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Most people think success comes from working harder, but the real edge comes from learning faster. In this episode, Sharran reveals the three shortcuts that will help you master any skill 10x faster.
You’ll discover how to reach out directly to experts using his “Magic DM Script,” the AI prompt that instantly identifies the 20% of knowledge that creates 80% of your results, and the “Learning Dogma” method that turns new insights into lifelong wisdom. These are the frameworks Sharran uses to learn anything at lightning speed without wasting hours in the YouTube rabbit hole or reading a dozen books.
If you’ve ever wanted to fast-track your growth, this episode is your blueprint.
“When you listen to something, you get to learn it once. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice (that’s a Jim Kwik quote, by the way). But when you document something, you get to learn it forever.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
02:02 – Why speed of learning is the ultimate advantage
03:37 – Shortcut #1: The Magic DM Script
07:44 – Shortcut #2: Using AI to identify the 20% that matters
11:41 – Shortcut #3: The Learning Dogma framework
13:55 – Why frameworks boost recall and retention
14:56 – Recap: Learn Any Skill 10x Faster
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Board Member: ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Board Member: The Real Brokerage
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
– Threads
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to the Business School Podcast. And in this episode, I’m gonna talk to you. No, not about working harder. No, not about working smarter. Definitely dunno what that means, but. Learning faster. I realized that if you can learn things fast, that means you have this insane superpower of a skill.
[00:00:18] Now we live in an amazing age of information where there’s way more information than we can learn anything. So, how do we learn things fast? And I figured out. My favorite three. Shortcuts. Shortcuts in the world with there are no shortcuts. Figure out three shortcuts in which you can learn things super fast, and I break them all down for you step by step.
[00:00:34] Starting right now.
[00:00:42] One thing is for certain. Just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to, how to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:01:04] That is the question. This podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa, and Welcome to Business School.
[00:01:17] Okay, so today I’m gonna give you the three-step system that I use to master any skill. But the craziest part is I was, I was pretty bad. I was never any good at this because just like everyone else, I wanted to figure out things. I wanted to learn new skills and. With this whole YouTube generation, I just feel like go down this endless rabbit hole of just binging content.
[00:01:37] And the algorithm is so good that it gives you more and more videos that are like that over and over again. And then I’m like, oh, you know, I should probably get a, a book from Amazon that is like this and the recommendation and you give you three more. So I’ve ordered four Amazon books on the same topic.
[00:01:51] Then I’m like, wait a minute, I know a friend that actually did this thing, so I’m gonna talk to him or her. And I’ve done all of this, which. I’ve realized at the end of the day is a total waste of time trying to learn new skills because we all know that skills pay the bills, right? If you are skilled to doing something, there’s a good chance that you are getting paid right now in whatever you’re doing because you have a unique skill and you learn that doing something.
[00:02:14] And I want to show you how you can accelerate the learning of these new skills because in this modern. Modern age of everything being accessible to us, of the, you being able to vibe code or vibe trade or use AI to do whatever or hire somebody in the Philippines to do whatever you want. You the the best idea creation and the best skill knowledge is the thing that you can have.
[00:02:36] So I’ll give you a quick background, right? I had a chance to build $2 billion companies. I bought over 3,500 units of real estate. I’ve invested in over a hundred plus deals, after which I stopped counting. And I’m trying to tell you that if I had known. If I had kind of organized these three shortcuts for myself, all of this would’ve happened much faster.
[00:02:53] And I say all of this clearly not to brag, you’re listening to me. I appreciate you. But to tell you that it’s not the skill, I worked my face off. I learned all of these things, but it’s not the skill I have learned. I’ve just learned that working harder never solved. Any speed of learning problems.
[00:03:11] Speed is the answer. Speed is the ultimate. Everything. You want to do things super fast. So I was, so for the last many years I’ve kind of been on this ridiculous mission to figure out like, you know, how do you collapse this learning curve and then find shortcuts in the world, in a world where there are no shortcuts, right?
[00:03:27] We live in a world where the world is figured out. It is a world. Where there are no shortcuts. So how do you figure out shortcuts in the world where there are no shortcuts? So lemme give you three shortcuts to make it all work. So shortcut number one, I call this the magic DM script and lemme explain what I mean by this.
