Treat hard as a skill you lack and chunk it down

1. Learning is a change in what you do

Start, almost always, from a precedent: business content is very easy to be entertained by. What divides the people it entertains from the people who do business is that the second group changes its behavior. If you return to the conditions you came from and act as you did before, you learned nothing; what you took in was, functionally, entertainment. That is fine if entertainment is what you signed up for, though there are, it is thought, more effective ways to get it.

The test is short: the same situation now meets a new behavior. You step away from what you were learning, and you are at home or at work again. If nothing is different, nothing was learned. The encouragement here is to get very clear on what you plan to do afterward, and even while you are still learning.

The phone. Your phone rings, you answer, and you say what you always say. Then you are given a script. The next time the phone rings, if you say the old thing again, you learned nothing. If you say the script, you learned something, and what you learned is the script. That is one behavior changed.

2. A skill is a chain, and the chain comes in chunks

Skills, including the skills of business, are chains of adaptive behaviors. Answering the phone with the script is one behavior. Link several such behaviors together and you have a skill. So skills are chunked.

Why instructions do not land. This is, it is thought, why people sometimes find something so difficult to grasp, and why people cannot get their employees to do a thing: they speak in terms that are too chunked up. One body of content is claimed to have done disproportionately well, and the reason offered, in its maker's view, is a lot of effort put into chunking concepts and breaking them down. That is its maker's claim about their own work.

Basketball. Nobody, it is argued, is simply good at basketball. They are good at a series of chunked skills. Beneath the game sit dribbling, shooting and passing, and inside those sit free throws, three-pointers, jump shots, bank shots, hooks and other kinds besides. You keep breaking them down until you reach the most rudimentary level.

Business. Business works the same way. People say someone is good at business, and it is thought that everyone wants to be good at 'business'. But tell someone to go and learn business and the natural reply is: what does that mean? Inside business there is marketing, sales, product, hiring and more.

3. Meta-skills carry across

The aim here is to build the meta-skills that generalize across functions. Reading, writing and speaking let you learn things, and that lets you figure things out. In sport, hand-eye coordination makes you pretty good at most sports, and it generalizes into basketball.

Why results vary. The stated goal here is to maximize the likelihood that each person succeeds. Give two people the same directives. If one wins and the other does not, it is because the winner typically has other skills that the implementation, whatever it was, did not teach. That is given as the fundamental reason results vary.

4. Where progress stops

You keep going until you meet a step you do not know how to take; that is where you stop.

The logs. Picture yourself on one side and where you want to be on the other. Between them lie logs, and you jump from one to the next to get across. Reach a spot with no log, which is, functionally, a spot where you do not know what to do, and you fall. Or you stop and say you do not want to die. So the goal is to fill up as many of those gaps as humanly possible. It is called foundational.

Everyone teaches. The obvious point is worth stating here, because many of you also have to educate your customers, an audience through your marketing, and your employees. So all of you are, fundamentally, educators to some degree. Why, when two people come in, does one succeed and the other not? Time with any one audience is limited, in general. If some people get results and others see none, the issue is a gap in what they know.

5. Decide where teaching stops

The view here, held fundamentally, is that getting results for truly 100 percent of people is possible. The question is whether it is worth it. To come close, you would have to re-educate everyone from kindergarten to 12th grade: give everyone the foundations first, how to read, do math, speak, think and make decisions. Almost no one can say that is worth it to do (that holds for you too), for example for an employee who joins. You expect a new employee to be able to turn on a computer, use an iPhone, use the Internet and send an email.

Requisites. So at some point you have to draw a line and name the requisites: what someone needs to be an employee, and what someone needs to be a customer. It is put as an extreme example:

• If you can't read, the quality of the books is beside the point.
• If you can't stay focused, the tactics make no difference, because you will not keep at it long enough, and focus is another basket of skills entirely.
• If no one likes you, attracting key talent will be very difficult.

Results vary. The reality here is that results vary with a person's background, education, experience and application. This is offered not as a compliance disclaimer but as a plain account of why results differ between people. It is worth understanding, it is thought, because it lets you take ownership.

