turn that defensive mindset into a learning opportunity, they'd probably be able to do a lot better in their lives or their projects as a result of that, and then finally finding lessons and inspiration in the success of others. This is something you can definitely adopt in the online business space, where you've probably seen and heard about many, many people who have built amazing online businesses. But not just in the online business space, in all kinds of different areas personal, investing, relationships. In my case right here, learning a language, I know that other people have done it. I know that I've done it in the past as well, at a different point in my life. And I can do it again. So finding inspiration in other examples of success. 

Now, the fifth idea that I've got here for explosive growth is around becoming a sponge. And this is absorbing information in a number of ways. Now, I can learn Italian with a tutor, I can learn it with books, I can learn it with apps, I can learn it by going to websites, I can learn it by going to conversation groups, I can learn it by listening to podcasts and by using a whole range of these different ideas. I'm going to pick up lots of different things in different ways, and they're going to help me build and achieve the level of fluency in Italian that I want. 

The sixth idea that I've got for you here, which can really encourage explosive growth and learning, is making it public. So here I am right now on The Growth Booth podcast, making public that in the next eight weeks I'm going to be aiming to get to a beginner level of fluency in Italian. I'm sharing this, not just with you guys on the show, but I'm sharing it with my friends and family members, people who I see every day. I'm putting myself in a corner where there's no way out. I'm either going to succeed and have a good crack at this or I'm going to be a failure at my project here. The only way I could fail is if I don't follow through and do it. I know that I'm going to do this and making it public helps all that little bit more. 

So why do I want to learn Italian? I'll give you a little bit of my background here and then I'll get into the steps that I'm going to be taking. As I share this with you, I want you to think about how you could use this or similar steps to come up with an explosive growth learning plan of your own. So for me personally, I am Italian, actually, which may be hard to believe because I certainly don't look or sound Italian, but my wife, who is from Argentina, has got an Italian passport. Her grandma came to Argentina after the Second World War and has been able to pass her Italian passport down through the generations to my wife's mother to my wife, and by me being married to my wife, to me, and to my kids as well.

So that's been a pretty unexpected gift that I never thought I would have. And I've learned to really love the Italian culture. It's all throughout my wife's family here. I've been to Italy multiple times and I absolutely love it. I love the language. And my kids are also learning Italian as a third language at school right now. So that's interesting. And I think that Italian is going to be, one way or another, a part of my life in the future. And I'm happy about that. It's a hobby. 

So that's kind of why I want to learn it. Also in eight weeks' time, I'm going to be spending a couple of weeks in Italy. I want to be able to get there and do better than what I did on my last trip to Italy, which is where I was sort of rumbling through and using a mishmash of English and Spanish to kind of get by, probably sounding like a complete moron, but that's fine. It was a starting point. So again, I've got this objective of getting to a level of basic fluency where I can hold a conversation. I can order things at a restaurant, I can ask for directions, I can do a check in at a hotel. I can explain a little bit about myself in simple terms to someone that I might be meeting for the first time. That's the level that I'm wanting to get to. It's a beginner level of fluency. 

I know this can be done. I know I can reach this in a period of eight weeks. I actually did that with Spanish in the past when I came to Argentina. I was learning Spanish in intensive classes for ten weeks and I was studying 4 hours a day. And this was 18 years ago, so I was a lot younger. My brain was probably a bit sharper and I was doing it 4 hours a day, which is not something I have time for now.

However, I do have the benefit right now of having more life experience to draw on. I've got a fluency in Spanish, which is going to help. It's one of the romance languages, so there's a lot of similarities between listening to Italian and listening to Spanish. A lot of the words are similar sometimes. In fact, right now, having been exposed to Italian quite a few times, I can listen to it and probably grasp 80% of the topic unless it's something really technical. But of a basic conversation, I can sort of get by, at least from the listening, but I really struggle with the speaking. 

I don't have 4 hours a day to dedicate to this. I've got about eight to 10 hours per week. But like I say, there are many more learning tools to draw on that didn't exist 18 years ago. There's lots of apps, there's an online database of different tutors that I can tap into and many other things as well, which I'll mention as we dive in here a little bit deeper. 

So with eight weeks and 8 hours per week available, that gives me 64 hours per week. I plan on using the 80/20 rule, the Pareto Principle, and focusing on achieving what I need to know and ignoring the things that aren't important. So for me that means focusing on learning how to speak and how to listen. I'm not going to worry too much about the reading and the writing, although I do think that there are a couple of skills that are going to naturally develop over the next eight weeks even though I'm not focusing on them.

My approach for this is I've developed an eight-week plan which is broken up into four different sections. The first section is really about an introduction, it's an immersion, it's absorbing as much as I can and I'll do that in week number week number one and two. Part two is weeks three and four. This is about the basics and conversation. Part three is weeks five and six, and this is intermediate Italian fluency, or at least at a beginner level, if that makes sense. And then part number four is basically just becoming fluent and building upon that. 

In terms of how I'm going to break down my investment of time into this, I'm going to have about 2 hours per week with a tutor. I'm going to have around about 3 hours per week listening and about 3 hours per week where I'll be learning vocabulary, maybe working in a book and that kind of a thing. 

Now in the first part, week one and two, I'll be spending, as I say, about 2 hours with the tutor. I've been able to find a wealth of tutors on a website called Italki. This is where I'm able to find people who are fluent Italian teachers and I can hire them on an ad hoc basis for a couple of hours per week. It might be $10 now, $15 now, but it's very affordable. These are people who are actually tutors and do this for a living, and I'm going to spend a couple of hours per week with them. Probably over the course of the eight weeks, I'll try to spend more and more time with them because it's the speaking that is really going to help me cement a lot of the ideas here. And that's the ultimate objective that I've got anyway.

