billion dollar ideas trapped in your head

I know something about you without knowing you.

I bet you spend a lot of time chasing after courses, audiobooks, wasting your time at meetups but come back to your old self.

You don’t need more information:

You’ve read the books, watched the videos, and followed the experts.

But still, you are stuck at the same place.

You don’t see the results you want because you don’t need more information. You need to take action.

Anytime I learnt something new I made sure to build a project from it.

I started a freelancing service when I learnt design.
I built my blog website when I learnt how to code.
I started my Letters when I took a Digital Marketing course.
My first business, TS Collections was after quitting my 9-5 job to experiment with digital product development.
I started Skillembassy after I completed the product design and management bootcamp.

Practice solidifies what you learn. That is how companies were built.

If you don’t apply what you learn to a problem sitting in your head, your mind gets fat from too much information just sitting in your head. Mental obesity.

Knowledge is relevant, but it’s useless without implementation.

You have subscribed to 5 - 10 courses, tutorials, newsletters and podcasts promising to unlock the secrets to your success.

The missing link isn’t the latest tip or trick – it’s the will to move from consuming information to executing it.

I have a philosophy that I apply to learning. This has helped me to get actual things done 10X faster: learn, build, expand.

You need habits to get results, not just knowledge.
The first step to transform your life is to transform your mind.
The second is to adapt new habits.

You don’t go through a whole course with the intention to apply what you learn to a new project later. It is a flawed approach. You need to adapt to a new habit.

• Outline a project you want to build
• Start building it out
• Learn along the way

This means that you use the knowledge you acquire on the project.

This is where a lot of people get trapped in tutorial hell, stacking up information that is going to be forgotten in the next 5 minutes.

If you aren’t building, you aren’t learning.

Remember what we spoke about habits. Yes, you can’t continue to do the same thing and expect different results. That is called madness.

A new habit you should adopt to learn 10X faster:

I am going to pick a few insights from a blog post I read over the week.

Essentially it is what I want to tell you so I will go ahead and save some time and thinking space.

1. Outline a project

There were a few moments in my life when I made giant leaps in learning, understanding, and progress:

• Building my products
• Writing these newsletters
• What do they all have in common?

I treat them as a project.

A project has:

• An outline so you can note ideas to fill in that outline from everyday life.
• Milestones so you have direction and clarity on your next steps.
• A real-world deadline that forces you to act, or else your survival takes a hit.
• Experimentation, trial, and error so you can turn failures into lessons.

Create a real-world project that you will publish for others to see.

If you don’t know what project to create, see what others have done.

If you want to learn Photoshop, your project will be anything from a graphic to a digital art scene.

2. Learn, Build

If you aren’t building, you aren’t learning.

If you aren’t actively applying what you learn to a problem sitting in your mind, you are simply stacking useless knowledge to be forgotten in the next 5 minutes.

When you start building something, there are only a few things you need to know: the fundamentals.

When you have a project to build, do one or both of the following:

• Purchase a beginner-level course on the topic
• Watch overview videos on YouTube that teach the fundamentals
• Study them until you have clarity on what to do next. Then, do it, and when you encounter a problem:

Refer back to sections of the course or video
Research how to solve that problem directly
Watch tutorials where people build projects similar to yours and see how they overcome those problems.

3. Teach What You Learn

Teaching in public by writing as a personal brand (or your public resume) so you can also attract high-paying opportunities as you learn. (This is what I teach in Digital Mastery program).

Build in public and let people criticize you.
Teach your friends to make for interesting conversations.
Take notes on the subject but write them as if you were teaching yourself.
Teaching almost forces you to make sense of the information.

You have to structure it, explain it, and ensure that you aren’t giving false knowledge.

4. Expand

By this point, you may still feel overwhelmed or like you aren’t learning much.

This is a good thing.

Your mind is primed for pattern recognition.

So:

• Launch yourself into the unknown – immerse yourself in the culture, environment, and information related to what you are trying to learn.
• Condition your mind through repetition and exposure – slowly understand the lingo, vocabulary, and skill set of those who have seen success in that topic.
• Let your mind expand through the discomfort – the worst thing you can do is quit when you are feeling growing pains.
  You aren’t seeing results because you aren’t the person who would see results.

This process allows you to become a new person by letting your old version die.

Like when you are adopting new habits, you have to get out of the old environment that fueled your bad habits.

To make this more practical:

• Read books – books give you 10 years of effort from 6 hours of reading.
  Consume lectures – long articles and videos give you 3 days of effort in 20 minutes.
  Follow new people – this is less about consuming short-form content and more about training your mind to be in that tribe of people. Buy 3 books.

One best-seller, one technical, and one historical.

Burn through them and don’t let your obsession die.

This may seem like a long process, but we aren’t trying to learn something on a surface level, we are trying to become masters as fast as possible.

5. Make Connections To Solidify Understanding

When you master one thing, it becomes easier to master others.

Principles are Universal. They overlap.

When you master fitness, you can master business in half the time, and then relationships in another half.

Most people never master one domain of their lives, so they never experience exponential personal growth.

When you feel like you have a solid understanding of the topic you are trying to learn:

• Zoom out one layer – move from “Photoshop” to “graphic design” to “creative work.”
  Take note of signal – when your mind signals important information, write it down.
  Build better projects – from a new level of mind, build a new project that will take you to the success you want to see.
  In my own experience, my knowledge compounded when I peeled back a layer from web design to marketing to content creation to metaphysics.

This is also a great way to start your one-person business.

Start by learning, teaching, and building in one domain then branch out as your audience expands.

We help you do this and start your digital career in 90 days inside Skillembassy

You don’t need more information – you need to start using what you’ve got. Make mistakes, learn from them, and keep pushing forward. The only way to truly improve is through active experimentation.

Now, go learn, build, and enjoy your weekend.