One buyer's record. In one example, a buyer reports being very proud of having been the biggest success story of pretty much everything they have ever bought, offered, hopefully, not in a self-aggrandizing way. The reasoning: if a seller works with twenty people and one buyer gets the best result, then that buyer has other skills the other nineteen did not have, and those extra skills contributed disproportionately to the outcome. That is the difference, in this view. It is a self-report, not shown.

6. Every step of the bridge

Think of learning as a bridge. Every step is needed; you cannot skip one to get across. You must have every foundational piece.

General skills fill gaps. The wider your general skills, the more gaps you can fill when someone gives you incomplete information, which everyone gives. Otherwise you would have to start at zero and go all the way up to coding AI, and no one has the time for it.

7. Ask what you lack, and figure it out

One practice. For any kind of implementation, one practice here is to ask what skills you lack, or what gaps you need to fill, in order to succeed. In that practice, the moment of getting stuck is the moment of finding something you do not know how to do, so the ability to figure it out becomes very important.

Proportional to what you already have. Your results will be proportional to your existing domain skill, and that is stated flatly. So figuring things out becomes one of the most important skills you can have: a meta-skill.

Start where the person is. Ask someone with a big bucket of other skills whether they can build a business, and the answer could be yes: it is a very general request, but those skills stand behind it. In the same way, tell a world-class athlete simply to win, and he could. Tell a five-year-old to win, and the reply is a question about how to tie their shoes. You have to start where the person is. All of this is a pre-frame, setting the context for what follows.

8. Seek hard

The point is then pressed as a reframe: you should seek hard. The reason given is that the difficult things are things other people also have to figure out. If an opportunity has literally nothing hard about it, and none of it is hard for you, it will not be hard for anyone else either. It will very quickly become saturated, and in the end it will not be an opportunity anymore.

Jumping from thing to thing. You can take the position of jumping from one thing to the next, which many people do. Long-term success never really comes to them, because they keep taking the easiest path and starting over, again and again. They never unlock compounding, and compounding, it is said, is where all the money is made.

The wall. You hit a wall: you simply do not know what to do. When that happens, it usually means there is a skill you need to learn. Learn it, and then, it is said, you can unlock it.

Recasting hard as not yet knowing how is on SOP 184, section 8.

9. Where this sits

• Handing a job to someone by doing it, then watching them do it, until they correct themselves: SOP 43 — Document, demonstrate, duplicate.
• Training a sales team on one obstacle at a time, by drills: SOP 108 — Drill a team on closing.
• Writing scripts and ads plainly enough that the reader keeps going: SOP 31 — Write at the right reading level.
• The same learning test, told through a front-desk greeting and then applied to a brand: SOP 92 — Measure brand as reach, influence and direction.
• Choosing between two people you might hire: SOP 192 — Hire for the smallest skill gap.
• Writing a process down as actions someone can be seen doing, then testing it on a learner: SOP 279, sections 4 and 8.

10. What this page does not decide for you

• Where to draw the requisites line for your own employees or customers. Not established on this page.
• How to learn the skill a wall points to. Not established on this page.
• How to tell a meta-skill from a domain skill beyond the examples given. Not established on this page.

11. The checklist

When	What to do
After any training or session	Get very clear on the actions you will take (the encouragement here); if your behavior in the same conditions is unchanged, nothing was learned
Explaining a task to someone	Break the concept into its chunks, as one creator says they try to, instead of speaking in terms that are too chunked up
Two people, same directives, different results	Look for the skills the implementation did not teach; typically that is the difference
Deciding what to teach	Set the requisites you expect before you teach; almost no one can say teaching everyone from the foundations up is worth it for them
Starting any implementation	Ask what skills you lack or which gaps you need to fill (one practice here)
You hit a wall	Treat it as usually a skill you need to learn, and learn it
Choosing an opportunity	Seek the hard part; an opportunity with nothing hard in it, it is said, will very quickly saturate

12. What this page does not cover

What compounding is, and the kinds of vehicle that produce it, are on SOP 199 — Build a compounding vehicle. Which customers to sell to is not covered on this page.