How I Brainwashed Myself To Be A High Achiever

0:00In high school and in college, I definitely was not naturally gifted. In fact, I had to come up with systems like this on a notebook page just for me to get by. What I didn't realize back then it was that I was building a learning system, one that was transferable across disciplines including business. Now, without ever having read a business book or without ever graduating with a business degree, my new business in just

0:1915 months has done over $13 million. How? Well, it's actually because this learning system has transferred over to an operating system for this eight-figure business. In this video, I want to do something really cool. Side by side, I want to break down how my academic learning system turned into this eight-figure business operating system and how you can start to apply for yourself, too. Here's the truth a lot of you don't know about me. So, you might see the Dean's list, you might see the bachelor's and master's in biomedical engineering simultaneously, but what you don't see is the amount of struggle that I had to overcome just for

0:49me to get by. When I first came into biomedical engineering, I was so intimidated. A lot of my peers were significantly smarter than me and I would have these classes of thermodynamics or computational modeling and I had no idea what the heck I was doing. I was utilizing all these passive learning strategies, I wasn't retaining information very well. Even if I was doing decently on an exam, it wasn't compounding to the next one. So, I felt like I was constantly starting from scratch. And it was this exhaustion, this burnout that made me realize I can't keep doing this. I have to learn a different way. So, my biomedical

1:16engineering degrees have a neuroengineering concentration. So, I was familiar with the space and then I got obsessed with cognitive psychology and trying to understand how human beings learn. And some of you have actually seen me talk about this system on this page. It is to prime and then to have your in-class notes, post-class immediate review, and ultimately a revision. I want to give you the quick version so that we all have context before we head into the business operating system version of it. Before I

1:38walked into any class, I would prime. This basically means that you are contextualizing or getting the big picture understanding because we as human beings, we need linkages. So, we need scaffoldings to build on top of in order for new information to be retained quicker. Then, when I was in class, I wasn't trying to write everything that the professor was saying. Instead, I was actively listening and constantly trying to test myself in real time. Right after I would do an immediate review for about 25 minutes to consolidate the information to ensure that there was stickiness, to ensure that I wasn't actually going to forget it. And then

2:06lastly, after a few days, I would build out a diagram. It was one of the greatest active recall practices I could do because I was contextualizing it not just for it, let's say the class alone, but for the entire curriculum if possible. This really tests your knowledge. If you can see how one piece of information connects to an overarching hierarchy of information, that's when you can really say that you've understood it greatly. So, those are the four steps that I used to survive biomedical engineering. And

2:29here's the part that changed everything. I never stopped using that system. I just stopped calling it studying and it became business. I still feel as though priming is the most important step for me. Even as I try to learn today, anything in business, I will always have pages and pages and pages printed out or on my iPad in order for me to review before I go into any main learning event. Again, for me today, that could be a podcast, it could be a production set, it could be an investment meeting, it could be any one of those, but before it, to have that scaffolding. I need the

2:57big picture. Let's take podcasting as a very specific example of this. So, recently I've decided to initiate this endeavor of mine and it's been a neat challenge because to prepare means that you are doing a lot of work. You're doing a lot of research. You're trying to encapsulate somebody's entire livelihood into a set of pages that you can go ahead and prep for. And so, I I'm always doing this and basically what I do is I will write down everything from their origin to their career, if there was any career changes to that how content or let's say personal branding has influenced it because basically our

3:28podcast is called Creator on Plugs, so I'm trying to actually fit it into the messaging of the podcast and my audience. So, you have all these moving parts and I basically just write it all out and I'll use Claude here. So, I'll go ahead and use Whisper first and I'll just voice dictate everything that comes into mind about this person. So, I'm like already testing my knowledge. And then I go ahead and my podcast producer has her own notes and basically what I'm doing there is an active recall practice where I'm trying to recall the things that I've researched about the person, but I'm also testing it against what my

3:54podcast producer has developed so that I can see where I might have missed out or where my podcast producer might have missed out as well. Then I actually utilize Claude to ask me questions about it. So based on the brief, it'll ask me 10 questions and I'll have to understand it, right? So I'm practicing with that so again that I have a scaffolding, I have an understanding of the person generally before I go into the main learning event. Now for this next step, just like I said in the classroom setting, I'm not trying to write down everything that the professor is saying

4:19because then I'm not actively listening. And then I'm not just trying to also passively agree and not along. I have to test my knowledge while I'm trying to learn it. That's the best way that you can consolidate information. Here's a really good example of this. When I first started business, it was when I was still actually a student and I came out with a $39 product. Now again, I had no context as to how to even build out a landing page. I didn't even know what that meant. I didn't know even how to come up with a good name. I didn't even know how to market it. I didn't even

