Most people's process for learning is broken. Stuck in this mental masturbation loop of needing to know everything about everything.
Table of Contents
Learn Faster to Scale Your Business
The harsh reality is most entrepreneurs are learning way too slow. You’re consuming endless books, podcasts, and videos, but none of it sticks.
If you want to scale faster, you need to learn faster. The speed at which you acquire and apply knowledge directly impacts your ability to grow wealth, freedom, and fulfillment.
1. Define Your Master Node
Learning 10x faster starts with clarity. You can’t just “learn a skill.” You need to define the exact outcome you’re chasing.
Here’s how to create your master node:
Pick one outcome: Don’t stack multiple goals at once.
Set a deadline: Without urgency, progress drags on.
Attach purpose: Tie it to an emotional reason that matters to you.
Example:
| General Goal | Master Node |
|---|---|
| Learn Spanish | Hold a 30-minute fluent conversation with a native speaker in 90 days |
| Learn to code | Build and sell a working prototype app to 5 customers in 6 months |
📌If you’ve ever struggled to stay consistent, it’s often because you didn’t define the “why.” And without purpose, there’s no power. For more on reclaiming your most valuable resource, check out how to buy back your time.
If there's no purpose, there's no power.
Break Down Subskills
Every master node is built on smaller subskills. The mistake most people make is trying to learn everything all at once.
Here’s how to approach it:
Use AI tools like ChatGPT to identify key subskills.
Prioritize them by importance and sequence.
Learn “just in time,” not “just in case.”
Example: Training for an Ironman. It’s not just swimming, biking, and running. You also need nutrition, hydration, gear, training blocks, and recovery. Start with the highest-leverage skill first.
Learn just in time, not just in case.
3. Install Feedback Loops
Feedback is the fuel that accelerates learning. Most entrepreneurs avoid it because it’s uncomfortable, but that’s a mistake.
How to create fast feedback loops:
Ask for direct feedback from mentors, peers, and team.
Use prompts: “Tell me something unique about me that I don’t realize yet.”
Reflect regularly: Document what worked, what failed, and why.
Model then modify: Don’t reinvent the wheel before mastering the basics.
Pretty much any major retailer has an opportunity for other people to promote or sell their products and get paid cash as a commission.
4. Teach to Lock It In
You don’t truly learn something until you can teach it. Teaching forces you to simplify, find gaps in your understanding, and reframe insights into actionable frameworks.
How to teach effectively:
Summarize subskills in your own words.
Explain it as if to a 5th grader.
Identify missing context, then add stories to make it stick.
Share on social media, write a blog, or record a quick video.
📌 Teaching makes the knowledge transferable. If someone else can grab it and use it, that means you’ve mastered it. When you start teaching, you’re also naturally building the same habits of millionaires that compound results over time.
When you teach, you lock it in.
Commit to Becoming the 10.0 Version of You
Learning faster isn’t just about making more money. It’s about becoming the best version of yourself and sharing what you’ve learned with others.
Every day you should wake up asking two things:
How do I grow into the person I needed most in my toughest season?
How do I pass that knowledge forward to help someone else?
If you live by those two rules, wealth and impact will follow.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the FAST learning framework and why does it make you more successful?
The FAST learning framework focuses on mastering skills faster by defining a clear goal, breaking it into sub-skills, using feedback loops, and teaching others to lock in knowledge. Learning FAST makes you more successful because it compresses the time it takes to achieve results, helping you advance in business, personal growth, and wealth creation much quicker than traditional learning methods.
How can mapping a skill tree improve the way you learn?
Mapping a skill tree improves learning by forcing you to define a specific master goal and then breaking it down into sub-skills that must be learned in sequence. This approach ensures you focus only on the most critical dependencies first, instead of getting overwhelmed by unnecessary information. A skill tree helps learners stay on track, measure progress, and prioritize what actually moves them closer to their outcome.
Why is feedback important when trying to learn faster?
Feedback is important for learning faster because it identifies blind spots, mistakes, and areas of improvement that you cannot see on your own. Without feedback loops from mentors, peers, or AI tools, you risk repeating the same errors and slowing your growth. Implementing feedback allows you to model proven strategies and then modify them to fit your situation, accelerating mastery.
How does teaching a concept help you lock in learning?