[00:03:41] So I have always, one of the first things that I do when I wanted to learn something is I just start to follow people who are really good at that thing. So let’s say I wanted to learn about the Anaheim Ducks. Well, I will, I will start following like ice hockey commentators. Let’s say I wanted to learn about options trading.
[00:03:59] I’ll just start to follow people who. Trade options and talk about it often. And the more I start to follow them more I see them in my feed, the more I realize. All right, cool. I, I’m getting an understanding of the language, I’m getting an understanding of the way to think about things. I’m getting an understanding of just the being in the world of things, right?
[00:04:14] So I remember I was really, uh, I really wanted to meet this author. I, I thought, you know, she was fantastic and I loved her approach to life. And so the first time I tried to reach out to her, I was kind of. It felt strange. I kind of froze and I was like, well, what do I exactly say? What would she think of me?
[00:04:33] You know, how do I sound like I’m not begging? And so I wrote a bunch of drafts in my inbox and then none of them quite felt right. So finally I came up with this DM script that actually worked, and I wanna give it to you. So essentially I said, hi, so and so, hi name. I said, I love and admire your work. I’m working on a project and hoping you can help me.
[00:04:53] Are you open to paid consulting? So what have I done? I’ve reached out in a very clear way saying, Hey, I. Long-time listener. First time caller, right next I’m like, Hey, I’m working on something and I need your help. Third, I don’t want it for free and I don’t wanna insult your time. So, are you open to paid consulting, by the way?
[00:05:11] It’s crazy that I didn’t like think about this before as opposed to just, instead of just reaching out to people and saying, Hey, do you wanna jump on a call or whatever, I don’t do that anymore. I just, I lead with the offer of paid consulting where I wanna write them a check upfront, and so I sent it to this author.
[00:05:27] Deeply respected. She literally within hours respond to me and she’s like, sure, I’m happy to help. Here’s my fee. Right? And, I was remember thinking and staring at that message saying like, this is insane. All these ears of overthinking, and all I had to do was just be direct and respectful. Like that’s all I needed to do.
[00:05:45] So the reason I’m telling you this is to please use the script. Because here’s the best part. There is an 80 20 rule when it comes to this as well, uh, 80% of the time. I will tell you that people will just offer to help you immediately. They I think they will believe that you are, you sent them this message.
[00:06:00] It’s a symbol of seriousness, and it’s not a freeloading mechanism, so they know that you’re not a freeloader. So they’ll be like, Hey, what do you need? They’ll actually help you. And second, the other 20% of the time, they will just quote you a fee. And I will tell you four contexts, just so you know, I do this often.
[00:06:17] When I say I do this often, I do this every week. I pay a lot of people a lot of money on a weekly basis. The other day, I, I was, I found this guy who was trading options and his hourly consulting was $195. I was like, this is crazy and I want to, that’s what I wanna explain to you. I have received; I have yet to receive.
[00:06:36] A fee that was quoted to me above which I had expected it not once, which it all teach us something, right? That’s what I’m realizing, that there’s so many experts around the world that I don’t have to go buy any books or buy any courses or buy any podcasts or, you know, do like binge any content. I just find the person who’s great at it and I just literally call them or DM them and ask them for paid consulting that is so much faster and they’ll give you all the cheat codes because if you call me and asked me all the cheat codes to, you know, doing whatever that time and money saved is going to collapse so much time now there’s a good chance at.
[00:07:12] You probably don’t want to pay a hundred thousand dollars an hour or whatever, like the, the fee is, but the, the the, because I don’t want to spend the time because I could spend that time building our business and creating the revenue for us. Right? But my point is, I will tell you 99% of the time, whoever you’re looking for is out there that can give you the answer that you want.
[00:07:30] So please. Use the script. The script was kind of in front of me here. Hey, I love and admire your work. I’m working on a project. I’m hoping you can help me. Are you open to paid consulting? If you send that script, I guarantee you you’re going to get, you’re gonna get some pretty good responses. Alright.
[00:07:44] Here’s shortcut number two. We talked about the 80/20, so I’m gonna give you another 80/20 kind of AI prompt method. So lemme give you like a really funny story. So many years ago, almost 20 years ago, I wanted to learn the guitar so that I could write a song and propose to my wife. My now wife, so I’ll tell you what most beginners do and I’ll, I kind of Googled, Hey, what are these beginner chords?
