If asked, most successful people will tell you a story about how they became successful, but unfortunately it won’t often be true. It will just be what they wished was true, like they worked hard, or were courageous, or broke the rules in some dashing way.

In this video series (3 parts), we’ll break down the proven strategies and tactics of success that don’t require any starting advantage and actually align with scientific studies on what makes people successful.

This first video covers these strategies:

1. Meta learning
|2. Focus on your strengths
3. Be lazy (efficient)

Dan’s Top Resources

The Naked Truth: Using Shameless Honesty to Enhance Your Confidence, Connections and Integrity

Get Dan Munro’s latest book to learn how to build your integrity and truly be yourself without fear.

The 3X Confidence and Authenticity Masterclass Program [Udemy course]

A complete in-depth guide on how to build your confidence by being authentic and living with integrity, following Dan Munro’s secret 3X Confidence formula.

Overcome Your Fear of Rejection… Permanently [Udemy course]

Say goodbye to fear of rejection, approach anxiety, and missing out on opportunities. This quick but thorough course will destroy your limiting beliefs around rejection.

The Legendary Life: Build the Motivation and Confidence to Create an Authentic Lifestyle [book]

Dan’s first book covers a complete blueprint for designing your life in a way that matches your core values, showing you how to overcome fear, set and achieve powerful goals, and build your confidence without needing other people to like you.

Nothing to Lose: Using Curiosity to Destroy Hesitation, Procrastination and Limiting Beliefs [book]

A philosophical examination of the confident mindset, from a scientific and practical viewpoint. This book will help you decode confidence into a set of beliefs and behaviours that you can control.

Full transcript (unedited)

welcome back to the brojo online podcast today we’re going to talk about how to win at everything