Teaching a concept locks in learning because it forces you to simplify, structure, and explain information clearly enough for others to understand. When you can teach a topic to someone else in simple terms, it proves you have internalized the knowledge. This process also reveals gaps in understanding, making it one of the most effective strategies to reinforce learning and ensure long-term retention.
What is the difference between learning just in time versus just in case?
Learning just in time means acquiring knowledge or skills only when they are directly relevant to your immediate goal, while learning just in case leads to information overload without practical application. By learning just in time, you stay focused on the most important skills needed now, reduce wasted effort, and accelerate your path toward achieving your outcomes.
More Resources
Tools Mentioned
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ChatGPT – AI tool used to identify required sub-skills, prioritize them, and generate custom learning plans.
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YouTube – Platform for learning new skills, finding tutorials, and teaching others through video content.
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SevenCTOs – Community and platform for CTOs where Dan Martell first taught his CTO quadrants framework.
Full Transcript
Why Learning FAST Makes You More Successful (just copy me) – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyjOcYcmqQ
Transcript:
(00:00) Most people’s process for learning is broken. Stuck in this mental masturbation loop of needing to know everything about everything. Reading books, watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, and just a few weeks later forget about what they learned in the first place. Now, I know because I used to be that guy, reading books just to tell people I read them without actually learning anything.
(00:20) Today, my life looks completely different. I’ve built and sold three successful software companies, becoming a multi-millionaire at 28. And I attribute most of this success to my ability to learn 10 times faster than anyone else. But here’s the brutal truth. You’re learning way too slow. And I believe most people are on a path to becoming a millionaire, too.
(00:38) The only problem is it’ll take you a 100red years to get there. And if you can learn 10 times faster, you can reduce that 100 years down to 10 or even three. But to do that, you need to learn how to learn. And that’s what I’m going to share with you today. So to learn anything 10 times faster, I do what’s called mapping a skill tree.
(00:55) Starting with defining your master node. You need to define your specific end goal. For example, learning Spanish is way different than having a fluid conversation with a native speaker. Another example would be learning to code versus building a prototype app and pre-elling it to five people. You need to be very specific on what you’re trying to learn.
(01:11) So, here’s how we identify our master node. First, what does success look like? Pick one outcome. Don’t try to do this plus this plus this. Then, when should it happen by? Have a clear deadline. When we give something a deadline, our brain goes to solving the problem with the time frame allocated.
(01:28) If we make it an open-ended option, then it will take the amount of time we’ve given it. And I don’t have all the time in the world, and nor do you. Finally, why it matters to you. Tie it to a feeling. I learned a long time ago, purpose is the most powerful thing you can give a goal. If there’s no purpose, there’s no power.
(01:43) And that’s how you start building your master node. But you can’t learn a skill without breaking it down. That leads us to identifying your subsklls. Here’s a crazy example. Learning to finish an iron man. The first time I ever decided to do an iron man, I didn’t know how to swim. I’d never been on a road bike and I might have ran 5K.
(02:00) If you’ve looked into the distances of an iron man, it is a heck of a lot more than that. And the first time I went to the pool and I tried to swim, I got to the other end 25 m, stopped on the wall, turned around to my friend, and say, “How many more of these we got to do?” He’s like, “A lot.” I had to learn the subs skills so I could dial in the iron man outcome.
(02:17) And I wish it was only biking, swimming, and running. It turned out I needed to learn about nutrition, hydration, training blocks, the whole thing, the gear, the gizmos, the bike maintenance. Trust me, it was way more than just the master node skill of doing well in an Iron Man. The key is to not overwhelm yourself.
(02:34) Learn just in time, not just in case. So, here’s how you identify your subsklls. First off, I like to ask Chad GPT or any AI tool, what skills do I need to reach to achieve that goal? And be specific. And then I sequence them by how important they are to reach that goal in my skill tree as a primary note. For example, building an app, coding, cursor, language, basics, problem solving.
(03:00) These are all things that could come up, but I got to focus on what’s the most important dependency first, then go to the second one, and then the third one, and then the fourth one. The cool thing is I can just ask AI to prioritize them and then give me a learning plan to learn them. So on an Iron Man, learning to swim is more important than learning to bike.
(03:15) Why? You can’t win the race in the swim, but you can definitely lose the race by not getting out of the water. Now, all this learning without the next step is just noise. That leads us to installing feedback loops. See, most people don’t even ask for feedback because they don’t want to know.