[00:08:05] Right? And of course, thousands of tutorials came up and each telling me something different to do. I was pretty overwhelmed, of course, because I was starting from scratch. I’m also tone deaf, so I was trying all of this. At that time, I didn’t know what else to do, so I called my friend who’s a musician, and he gave me really good advice, which helped me learn the guitar.
[00:08:23] Proposed to my wife, which she was like, wow, just stop singing. Right? But I was thinking about the story when I was telling the story recently somebody, and I said, that’s so interesting now that we have ai. How would AI answer the same question if I had AI today? So I asked the AI the same question that I asked my musician friend, and so I’ll tell you the I copied, pasted the prompt in front of me of the exact question I asked AI and I said this.
[00:08:45] I said, Hey, AI to ai, I’m learning to play the guitar. My goal is to play three songs in the next 90 days. What are the top three high-impact areas I should focus on? Avoid generic advice and explain why these matter. That’s all I said. So the crazy part here is the answer insanely shocked me because it told me to forget all the crazy things like scales and music theory and it just hit mastered these four chords because you can play most songs with these four chords.
[00:09:14] The G, the C, the D and the e. I think there are a couple of musicians, I think all the pop songs that are in, in the last, you know, 50 years are all played. You know, ed Sheeran said that they all play on like. A four, either these or some thumb version of these chords. So lemme tell you why this is insane, right?
[00:09:31] This was exactly what my musician friend told me. So the crazy part is 18 years ago when I got his advice, I sat on my couch with my guitar. I will never forget, and I could barely press down on the strings without it like buzzing and being kind of off-chord. And I will tell you, I finally got it. And then switching the first score from G two C like felt impossible.
[00:09:53] Like I’m not musically talented at all. The my rhythm was like just not there. I couldn’t make it work. The strumming pattern was off and I was tone deaf, so I couldn’t even strum properly. I couldn’t even hear it in myself. And I was like, I really wanna do this. Can I come up with a different way of proposing to my wife?
[00:10:08] And then I started to begin, I began to like second guess my friend’s advice. And so. I’ll tell you what was going through my head that time. I said, so before I quit, I decided to kind of do something unreasonable. I said, you know, what would I decided that I wouldn’t wouldn’t go to bed until I could switch between two chords.
[00:10:26] I was like, there, there has to be a way. If it takes me a few hours, there has to be a way that I’m gonna learn this. So hours later, I, I tell you, I kid you not, my fingers were sore. They were a little tender. They started to blister, bleed a little, but something clicked for me. I was, I was, I literally was able to switch from a G to a C cleanly for the first time without breaking the strum.
[00:10:44] Then I was like, oh, that’s how you switch from a DG to a C. Now I know how to switch from a D to E. And I figured it out. He was like riding a bike. I just figured it out and I was like, this is awesome. And so I clearly, I went to bed that night with fingers that hurt super bad, but I was insanely happy.
[00:10:59] And the next day, those four chords that I had turned into music and turned into a song, and that, what I’m trying to tell you is that is the 80% in action. So my point to you here is in the second shortcut is ask AI to only lay out a plan for you based on the 20% that matters. So you just want the 80/20 rule.
[00:11:16] Just say, don’t show me anything else. Just show me the 20% that matters. And just keep cuing it down, culling it down, cuing it down because it takes so many people years, it’ll take you like, you know, reading three to four books and watching 10 to 12 videos to finally get the 20%, which you won’t even know is a 20%.
[00:11:33] And. The top 20%. So now if you just ask ai, it’ll give you the top 20%, which is exactly what you wanna know. So that is shortcut number two. Alright, here’s shortcut number three for learning much faster, and I call this the learning dogma. I came up with this kind of framework for myself and it really helped me.
[00:11:48] So let me explain it to you so I. I realized that if I didn’t write down things, what, whatever I had learned, I didn’t remember it for very long, and I, I kid you not, I felt really dumb. If I read a book, unless I highlighted half the book, I would forget everything in a week. So I had to kinda like, fix this thing, fix this issue, because I was spending all this time learning.