i don’t normally talk about how to get outcomes or how to succeed in the kind of external traditional sense because it tends to steer people towards a way of living that actually breaches their integrity and doesn’t bring long-term fulfillment or a sense of satisfaction or meaningfulness it tends to lead people towards superficiality or chasing things they don’t really need or want but if you’ve got your target set properly if the compass is pointing in the right direction then it helps to have certain strategies and tactics to make sure that you achieve the goals you’re trying to achieve more efficiently than not and today i’m going to share some of those tactics so what the [ __ ] do i know about it right what do i know about winning you maybe you’ve never heard of me before i’m not rich and famous and i don’t have all those kind of traditionally you know worshiped forms of success but i’ll tell you what i do know for start i’ve studied the most successful people in the world and i’ve studied them intensely and tried to figure out what they have in common and what the rest of us don’t so to speak but i’ve also got a few things going on i got my degree in psychology at university barely making an effort okay it was easy for me to do and not just because i have some sort of academic advantage or talent genetically but because of the way i did university meant the least amount of work for the best possible outcome within a year of starting dancing for the first time in my life i was winning national tournaments i’ve published three books and two music albums i’m married to the woman of my dreams essentially and i have a child with her and i did that all just by being honest i have my own business that pays for everything that i needed to pay for and i do whatever i want pretty much all the time when i was in uh employee career i was the youngest ever service manager in the department of corrections and i was youngest ever senior advisor in their history and i was kind of head tapped to go to the top role of ceo and all of this while traveling around the world being lazy a lot of the time kind of doing what i want most of the time they might sound like some sort of weird humble brag thing that i’m trying to do but it’s really not what i’m trying to explain is i learned strategies that i applied and they were very effective so what you don’t hear is a lot of the failure before those stories you know there are things i tried to learn that i didn’t learn so i did muay thai kickboxing for two years and really didn’t get much better at fighting you know i’ve tried things that didn’t work for a very long time before i learned these strategies when i share these strategies with you hopefully you can apply them too and there’s really no reason why you can’t there’s nothing special about me i just learned these strategies and applied them and you combine that with integrity and you’re on to a really strong thing one of the first things you’ve got to understand is trying to ask successful people why they’re successful is actually often a dead-end road because they don’t really know why they have a narrative in their head that they want to believe is the reason they’re successful it’s the story they want to tell you but research really shows that that’s not quite true there’s a great book uh outliers by malcolm gladwell that talks about this concept of why people are successful and covers a lot of the areas that successful people aren’t willing to admit like luck and good timing and all these other things that they don’t think were part of it but were actually a huge part of it and most of it a lot of people will tell you what they wish was true that they were grinding hard and that they just worked harder than anybody else uh or that they’re particularly talented or that they’re courageous and they don’t give a [ __ ] what other people think or that there’s some maverick who breaks the rules because that’s what they want to believe what i’m going to share with you on this podcast is what’s more likely to be the reason that they succeeded and how you can copy and paste these strategies into your own life even if you weren’t born with certain advantages or privileges first and foremost i have to point out i think the most important strategy is to carefully define what the word success means to you most people don’t even have a clear definition and the ones who do have an unhelpful definition if your definition of success has got anything to do with gaining certain outcomes or achieving certain one-time goals or being in control of something that isn’t really yours to control then it’s not a good definition of success mostly because all of those things can either be taken away from you or they have a short shelf life of satisfaction for example if your idea of success is to be a millionaire watch how long the glow lasts when you actually become a millionaire it might only be a few days then what now it’s got to be 10 million when do you stop you’re not going to suddenly get to a million and go oh my god my life is now complete that is not how millionaires feel ask any millionaire i’ve asked loads of them how did you feel when you finally got to a million and the answer is usually something along the lines of good for about three days and then i’m back to normal your definition of success and it can be your own it doesn’t have to be the same as mine in fact it should be your own if it’s going to be based in integrity but it needs to be some sort of sustainable way of living something that lasts being a millionaire isn’t a thing that lasts it’s just a status that you hit once and then it’s over usually it’s not actually that big a party getting married is not something that lasts because what if you get divorced what if the person you married turns out to be a psycho what if they die it’s too easy for that to be taken away from you it can’t be something that can be taken away from you oh i’m going to get a six pack and get all ripped you think that’s going to last until you’re like 70 or 80 years old probably not what if you get an injury that prevents weight workout you can’t have success be defined as something that can be taken away from you or something that will not be meaningful for very long but a way of living a way of being call it integrity call it a code of honor call it a disciplined practice if you can develop something like that then you can be successful all the time in any situation no matter what happens so think very carefully about what that word success means to you because if someone else can take it away you’ve got a bad definition so let’s begin first real strategy learning techniques most people simply learn wrong we’re taught how to learn in school particularly in high school and we’re taught a very outdated very ineffective method of learning basically what we’re taught in high school is retain tons of information to be applied many years later remember dates remember codes remember whatever replicate it once in an exam and then use it in your career in 10 years it is such a [ __ ] stupid way to learn i don’t know why anyone thinks this works it clearly doesn’t why do we need university if high school works because you get out of high school you don’t know anything right you have to actually go to school for the first time and even university does this like three-hour lecture with no application it’s a terrible way to learn it’s not how we’re built to learn there are certain strategies of learning that you can apply and you’ll notice yourself accelerate great i first tested this out properly with dancing so when i first got into dancing i was about 30 years old a bit younger maybe i never really danced a step before in my life other than a nightclubs and that was i’m so glad there’s no videos of that but i went and really as a beginner and with no natural talent really i had two left feet i wasn’t particularly better than anyone else going out of it you know there were brazilian guys in there and [ __ ] i’m like you were born to dance [ __ ] i just feel like i’m made out of cardboard it’s ridiculous right but i applied certain strategies one of those strategies is there should be at least seven times more practice than there is information so if you spend an hour in a classroom you should be spending seven hours putting