3 Steps to Becoming Great at Anything

What's up, everybody? Mark Manson here. And you know, everybody wants to be great at something. In fact people come up to me all the time. They ask, you know, Mark, how do I become great at this one thing? I totally get why they ask me because I'm pretty fucking amazing at like everything I do that lettuce in my teeth these fucking nose hairs. They really spring up on you got my sweat smells like onions and the fact is I've broken down how to be great at anything. Yes.

Is anything into three easy repeatable steps just one two, three. Boom. You're a world-class performer and whatever you want to be for a limited time. It's only nine thousand dollars $999 wait nine thousand. I can't even get the price right just watch the video..

Before we dive into how to become great at something. This video is brought to you by Mark minutes and an up-and-coming personal development author whose books have sold more than 10 million copies Mark Manson was a popular blogger and now has a Weekly Newsletter called mindfuck Monday. You can sign up at Mark Manson dotnet / newsletter Mark Manson was kind enough to pay for the camera the lens the lighting the chair. He's sitting on pretty much fucking everything in this room Mark Nancy..

Then tried to set up said lighting but even after three months of trying still pretty goddamn terrible at it. All right back to you mark. Ah, thanks Mark, please support our sponsor subscribe to the channel, you know, he's doing his best. He's trying pretty hard here. Even if he kind of smells like onions. All right, so three step process how to get great at anything step. Number one. Learn the fundamentals figure out what the 20% is that drives that 80% of results. There was this economist who live like a long time..

Go name Ricardo perret. Oh and he had this principle that he discovered which was that essentially 80% of economic output was generated by roughly 20 percent of the company's similarly within the company's about 80% of the productivity came from 20% of the workers. This became known as the 80/20 rule the 80/20 principle and it applies to nearly everything 20 percent of the customers will make 80% of your purchases 20% of the population pays 80% of the taxes 20% of the politicians..

Responsible for 80% of the corruption you can just you can go on and on what's interesting is sometimes it goes beyond the 80/20 principle. Sometimes it's the 90/10 principle or the 99 one principle, for example, in music 1% of the songs account for 99% of what people listened to and sports 1% of the athletes make 99% of the money and Publishing one percent of the books are read 99% of the time. So the first step of entering any field or developing any skill set is figuring out where.

Are the 80/20 is what is the 20% that's going to create 80% of the results think of these like Leverage points. Where are the actions and effort that you can get a disproportionate amount of returns for example in writing if you read some books on how to improve your writing one of the first things that you'll notice is that everybody says that editing has a disproportionate effect on how good the writing is editing is the 20% that drives the 80% of results Ernest Hemingway once famously said the first.

Out of everything is shit, and I can tell you from experience that is completely true. Nobody writes a good first draft. Everything is full of inconsistencies and bullshit and run-on sentences. It's only through the revisions in the edits in the rewrites that you actually get a sparkling clean beautiful piece of writing similarly in music you find that there's only a handful of core progressions and concepts of Harmony that account for like 80 or 90 percent of the popular music that you hear. So if you're able to Simply learn a few of those.

chord progressions or understand the harmony behind those chord progressions, you're going to immediately be able to play the vast majority of music that people want to listen to or like in chess. If you study Chess at all, you will quickly find that there are many repeatable patterns that come up consistently game after game. There are opening patterns, their mid-game patterns, their in-game patterns their forks and pins and different concepts around Pawn structure. If you're able to focus on those patterns that will help you be a better chess player..

Then 80 90 % of people generally this first step. It requires taking an introductory course reading a couple books may be hiring a coach but the focus should always be what is the 20 that's driving the 80 a lot of introductory courses specially in University. They don't tell you what that 20 is that drives the 80, you have to figure that out yourself a good coach will point that out to you but a bad coach will not so this is something that always needs to be in the Forefront of your mind when you're taking on a new Pursuit..

Step numero dos arrange a system so that you receive feedback consistently and reliably you can't improve on anything unless you receive feedback on it. Now that feedback could take many different forms. It could be a teacher telling you that this term paper you wrote was terrible. It could be a coach telling you that your basketball shot is all off and you need to like move your elbow or something. Whatever basketball players do it could be putting your music online and hearing what your friends.