I'll spend about 3 hours each week listening to Italian. I've started doing this already. I started this yesterday. I found a podcast called the Teacher Stefano Show. This is a guy who is an Italian teacher and he speaks in a very clear way about basic concepts. It's been amazing just being able to go through that and listen to things and remember words that I've heard in the past but have maybe long since forgotten. So this is a great way that I'm going to be increasing my vocabulary and becoming comfortable listening to Italian. And then I'll spend another few hours working on my vocabulary. Now, in the first couple of weeks, my speaking is going to be minimal, but that's fine. I'm building a foundation and I'll build upon this in the future, in the upcoming weeks as I've got that foundation established. 

In terms of scheduling, I think this is really important. I've added time slots to my calendar so that I know that I'm going to do two 90 minutes slots or 3 hours each weekend for the next eight weeks. In addition to that, I'm going to be doing 5 hours between Monday to Friday. So 8 hours total, maybe a little bit more if I can squeeze some more in. I've got that booked into my calendar. Allotting time to things that are important is a good strategy because that makes it more like a commitment. If I put something in my calendar, I treat it like a doctor's appointment, like I'm going to be there, I can't miss it. I'm going to make sure I turn up to each appointment.

Also keep in mind that some of these appointments that I'm talking about are going to be real deal appointments with the tutor. It's not just, “Oh yeah, I'm going to be spending from 09:00 AM to 10:00 AM working on my vocabulary.” I might be spending from 09:00 AM to 10:00 AM meeting with someone online to practice learning Italian with them. So that's a part of accountability. I think accountability is really important in projects like this. This is why, by the way, coaching works so well because if you've got an accountability partner, if you've got a coach or in my case a tutor, there's no place to hide. You either show up and you do the work and you've done the work or you don't. You can't hide from that. 

I remember back to when I was learning Spanish for the first time. There were four students, me and three other students, in one small classroom with one teacher and I couldn't doze off to sleep or sort of hide from my responsibility to get involved. I couldn't sit at the back of a lecture theater with 200 people and just sort of be invisible. I was right there. This is going to be similar in this instance and it's always the case when you're working one on one with a coach, which is I think why it works so well. 

So that's an overview of what I'm going to be doing. You can use this approach for yourself in pretty much any area of life. I think a lot of people tend to overcomplicate the learning process, but if you start off by identifying what it is that you want to achieve, make it something realistic but something that still pushes the boundaries a little bit, it can't be too easy. You build a plan around that, and then you allocate time to it, and then you just dive in and make a start. You'll be amazed at what you can achieve. 

You can use this kind of approach for online business, maybe building a niche website for the first time or starting to make money online for the first time, maybe making your first dollar online, and that could be a breakthrough which leads to millions more dollars coming in, maybe building an ecommerce store for the first time. You could use it to master a hobby, you could use it for cooking, you could use it for fitness to really shock your body into getting some new results that you haven't had before. You could use it for reinvigorating a relationship, personal friendships, personal finances, basically anything that you can imagine. This is where you are taking a proactive approach and paving your own path as opposed to just floating along in the current of life. I think this is one of the things that separates people who achieve really impressive achievements versus people who are just sort of dragged along by the current of life. Because when you do something like this, when you make a commitment to improve yourself, you are making a deliberate action that is going to result in something new coming out the other end. And in this case, it's going to be a better knowledge of Italian for me. 

Immersion is something that is incredibly powerful when it comes to learning and there are different ways that you can immerse yourself in learning. I think a lot of it comes down to what you spend your time thinking about, ultimately comes about. If your mind is constantly exposed to something and if you just keep thinking about it, then you learn it one way or another. That's why people often become experts in the things, the hobbies, because they're thinking about it all the time, they're talking about it with their friends and so on and so forth. This is a strategy that I've used with investing, I've used it with fitness, I've used it with relationships and many other things in my life, and it has never let me down. 

I think it helps if you've got a really strong reason why and a deadline for why you want to be doing something and when it needs to be done by, because this is the kind of thing that can get things moving so much faster. Now, the good news is that you can manufacture a deadline. For me, for example, I could have traveled anywhere, but I chose to go to Italy, and part of that was because I wanted to keep practicing my Italian. Now I've got a deadline, that plane is going to be leaving and I'm going to be on it, and I want to be able to fend for myself when I'm in the land of pasta and pizza and everything else that Italy has got to offer. I've given myself a deadline, but I've manufactured that in a way. And coming up with a reason why, that was quite simple for me, because there are a lot of natural tie ins with my life. 

So I thought that this would be interesting today, and hopefully you can see different ways or think of different ways that you can use explosive learning in your own life to break through different plateaus and achieve something new. Just remember that you don't need to have massive improvement all the time. You can layer on 1% gains day after day after day, but these can compound on each other. I'm talking about having 64 hours of learning over the next eight weeks for something that is completely new to me. I know that I don't know how good I'm going to get at the end of it, but I'm going to be a heck of a lot better than I am right now. I'm going to be layering up, leveling up my knowledge in this area. So this is something that you can apply to all kinds of areas in your life. 

Now, that's a wrap. You can see show notes, you can download the transcript and all the other good stuff over at thegrowthbooth.com. This is episode number 72. Check out the other episodes that I've done recently. There are some really interesting ones there as well. Thanks for listening and I will see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth.