# **Learning** The most successful entrepreneurs are decisive, confident, and driven. They tend to be strong and charismatic leaders as well. Leadership and Charisma can be cultivated. Educating yourself is the simplest 1% improvement you can make. Anywhere, anytime, and about anything thanks to the internet. [[GOTBook/1. Ready For Final/0 GOTBook Intro#Thinking in Loops|Invest in yourself and watch the dividends roll in.]] ## The Modern Symposium A Symposium is a gathering for learning. In Ancient Greece, they had them after banquets and feasts. The Symposium was where they gathered to talk and argue over philosophy afterward. [[GOTBook/1. Ready For Final/Personal Philosophy|You should seek to make a Modern Symposium for yourself]]. This is one of the basic principles that we’ll be exploring throughout this education section. The best learning is done together, but after being apart. Everyone goes off on their own and they work and they learn, and then they come back together and they feast, and talk. As you talk to one another, you’re able to maximize your knowledge sharing and learning. As entrepreneurs, we want to make our companies in this fashion.. As people of earth, we should seek to gather friends around ourselves in the same way. I think that a symposium could be either a formal or informal thing. I think the formal business version is the Mastermind, as popularized by Napoleon Hill, and is defined as a group of businesspeople getting together to exchange ideas and knowledge and network in an effort to improve themselves and their businesses. There is also the Modern Symposium on the social level. This would refer to a group of people who meet once regularly - a book club would be an example of a Modern Symposium - but in my ideal each person is reading a different book on a collective subject. The idea of Symposium being a group of individuals learning paths that then come together on a regular basis to exchange knowledge, keep their minds fresh, and grow together. ## Evolution Of A Businessperson (~2-3 Years if accelerated) **** **** ## Learning With Purpose Learning with a purpose implies that you are learning for a final goal. This means you can associate projects with it along the way, and those projects can both be used to accomplish parts of the goal and to prove that you now know certain skills. Develop a plan that includes practical application as soon as possible. ### Project and Research Emphasis In order to complete a course of learning, you must have some sort of capstone project that encompasses all the skills and knowledge you’ve learned, complete your goal, and put the project in a final portfolio. An architect has a portfolio that is key to their entire career. In digital, and in creative work, portfolios are pretty easy to make. In some knowledge work, like consulting, it is much more difficult to create a portfolio because you may not have the same deliverables that you can point back to. The way I work around that hurdle is by creating content that shows I know what I am talking about. In most cases, I can’t show off what I have done for my clients, and maybe one in ten are worthy testimonials. ### **Systematic Learning - My Notes From Ultralearning (good framework, middling book)** There are three main ways to apply ideas of ultralearning: * New part-time projects. * Learning sabbaticals. * Reimagining existing learning efforts. Ultralearning principles: * Metalearning: first draw a map. * Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle. * Discovere how to do good research and how to draw on your past competencies to learn new skills more easily. * Focus: sharpen your knife. * Cultivate the ability to concentrate. * Carve out chunks of time when you can focus on learning, and make it easy to just do it. * Directness: go straight ahead. * Learn by doing the thing you want to become good at. * Don’t trade it off for other tasks. * Drill: attack your weakest point. * Be ruthless in improving your weakest points. * Break down complex skills into small parts, and then master those. * Retrieval: test to learn. * Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it. * Test yourself before you feel confident. * Push yourself to actively recall information rather than passively review it. * Feedback; don’t dodge the punches. * Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. * Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. * Extract the signal from the noise. * Retention: don’t fill a leaky bucket. * Understand what you forget and why. * Learn to remember things not just for now but forever. * Intuition: dig deep before building up. * Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. * Understand how understanding works. * Don’t recourse to cheap tricks of memorization to avoid deeply knowing things. * Experimentation: explore outside your comfort zone. * True mastery comes not just from following the path trodden by others but from exploring possibilities they haven’t yet thought up. * As long as you stick with the process, you’re bound to learn something. * Establish the skill/knowledge that you would like to obtain. * Establish how to start learning this skill. * Find a mentor/teacher/coach to help with furthering knowledge in this skill. ### Knowledge is Free The abundance of learning available online makes it possible for almost anything to be self-taught. If it is not free, it is very cheap. MIT and many other major institutions have released their coursework online. MIT has all its courses available, and you have websites such as Khan Academy usually. Then you have YouTube for pretty much anything else. You virtually have the ability to learn anything you need in order to move forward. So, how would you make knowledge valuable if it is free? There are two things to look at here. It is free because the incremental cost of creating one more of any of these is zero. This is entirely different compared to the cost structure that existed before the internet. Both creation and distribution of content or media had cost, now the only cost is in creation. So a few ways one can make money off of knowledge: * Packaging Content - if one places content in a structured packaged, such as a book or course, which does not have value on its own, we instill value within them. The idea behind the packaging is that you have determined that the knowledge can be used to create value, and that’s what people are paying for. They are paying for the value of the structure, the hierarchy of information. * Use the information to instill value within yourself - when we look at ourselves, as workers in a knowledge economy, our values are tied to the knowledge we have structured within ourselves in such a way that we can use it to create value externally. * Asymmetric Information is the core of business - all knowledge might be free in terms of useful skills and learning like that, but information such as who owns the building down the street may not be readily available, and that may be worth millions of dollars. Knowing that a business is for sale is worth something if you know somebody who wants to buy. If the party that wanted to buy a business knew of that same business, then your knowledge would be worthless. However, if that party was not aware of that business, and you were able to broker the transaction, then you can make a piece of the value. ## A Peak Inside My Library 1. Traction 2. Mastery 3. Laws of human Nature 4. What is strategy 5. CEO within 6. Exponential thinking 7. Aggregation theory 8. Mental models 9. Defining decade 10. Getting there (orange) 11. Atomic habits/tiny habits 12. Indistractable & Hooked 13. Breakthrough advertising 14. Finding flow 15. Skin in the game 16. The leading brain 17. The charisma Myth 18. The billionaire who wasn’t 19. In praise of idleness 20. On wealth 21. Ender’s Game 22. Seneca (shortness of life, letters) 23. Marcus Aurelius (meditations) 24. Why Information Grows 25. William Gibson 26. Ogilvy 27. How to win friends and influence people 28. Think and grow rich? 29. A Sense of Style 30. Trust Me, I’m Lying 31. Principles 32. Finite and Infinite Games 33. The lessons of History 34. The war of art 35. The Rye Baker (contrast normal bread) 36. Wait but why (careers, marriage, friends, everything) 37. Ted talk (time in a day and moms, Tim urban) ## Other life lessons * just jump (learning to swim) * Lottery ticket of birth (where/when/who/what color) * Business is everywhere (breaking down with Dad) * Never hurts to ask (Mom) * Can’t win if you don’t believe it (Brother) ## Media and Thought The core concept here is that in terms of thought, and the way people think, it is my belief that people think in a manner more closely related to the form of media they spend the most time-consuming. ### Books People who read books all the time will tend to think in longer, slower formats, with more structure to them. ### Social Social media is the shortest burst of information, so, people who tend to consume larger amounts of this media tend to think in the shortest bursts. ### Television People who tend to consume more Television will think in a shorter format, but may still be longer than those who focus on social media. ### Long-Form Speech Long-form conversation in books is the most common long-form speech, it is also the oldest format of a speech, and of information being passed down.