Family members think about it. But whatever it is, you need a consistent system of feedback. You need a valuation on your performance so that you can adjust your performance and you can begin to iterate iteration is the fundamental basis of all Improvement. Now, here's the problem people make two mistakes with step numero, dos they either don't receive feedback. So they just write in their bedroom for years and years and years and never showed anybody or they shoot baskets in a gym..

I'm and never play against anybody and it's because they're afraid of criticism. They're afraid of losing their afraid of being embarrassed or afraid of being made fun of or the second problem is that they receive the feedback and then they refuse to listen to it in either case. If you don't accept the feedback, then you're not going to improve this is where ego comes into the process, you know, is that the people who are afraid of feedback it's because there he goes a little bit too fragile. They need to protect themselves whenever they're pursuing its.

Two fundamental to their identity so they can't allow themselves to threaten it. That's not a healthy way to pursue anything. If the thing you're pursuing is the only meaningful thing in your life. You're not going to get very far. Similarly. A lot of people they think they're hot shit before they're hot shit. They're sitting there publishing short stories online and nobody's reading them and they're like man, you know, it's just because I'm just too fucking brilliant people don't you know people don't get it if you're ever telling yourself that.

That you're probably full of shit step. Number two also kind of explains why coaching is a thing because you know, it's easy to ignore your friends. But if you're paying an expert to give you feedback, it's kind of hard to ignore that feedback. I mean, otherwise why the fuck are you paying this guy? The other great thing about a coach they can point out when you're protecting your ego. They can point out when you're deluding yourself and ignoring the proper feedback. So while this step sounds very simple like oh, yeah, I get feedback all the time..

It's actually very difficult. It's very difficult for most of us to listen to criticism and be realistic about it. Be honest about it actually taking it into consideration and changing what we do wall step number three..

Now that you know how to iterate wait, where's my microphone now that you know how to iterate iterate for 5,000 to 10,000 hours. I know what you're thinking right three steps. Wow, that's easy. Ten minute YouTube video. Here we go. Alright, you get to step number three and it's like 10,000 fucking hours. Are you shitting me? Who has that kind of time? All right. All right. This is this is hold on the this is the harsh truth..

Harsh truth of the day. There are no fucking shortcuts. Okay, there's no short. Nobody took a shortcut anything you hear about the overnight success. You heard about in the paper you read about on Facebook. It's bullshit. Don't listen to it. You got to put the time in you got to iterate man. Like one way I think about this is that if I'm going to try to become excellent at anything, I need to fail a thousand times and the faster I can get those thousand failures out of the way..

The sooner I will start experiencing success at that thing as a culture. We love we love like we get such a fucking hard-on for these overnight overnight success stories. There's no overnight success. It's absurd you take like the Beatles right? It's like one of the most storied important music careers of the last century in people's minds is just these like random 20 year old kids from Liverpool just show up and have all this amazing music the Beatles fucking great..

Find it there playing five to six hours a night in Germany, like old dank German bars in the red light district for like no fucking money. Nobody was listening six nights a week for like a year. That's so much fucking time. One of my favorite interview moments ever. I remember I saw an interview of the Facebook co-founder Dustin moskovitz and the interviewer actually asked him. What is it feel like to be an overnight billionaire and he like just laughed and he was like if by overnight you mean.

Working all night every night for seven years. It was really tiring and stressful. That's what an overnight success is. I ran into this stuff with my own book, you know, when I started doing TV interviews and press interviews people like oh this came out of nowhere, right? It's like no motherfucker. I've been blogging for eight years. I was writing shit online dealing with fucking hate mail and trolls since 2007. This is it not happen overnight. This was nine years in the making. Alright, so that's it for today..

Go out and you know become excellent at something. Let me know how it goes 10 years from now and you know by then I'll probably forget about this video and I won't care anymore. So peace..

step number 3.

Please don't use that..