[00:12:06] And I couldn’t really like, retain much. And if you learn stuff and you can’t retain anything now, like I’ve read hundreds of books, I can’t retain much and which, or I can’t. Retention is not the answer. Recall is the answer. So I was like, alright. So I realized that I was solving for recall. So I made this rule that I wrote down, which I called the learning dogma.
[00:12:24] And I said, Hey, when you listen to something, you get to learn it. Once, when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. That’s a Jim Kwik Court, by the way. But when you document something, you get to learn it forever. Okay, so. So, by the way, when I say document, I don’t mean you write and memorize this thing.
[00:12:41] That’s not what I’m saying. I specifically mean kind of building a framework for it. So it’s easy to think about it and think about the complexity around it. So I’ll give you an example. So a few years ago I sat down and I kind of like mapped out my entire approach, lead generation because I was doing a.
[00:12:56] Like a q and at a conference. So after putting I don’t know, I had like a hundred-plus ideas. After putting all my ideas in the whiteboard, I decided that I would just map them into the categories and then I realized they all fell into four buckets. Bucket number one was organic, where you make content or you use media in some way.
[00:13:11] That is a one to many bucket number twos paid where you run ads or you paid to. You know, distribution bucket number three is partnerships. You recruit others to promote you, like affiliates or your clients or your sphere of influence or what have you. And number four, you do activities, which is you do things like door-knock and cold call, et cetera, or you go do something.
[00:13:29] So I realized that there’s only four ways to actually get somebody to raise their hand and generate and generate leads. So it’s like, well, if these are the only four ways, that’s good. So now I know this, these four ways are in a framework for me. So now when someone asks me about lead generation, I just kind of go through the four ways in my.
[00:13:44] Mine mentally is part of the conversation because I’m not gonna be able to run with the 112 ideas I put on, put on a whiteboard, right? And. I will tell you that I’ve learned that when you have a framework, what is, what is the framework? It is just a, it is just a well-defined container of your thoughts.
[00:14:00] It allows you to think through and filter. It’s a diagnostic in a lot of ways, or it’s a filter and it’s almost like you’re, you’re putting a filter on something so that you can think through it more clearly. And the nice part about a framework, you can shove a lot of complexity into the framework. Like I told you, there were only four buckets of lead generation.
[00:14:16] It was organic, paid partnerships and activities. But in all of those, I could shove a lot of. Ways of doing those things. And if they tell me, well, I can’t do any organic ’cause I’m bad with content, I just shut that piece down and I can instantly go to paid. If these days they can’t do paid, then I can instantly go to activities.
[00:14:31] Right? So now it gives me a lot more of a way, a lot more thoughtful way to actually answer the question without just saying, oh gosh, I need a new marketing hack. Like nobody needs a new marketing hack. You just have to figure something out that you can actually do. And the thing that you can actually do is entirely based on what you’re already good at doing.
[00:14:47] So that’s why I have a framework. So make a framework to kind of supercharge your recall, because if you can’t recall the things that you’ve learned, then why are you learning the things, right? So. Those are the three big ideas, the three shortcuts of learning the anything super fast. Shortcut number one is the magic DN script.
[00:15:02] Just tell people that you want paid consulting. Shortcut number two is the 80/20 rule with AI. Just ask AI to give you the top most 20% of the thing that is most valuable that you need to know right now. And you don’t need to know anything else and just tell them, Hey, I have 20 minutes to learn this topic.
[00:15:14] I want you to make me an expert. What are the, what are, you know, what would you teach me? And the third is, you know, learning dogma. So when you. Listen to something, you get to learn it once. When you teach something, you get to learn it twice. But when you document something and you make it a framework, you get to learn it forever.
[00:15:27] And the reason I wanna share this with you is in a world of where there are no shortcuts, if you can find a shortcut. Some pretty cool things start to happen. So this is how to learn any skill 10 times faster. And if you like this, can you screenshot this and post it on social and tag me that way I know you like this and I can make more like this for you.
[00:15:44] So screenshot this, tag me, and I can make more like this for you.
[00:15:55] Hey, this is Sharran. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I’ve got a chance to build $2 billion companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you’ll love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It’s on my Substack, called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three-peat and build the next billion. So everything’s free at mynextbillion.com. Please check it out at mynextbillion.com.