that into practice before you go to your next class multiples of seven so if i go to a dance class i need to do dancing for seven hours after that class practicing what we learned in the class before i go to another class and this is the number one mistake people make is they don’t simply don’t practice enough so that’s what i did in dancing i’d go to a class and then i’d go out on the town two nights a week just dancing three or four hours a night when i got to the next class i had nailed what we learned the last time i’m like okay next i’m ready getting coaches and mentors so rather than trying to learn something on your own or getting sort of inadequate mediocre teaching in a large group environment getting one-to-one from somebody who really is good at it and knows how to pass that knowledge on and will give you feedback on the way you’re doing it again the practice rule still applies but what you’re looking for is someone who can pick apart the stuff that you can’t see point it out to you and help you put it into practice you know whenever i get a one-to-one dance lesson i come out 50 better than i was before and usually we just focus on some tiny microscopic mistake i’m making with my footwork or my frame or something that affects everything you know and only they can see that it’s only as you know as soon as i put my arms around professional dancer they’re like you’re holding me wrong well how the [ __ ] do you know that but they just know right and they can give me feedback that no one else can give me i’ve got plenty more strategies that i can send you so you can always just get in touch with me dan broder.org and i’ll send you a kind of resource i put together of learning strategies but the main thing to keep in mind is you should actually put some time in learning how to learn what’s called meta learning okay learn the principles of learning what is the fastest most efficient way to learn something actually training yourself in that and then applying it to everything in your life speeds up your progress all across the board it is time very well spent and you’ll find as soon as you start doing a few google searches on how to learn effectively and start looking for some of that stuff that’s outside of the box you’ll realize you’ve been doing it wrong your whole life and it’s cost you years and years in progress second strategy pick what you’re naturally good at what a lot of people do in all forms of self-development as they try to fix their weaknesses [ __ ] that exploit your strengths forget about your weaknesses find out what you’re naturally good at or what you generally do better than you do in other areas and over emphasize your effort into that like double down on what you’re excellent at rather than trying to bring everything up to average because if you if you go really hard on what you’re good at your weaknesses won’t matter anymore okay you’ll find ways to compensate for you know like when i first started my business i put so much effort into trying to create a website which is an area i’m very weak in okay everything from design to to internet technology is not my strong suit i’m an artist but i’m not a design artist by any means i i just can’t draw for like you should see my tattoos they’re [ __ ] right but i put so many hours into trying to get my internet marketing and my website game up to some sort of like basic level that all it did was took hours away from my coaching a much better solution which took me way too long to discover was to pay someone who’s good at it to do that [ __ ] well i focused on making videos and putting out podcasts and doing what i do my as soon as i changed my focus away from trying to create a website and into serving people with content my business escalated through the roof i’ve never had to become good at website design even if you look at my videos and stuff they’re not really particularly well edited are they they’re not really high quality in any way and any fancy stuff you see in there probably paid someone else to do but they don’t need to be i don’t need to be good at that stuff if for example you’re an introvert then socialize like an introvert don’t try and force yourself into becoming an extrovert you don’t need to go do quiet thoughtful social things if that’s what you prefer double down on that join clubs and groups and invite people out who are best suited to that rather than trying to squeeze yourself round [ __ ] peg into a square hole or whatever that stupid saying is right just make a list right now of all the things that you’re better at than you’re not all your strengths and you might already have a list in your head or on paper of your weaknesses and ask yourself what would it look like to abandon my effort into fixing my weaknesses and take all that effort and put it in put it into doubling up on my strengths that by far is so much more effective because your weaknesses don’t even need to be fixed [ __ ] them right find a way around them do something you’re good at that compensates for them and you’ll never actually have to deal with them number three be lazy hard working is often touted as noble and virtuous and yet what hard working usually just means is being inefficient it means putting a lot of effort and energy to getting a small result laziness is often [ __ ] on isn’t it it’s often seen as some sort of bad unvirtuous behavior but you know what laziness really is careful selection of what works that’s what laziness is it’s how do i get the most done with the least amount of effort and that is a good [ __ ] question to ask yourself rather than how do i get it all done with strenuous effort how do i get what matters done with the least effort possible how do i save the most amount of time i don’t know why people don’t ask this question more often they just fill their time like a plate at a buffet they can’t stop eating whereas what you really want is an almost empty plate you got to learn how to break the rules whenever you go into a system there’s a better way of doing it than anyone else is doing it and it’s probably a lazier way in tim ferriss’s book four hour work week he talks about how he won the chinese kickboxing championship by learning just how to throw people out of the ring which is an automatic forfeit on their part so he didn’t basically learn any real kickboxing stuff he was just a big white guy in a chinese competition he just threw them all out of the ring they didn’t like it but he won he [ __ ] won after like a year of training right because that’s what a lazy person does like you know what there’s one thing i can do that would win every fight i don’t need to learn all this complicated martial arts [ __ ] i’m just here to win so i’m just going to chuck people out of the ring if they don’t like the rule they should change the rule right so you’ve got to learn how to do things that people are going to think are wrong but actually work better like you might find a way of working at your work where you get more done in two hours that everybody else gets done and ate that’s a good thing that doesn’t make you lazy that makes you efficient they’re the ones who are inefficient one of the kind of best ways to do this is to learn the principles there’s always principles of how things get done and there are ways to make things successful with the least amount of effort for example i’m learning how to play chess at the moment i’m not particularly good but i’m getting better every day at least my ratings going up and what i’ve learned is just to stick to the chess principles you know i found a great blog post where somebody wrote them down you know never let your bishops get blocked always protect the king don’t bring your queen out too early and you know a grand master isn’t going to bother with these because they’re so much more advanced but a beginner like me if i don’t know what to do let’s go to the principles okay what do i do next my bishop’s block oh let’s just get him unblocked because i have no [ __ ] idea what else to do and i’ve found that more often than not that’s actually the best move so rather than trying to learn [ __ ] textbook and textbook and textbooks worth of just mind-numbing information about all the theory of chess i can learn 21 principles and win more than 50 of my games just following those principles that’s laziness