4:44know how to collect somebody's email. I didn't know any of it. But I knew that there was only so much I could learn by listening to YouTube videos or trying to read some books. I I actually kind of ignored a lot of those steps and I said, "Let me just go out and try." And as I went along, my website crashed. I realized I didn't have the right domain

4:59or the right hosting policies involved. And basically what had happened is that the entire week sucked. I had all this hype and then everything came crashing down. What was crazy was that I for the very first time in my life, I made my first $10,000 and then I lost my first $10,040 or something like that because there was some sort of tax or some sort of thing that was attached once the money refunded back to them as the website got crashed. But this is all to say that I had a level of urgency to go

5:22ahead and develop the new change, right? So then I fixed it. I I worked with Bluehost at that time. I actually transferred over to Shopify. And as it was going ahead and learning all of this stuff, that's when I started to actually understand that concept. Another example of this is now I'm trying to do more in-person events. And in New York City

5:37we did one and I was quite impatient. The team knows this. When I have my mindset to something, I'm like, I just want to make it happen, no matter how much money it costs me. And for me, I want to make an impact in the in-person community too, right? So, I went ahead and was like, let's do it in New York. And yeah, I didn't do so well in terms of pricing or didn't do so well in terms of how to get sponsors or I didn't know about any of it. I just knew that I wanted something that looked really cool and left a really good impression on our

6:01audience. So, I went ahead and did it and I lost $37,000 or something like that. And that's how I'm learning, right? So, I'm learning in real time. Then we hosted an event in London for 1,300 people. So, New York was 300 people. London was sold out, 1,300 people at the Troxy. We actually have the vlog of this if we want to put it up in the corner that you can go ahead and watch. But, we sold that out. But, we would have never learned that if we

6:21didn't go through the New York process. The way that I think about this is that for the main learning event, the more I can closely simulate the actual living experience or in this case, I'm literally doing the living experience, the better I am for it. Something that became a very good practice for me while in college has turned into a very productive habit while being a business owner. And that is the next step. It is called post-class immediate review or in this case, I'm going to call this flushing. Basically, at the very end of the day, I'll have a notebook page filled with all the most important

6:50concepts that I've learned that day. I'm really trying to consolidate the information at that given period of time. So, if there are practice questions that I'm going through, as in, did I really understand what the meeting was about and can I in fact go ahead and maybe build out another diagram so that I can sure that I'm contextualizing that, I certainly will because even if it takes me 25, 35, even an hour long at night, it is worth it because I'll actually retain that information a lot longer so that I'm not wasting time in the future. But, I'm calling it flushing because every other part of that

7:17meeting, let's be honest, I am not going to recall. This is actually quite similar to even my biomedical engineering days because if I was taking eight classes maximum of credits each term, there was no way that I was going to recall every bit of information from my thermodynamics class and then turn around and remember everything from computational modeling and then go into calculus two and then also be able to know how to do linear algebra by and diffy Q and be like, I know every little bit of detail. There's just no way. You have to flush things that aren't of your primary focus and that's okay. And so,

7:43go ahead and delegate that to again a repository second brain and really keep the main thing the main thing. Then finally, we have the revision staff. This is my favorite, probably the most fun and actually a lot of the team has started to integrate this into their own workflow. A really good example of this to show you what I mean is my newest storytelling content challenge. And so, this is my very very very big weighted launch that's happening quite soon. But basically, while I was in France, I met

8:07a lot of my followers.

8:13Are you guys creators, too? Yes. Oh, you're kidding. Oh, that's incredible. And one of them recommended that I start a storytelling content challenge to make a lot of my teachings more accessible because the VIP coaching that we have done has been mostly focused on offerings that have been $3,000 and up and this would be significantly more affordable at a few hundred dollars. And so, they thought, all right, can you just do it in this way where people can learn it along idea where they'll do it themselves, but it's a challenge format. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, it's a phenomenal idea." What was a vacation turned into a new

8:43business and also ever since that for last month, I haven't been sleeping and trying to build out the best challenge I can possibly develop. So basically, what you see on this whiteboard is a diagram of that storytelling content challenge. I can't show all of it just yet. I will eventually, but once we finalize everything and we have all of our eyes dotted and our tees crossed, we'll have another video for What's crazy is that that whiteboard with this diagram and also all the steps that I now mentioned before have been responsible for over $13 million and over 35 team members globally all in just 15 months at the

9:16age of 25. I am telling you this because you do not need to be the smartest person in the room. You don't have to be the most experienced. You don't have to be somebody that has an actual gift for it. You just don't. You need a system and that's what I'm really good at developing. Repeatable ones that allow my success to be done over and over

9:33again, but also it can transfer to you. It can make it easy for you to take your next step as well. If this is your first time hearing about the four stage system, you can go ahead and watch this video where I break it all down. And if you want to go ahead and learn how to build a personal brand or business utilizing this operating system, then I'm going to be sharing that every single week on this channel. I love all of you, and I will see all of you at the

9:53top.