title: Become a Self-Improvement Freak description: [AFW M.1.31] Michael's Epiphany #31 published: true date: 2026-06-30T08:08:29.971Z tags: editor: markdown dateCreated: 2021-05-03T03:02:42.478Z
Kaizen¶
Kaizen = the Art of Continuous Self-Improvement
"If you commit to becoming a Self-Improvement Freak then your success is inevitable. Become addicted to constant and never-ending self-improvement. Work harder on yourself than you do your job. Always get better. Be a sponge." -Michael
“If you want to win, you've got to change.” ―Art Williams
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." -Abraham Lincoln
"Formal education will make you a living. Self-Education will make you a fortune." -Jim Rohn
"Don't wish it were easier, wish you were better." -Jim Rohn
“Smart people learn from everything and everyone. Average people learn from their experiences. Stupid people already have all the answers.” ―Socrates
"Take all the training you can get; one good idea is all you need to save yourself years of hard work." -Brian Tracy
"Become a lifelong student of your craft. School is never out for the professional." -Brian Tracy
"Empty the coins of your purse into your mind, and your mind will fill your purse with coins." -Benjamin Franklin
"The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in the field." -Richard Marcinko
In just 3 words, Warren Buffett drops the best career advice ever… "Invest in yourself."
"Everything easy is, once how you know." -Yoda
"We are experts at becoming experts. If I have to know everything there is to know about something by 8 o'clock tomorrow morning, I going to know that." -Christopher Mark Heben, Former Navy Seal Team 8
“Practical knowledge is the ultimate commodity. Evaluate opportunities using one criterion: the greatest possibility for learning.” -Robert Greene
Read Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic lesson DSM 07-11 - THE START-UP OF YOU PDF
Read Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic, September 3 - FIRST, A HARD WINTER TRAINING PDF
Read Steve Siebold's Secrets of the World Class #7 - Know They Are Unaware PDF
Read Steve Siebold's Secrets of the World Class #101 - Personal Development PDF
Read Steve Siebold's Secrets of the World Class #115 - Learning Machines PDF
Read Steve Siebold's Secrets of the World Class #177 - School Is Never Out For The Great Ones PDF
Nick Murray on Self-Improvement¶
“You can always learn by doing, but you can never do by learning.” -Nick Murray
Read Nick's ATY 024 January 24 - Just keep learning PDF
Read Nick's ATY 025 January 25 - The way we learn PDF
Read Nick's ATY 026 January 26 - A business of doing PDF
Read Nick's ATY 337 December 03 - Deliberate Practice. Incremental Mastery PDF
Robert Greene on Self-Improvement¶
Read Robert Green's TDL 01-13 - Master the Small Things PDF
Read Robert Green's TDL 01-25 - Change Yourself from Within, Little by Little PDF
Read Robert Green's TDL 01-27 - The Real Secret PDF
Read Robert Green's TDL 01-30 - Trust the Process PDF
Read Robert Green's TDL 02-04 - Value Learning above Everything Else PDF
Read Robert Green's TDL 02-11 - Enter the Cycle of Accelerated Returns PDF
Self-Improvement Tips¶
Read Nick's Around the Year, September 8 - Find Someone On Whom to Make a Mistake PDF
Read Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic, August 24 - PILLAGE FROM ALL SOURCES PDF
- Professionals Prepare to Win. Middle-class performers have a fondness for winging it. They are always looking for the easy road, yet appear to be confounded by their lack of success. Professionals are perennial planners. They are always charting their course to be certain everything is on track. The masses are professional pleasure seekers and planning doesn't fall into this category. Professionals have learned to delay their gratification as long as necessary in order to breathe life into their goals.
- It takes on average 10,000 hours of practice and 60 months to master this business and begin to "win". Give it time. Be patient with your career, but impatient with your work ethic. From the books The Talent Code and the Outliers.
- Absorb the whole, and break it down in chunks. Then begin your learning with small, incremental improvements, until you've master the whole.
- Gain from others' experience. None of us is as smart as all of us. Mingle and interact with other Advisors. Learn from your peers, and help them. Be a giver and be humble. You never know what you can learn from the "little guy".
