Michael Simmons

• 244 people on webinar
• Learning how to read
• Getting 10x in retaining learning
• Finding 1 hour to read every day
• Ex. learning to start a business - customers, sales, price setting
• The faster you learn, the more you can earn
• Ernst & Young reward and multi-million dollar business from scratch
• Co-creator of largest online community of learning how to learn?
• Think and Grow Rich - by Napoleon Hill is a classic. Takes a few hours to read, but changes life for ever.
• Michael started reading books since then en masse
• Likes learning about high performers, esp entrepreneurs
• 5 Hour Rule - read (or learn 5 hours per week)
• Worker Will, Hobby Hilda, Deliberate Danny - 3 archetypes.
• Scrooge saw the implications of his decisions - so he improved
• Focus on learning vs performance. Learning is improvement, not mastery, max mistakes, leverage 1000x. Performance is only 24hr, mistakes minimized, goal of execution, and mastery.
• Worker Will does well - but then plateaus. At that point, he must get deliberate about learning.
• Uber's first self-driving truck makes first delivery of 50k beers. Ie, that is blue collar job loss. Need to learn something new. Applies to white collar jobs, too.
• book - Disrupted. My Misadventuree in the Start-Up Bubble. Funny book. High pay + old skill = not good. Example of white collar job loss.
• Hobby Hilda - does well, then falls. How Hobby Hilda learns - ex. Industry Publication - reading what everyone else knows. You need ideas that people don't have. At best you get caught up with everyone. She also does Social Media - but that's not great (thought of day vs thought of lifetime). App called Pocket - pocket things for future. Books - books that everyone else is reading may not be good.
• Attention Bias - listening only to specific channels as above. Illusion of importance - just because something pops up you think it's important.
• Deliberate Danny - Compound interest: he who understands it, earns it, he who doesn't, pays it. So Deliberate Danny wins in the long run.
• Thrun - top players are worth $10M. Not many people have developed that skill. Deliberate learner finds what is needed and gets those skills.
• Obama did an hour per day learning when in White House - so business is not an excuse.
• Not all Deliberate Dannies are created equal - due to compound interest.
• The ladder of Lifelong Learning. AI eliminates whole professions over time. Top of the ladder people are in more demand.
• Old model is dead. School from 7-22. Not. New: Constantly learn, in and out of work
• Learning needs an RDA of new skills like nutrition on a label.
• Drive it home that exponential changes. 21st century will be 20,000 years of progress. Rate of change increases. Rate of learning needs to change, too.
• If your rate of change > rate of change of others - you are safe.
• Greatest inequality in the 21st century will be learning. You need to be a Deliberate Danny.

Specifics

• How to be a Deliberate Danny?
• How to determine what skills to get? You need to combine Your Love and The Market. But if you only follow the market, you won't do things you love.
• Get a Promotion Hack. Go to your boss - what skills could I learn right now that will get me a promotion later. Demonstrate that you have them. Then you get a promotion, maybe. If you don't - you actually have an option to go elsewhere.
• For entrepreneurs - your customers are your boss. Put together skills so you solve customer's largest problem. Increase your price 5x by understanding what your customer values.
• Ex. Original price - $2500. Talked to customers, than charged 4x as much for what they wanted more.
• Typical is starting as Worker Will (immediate performance). You burn out. So Michael changed his habits. Did reading and writing for 18 months. In one month, went to 6 figure revenue.
• How to future proof? Can't know what it will be. Can only learn valuable skills.
• Key Skills: understand cognitive bias, better planning, setting goals, learning processes, communication, energy management, behavior change.