(03:30) They don’t want to hear negative things from their mentors, their group chats, their peers. But it could make you 10 times faster if somebody else told you where your blind spots were. I remember the other day I saw Toby, the founder of Shopify. He tweeted this prompt that I just thought was so genius. and his answer to the prompt, which is very vulnerable, but he wanted to share how powerful it was with everybody that followed him.
(03:51) So, here’s the chat GPT prompt. Tell me something incredibly special or unique you’ve noticed about me, but you think I haven’t realized about myself yet. It doesn’t have to be something positive, and you don’t have to be nice to me. Just be truthful. That question is so powerful, and I’m going to put my answer below in the description so that you can see what it told me because I think it’s just a really powerful thing for you to be motivated to try it out yourself.
(04:14) See, feedback is fuel for progress. Without that feedback, then how are you supposed to reflect? How are you supposed to get better? How are you supposed to figure out what worked and what failed? If you don’t stop to reflect, then you’ll just keep moving forward, making the same mistake over and over again.
(04:29) And technically, that’s insane because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Finally, once you understand what didn’t work, you need to adjust because unimplemented feedback is just wasted potential. The key is you have to model then modify. See, most people think that their situation is so unique and they’re like a magical snowflake and it’s never been done before.
(04:50) And the truth is is most people have been there, done it, and can give you the blueprint if you just ask. Just if you don’t ask, you don’t get the feedback. If you just follow the blueprint, then you can modify once it’s working a little bit. Don’t modify before you model. But if you truly want to force yourself to learn faster, you need this next step.
(05:06) That leads us to teach to lock it in. A long time ago, I was asked by my friend Etien to come speak at seven CTOs, his organization. And before I went into the room to teach, I stopped at a coffee shop and I sat down and I asked myself, “What do I know about managing CTO’s or technical world?” And I wrote down a bunch of ideas and I started designing kind of what I was going to teach.
(05:27) And I looked for patterns. I even noticed that there was these four core areas and they kind of started with the letter T. So then I put them all in these T’s and then I put it into a quadrant. In each one of these things that I was teaching, I had a really powerful story and I ended by asking a question about that quadrant. And then I went and I taught.
(05:43) And when I got off stage, a Chen came to me and he said, “Where did you learn the CTO quadrants?” And I said, “Well, I just sat down and I just designed it at the coffee shop before I showed up.” He’s like, “What? This is amazing. Can I borrow it?” I was like, “Bro, it’s yours.
(05:58) ” The CTO quadrants to this day is one of the most popular YouTube videos on his channel. Why? Because I learned how to teach. And when you teach, you lock it in. See, if you can teach something and the other person can take it like a briefcase, like a handle, and then go and teach it to their team, that means you actually understood it.
(06:15) Most people think they learned something, but until you learn to teach it, you didn’t lock it in. So, here’s how you teach to lock it in. After each subskll, summarize it in your own words. Rewrite it in a way that makes sense to your brain. Then, we need to pretend like you’re explaining it to a fifth grader. And first time is always going to be complicated.
(06:32) You’re going to have acronyms and the truth is you’re going to think it’s simple, but it’s still complicated. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Next, we need to spot the gaps in your understanding and go back to strengthen them so that people when they hear it, it lands for them because you take so much for granted that you understand that makes this make sense that you need to give context and tell stories. The stories are the glue.
(06:53) So, now I’m going to ask you to lock it in. I want you to take the last thing that you feel like you really learned well and we’re going to post it on social media. You’re gonna write a blog post or you’re going to shoot a two-minute video. Whichever one you feel most comfortable with, honestly, whichever one you feel least comfortable with is the one you should do.
(07:08) And teach it to people and really challenge yourself to explain it in a way that anybody can understand it. Because the whole point of all this is, yes, learn 10 times faster so you can pull forward results into your life so you can get richer and have more wealth and have more opportunity and have more relationships and have all this stuff.
(07:24) But I think that true fulfillment comes from doing two things. Number one, becoming the 10.0 0 version of yourself, becoming the person that you needed most in your darkest days, and sharing the process, what you’ve learned along the way with other people, becoming somebody who teaches other folks to get the same results they got.
(07:42) If you do those two things, wake up every day to become better and teach other people how you did that, that’s how you create true fulfillment. Now, if you want to learn the 13 hacks to be 99% more disciplined, click the video and I’ll see you on the other