- Attend training classes, especially the Monday Kickoff Meetings. The overall, number-one secret of this business is attending training meetings. They are the source of knowledge, inspiration, sharing, supporting, camaraderie and education. Attending meetings will never make you 'win'. But not attending will insure a prolonged, arduous and difficult journey to success.
- Get a lot of experience in the Field.
- Digest the daily training posted on the Home Page of this Wiki.
- The five areas of our business that you should consistently be improving in:
- Business Skills
- Product Knowledge
- Psychology
-
People Skills
-
You must maintain, or even increase, a continuous gap in value between you and your clients / advisors.
Over-Prepare, Then Go With the Flow.¶
“You can't hire someone to practice for you.” -H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” ―Yogi Berra
Read Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic Email, September 14 - Will You be a Fighter or a Fencer? PDF
Resist the temptation to become a self-improvement junkie. Don't do more "self-improving" than "working." You should over prepare in every thing you. Always give your best shot. If you want to be good at something, you have to spend time with it regularly. Whether it's a hobby or profession If you want the best in life, give your best service and work hard for it. However, even with all the preparation several activities will not go as planned, but just go with the flow and have a great time! Over preparation provides a lot of options for success once you begin your journey. Lack of preparation really only leaves one option: failure. As you get into the business of executing your plan and then begin to go with the flow you'll find that your preparation pays off in expected and unexpected ways.
The 3 P's¶
- Practice, Drill, Rehearse.
- Pre-plan, Practice, Perfect, Perform.
- Proper, Planning, Prevents, Poor, Performance.
The Hierarchy of Competence¶
The Hierarchy of Competence is a model, developed by Noel Burch in the 1970s, that attempts to explain the stages we go through as we learn a new skill. All of us go through these same general stages as we're learning, but we'll spend different amounts of time in them depending on a variety of factors: what similar experiences we already have, what learning method we're using, what teachers we have (or don't have), our available resources, etc.
Phase 1) Unconscious Incompetence¶
You don't even know what you don't know.¶
The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.
Action Step 1: Be humble and open to learning. Ego is the enemy.
Phase 2) Conscious Incompetence¶
You are aware that you don't know. Enlightening.¶
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stage.
Action Step 2: Impact. Get the initial data-dump of that which you're trying to master.
Phase 3) Conscious Competence¶
If you pre-plan and think about it you're okay. But you are not a "natural" yet.¶
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.
Action Step 3: Repetition. Say it, write it, hear it over and over again. Perfect practice makes perferct.
Action Step 4: Utilization. Actualy use the thing your learning in the real world, over and over again.
Phase 4) Unconscious Competence¶
You are a "natural". The techniques are yours. You don't need to think about what you are doing it. You just do it.¶
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned.
Action Step 6: Internalize it. Use what you've learned in the real so often that you have internalized it (like drive a car).
Action Step 7: Reinsforcement. Go back and re-learn from the beginning to refine nuances of that you may have missed, and re-learn that which you may have strayed from unconscoulsly over time.
Reading¶
Books¶
- Books have been among the most helpful sources of information, motivation, training and knowledge in my career.
- You should read for at least 30 minutes every day, six days a week.
For a complete list of recommended client and advisor books visit AFW M.13.
Read Nick Murray's Book Reviews of great books. PDF
Read Ryan Holiday's short post on how Ryan Holiday reads hundreds of books a year and takes copious notes on each.
Read Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic lesson Fueling The Habit Bonfire PDF
Read Ryan Holiday's EDUCATION IS FREEDOM PDF
Join our AdvisorFirst Goodread Book Group. It contains many books relevant to our business.
“Authors put years, even decades, of knowledge in a book that you can read in a few hours.” -Michael Thomas
"Reading is work. Important work actually. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
"Pity the man who has a favorite restaurant, but not a favorite author. He’s picked out a favorite place to feed his body, but he doesn’t have a favorite place to feed his mind." -Jim Rohn
"Reading is to mind, as exercise is to the body." -Joseph Addison
"A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition." -Henry Miller
“If it's wisdom you are after, you are going to spend a lot of your time sitting on your ass and reading.” ―Charlie Munger
“In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time. None. Zero.” ―Charlie Munger
"The more that you READ. The more things you KNOW. The more that you LEARN. The more PLACES you’ll go." -Dr. Seuss
"When I get a little money I buy books. If any is left, I buy food and clothes." -Desiderius Erasmus
"People died to give me the right to read. So am I going to dishonor their deaths by not reading? I see it in a broader context than just reading to learn or for entertainment. I feel personally that I have an obligation to honor those people’s deaths; they died so that I could have the opportunity to read." -Coach George Raveling
“Listening to books instead of reading them is like drinking your vegetables instead of eating them.” ―Naval Ravikant
"Five years from now, you’re the same person except for the people you've met and the books you've read." -Coach John Wooden
"The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them." -Mark Twain
"Fewer blogs. More Books" -Nick Murray
"Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a boook." -Jim Rohn
"Some of the greatest minds dedicated their entire lives to a field of study and put their findings in one place… BOOKS." -unkonwn
"Top 5 Rules for Success: 1. Find your passion. 2. Read, read, read. 3. Always be competing. 4. Have a model for success. 5. Don’t care what others think." -Warren Buffett
“Never check the price of a book. Just buy it if you think you’ll read it.” ―Ryan Holiday
“Today: a Reader. Tomorrow: a Leader” ―Margaret Fuller
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” ―Jim Mattis
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.” ―Abraham Lincoln
“So many books, so little time.” ―Frank Vincent Zappa
“The smarter you get, the slower you read.” ―Naval Ravikant
“Reading is more efficient when at rest. Audio is more efficient when in motion.” ―Naval Ravikant
“If you want new ideas, read old books.” ―Naval Ravikant
“The foundation of learning is reading.” ―Naval Ravikant
“As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.” ―Naval Ravikant
“Reading books is so profound because it denies you the ability to speak when confronted with an idea. You must listen. It isn't a conversation. Sometimes it shouldn't be a conversation. Sometimes we should just listen.”
“If you do something like read a lot of books and talk to a lot of people, you can learn almost anything.” ―Elon Musk
Read Steve Siebold's Secrets of the World Class #130 - Seeks The Wisdom Of The Ages PDF
Starting from his early teenage years, Elon Musk would read two books per day in various disciplines. To put that in context, if you read one book a month, Musk would read 60 times as many books as you.
He read across multiple disciplines which made him good at a very specific type of learning that most others aren’t even aware of — learning transfer. Elon's thirst for knowledge allowed him to get exposed to a variety of subjects and take what he learned in one context and applying it to another.
A key to Buffett's extraordinary success is a refreshingly simple habit and "something anyone can do," his longtime friend Bill Gates points out: He reads every day.
Buffett, who spends between five and six hours a day paging through books and newspapers, finds it ""enjoyable to think about business and investment problems.”
"Everybody can read what I read. It is a level playing field.”
Read The Greatest Shortcut for Leaders Is Reading Books PDF
Read 5-Hour Rule Used by Bill Gates Jack Ma and Elon Musk PDF
Read Ryan Holiday - 15 Books that will change your life that noo ne has heard of PDF
Mastery by Robert Greene BOOK Mastery synthesizes the years of research Robert Greene conducted while writing the international bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, and The 33 Strategies of War, and demonstrates that the ultimate form of power is mastery itself.
Articles¶
Read all of Nick Murray's articles PDFs
Read all of Aaron Hemsley articles PDFs Highly recommended by Nick Murray.
Newsletters¶
Nick Murray Interactive newsletter NEWSLETTER
Capital Ideas Insights NEWSLETTER
Bill Cates "Referral Minute" newsletter NEWSLETTER Getting referrals, specifically for financial advisors.
Daily Stoic newsletter NEWSLETTER
Blogs¶
Daily Stoic BLOG
Robert Greene BLOG
Podcasts¶
Capital Ideas Investing Podcast PODCAST
The Elite Advisor Blueprint®: A Podcast for Financial Advisors PODCAST
Main Street Business PODCAST
The Daily Stoic PODCAST
Speak Up Storytelling PODCAST