me, Dom Goucher, and him, Pete Williams. >> Pete Williams: I'm back!

>> Dom: He is indeed, he is indeed. Hello, sir. How was this week for you?

>> Pete: It's been fantastic. A lot of really cool stuff going on. Some new things, hopefully

people who are part of the Preneur Community will see in their inbox over the coming weeks,

which is super exciting. All really good stuff happening.

>> Dom: Cool. This week, folks, we've got another great conversation that Pete's had

with an author. This week it's Josh Kaufman, the author of The Personal MBA, and now his

new book is called The First 20 Hours, which is a book about rapid skill acquisition.

And before we get into that conversation - which I as always recommend that you get out your

pencil and paper if you can, or be willing to listen to it again when you get back from

walking the dog - what's been going on with you this week? In fact, the last couple of

weeks, Pete, because you went AWOL. Actually, as I said in last week's show that

I did on my own, you've been spending time focusing on single projects, as we always

recommend, serial versus parallel, so what have you been up to?

>> Pete: Well, definitely been doing a lot of writing for the blog. If you don't regularly

check out PreneurMarketing.com, definitely worth checking out, so that's been a lot of

fun. There's a series on there which was posted earlier this week around e-mail marketing

tools. Now, a lot of people listening probably use

AWeber or MailChimp to manage their business. We did a whole really intensive, I'd say,

audit of all the different platforms available for our businesses (not just Preneur Marketing,

but also the e-com businesses and telco, and everything else we have our fingers in).

We came to the conclusion that for the information marketing-style projects, Preneur Marketing-type

stuff, to go with a self-hosted e-mail service to increase deliverability and control. So

basically wrote this whole series of posts between myself and some of the staff writers

to help everyone go through that jungle of working out what are the different e-mail

services available. Why you would go hosted versus the self-hosted

options. Like the cloud-based AWebers, MailChimps, Infusionsofts of the world, versus something

you can host and manage yourself. So yeah, it's a pretty in-depth series and had some

really good responses from the e-mail. And comments are starting to flow into those

posts as well, so that's been a lot of fun, going through that whole process and writing

that. What other projects are we working on? Some secret stuff I can't really talk about.

A couple of the telco various businesses, we're going through some changes there, which

is exciting. That'll hopefully be announced over the next

few months. Some new websites coming alive for those businesses as well, which is pretty

intense, and just plowing down, working in the trenches a little bit the last week or

so on a few projects. It is always fun when you get to do a deep dive in something for

a while. >> Dom: Yeah, and there's something that we're

going to be talking about real soon that - I'll just say look forward to next week's show,

where we will be talking about a big project. >> Pete: Ah, a new piece of software.

>> Dom: That you've been just getting out the door, haven't you?

>> Pete: A new piece of software, so that'll be a lot of fun. We're working on that. It

hasn't been a lot of my time the last week or so, because that's been using some outsourcers

and some developers to put together a new app. But we'll talk about all that in next

week's show, which I'm super excited to release and talk about.

>> Dom: Cool. Now, just reflect back on the e-mail piece. Pete, as you say, it is incredibly

in-depth, really well-researched, behind-the-scenes look at your thinking and the reasoning behind

your decisions. We have such a wide range of listeners on the show.

I think - the first thing I would say is, don't skip over that, the knowledge about

e-mail or what we call autoresponder systems. Because having regular contact with your customers

is a big thing. And these e-mail autoresponder systems, whatever level that you get involved

with it, is an incredibly powerful tool. In fact, I think, Pete, we should maybe talk

about the principles of it in another show, or maybe it's an opportunity for you to put

another post on the blog, just at a more introductory level, to just explain to people why they

should care. >> Pete: Well, I think we should absolutely

put it into a future edition of the show. Because from our perspective, we use e-mail

in a lot of different areas of the business. But one of the real prime, profit-generating

areas is that transactions-per-period as part of the 7 Levers framework, which I'm sure

is what you were directing this conversation towards.

In our e-commerce, in the Simply Headsets business, one of the e-commerce products we

have, we have an autoresponder sequence that is all about getting clients to come back

and buy from us again. In the very first blog post in the series that we're talking about

here, I took some snippets out of some replies that we got from people.

And those snippets were taken from I think a one-day period or a two-day period of responses

to the autoresponder sequence from people really engaged with the actual series, which

is in turn causing an increase in transactions per period, which is the goal of the Levers

that we talk about in the 7 Levers of Business. >> Dom: Absolutely. That's exactly where I

was going. So yes, I really do think we should pick up on that in another show.

>> Pete: Sounds like a good plan. >> Dom: But in the meantime, folks, if you're

already using e-mail autoresponder systems, then definitely go take a look at that series

of articles. It's a great piece of work that Pete's put together over at PreneurMarketing.com.

So that said, shall we hop into your conversation with Josh?

>> Pete: Absolutely. Let's dive in and learn how to gain skills much faster.

[Pete's conversation with Josh Kaufman starts] >> Pete: Josh, really appreciate you taking

the time to join us today, mate. >> Josh Kaufman: Thanks, great to be here.

>> Pete: It's going to be a lot of fun. So The First 20 Hours, love it. And the thing

that, I guess not surprised me but I found really interesting, is you talk about rapid

skill acquisition and deliberately differentiate that from mastery, which Robert Greene talks

about, who we've had on a show, and Tim Ferriss, to a certain extent, who we had on a show

as well. Do you want to explain that differentiation, set the scene a little bit?

>> Josh: Yeah, so a lot of the books and resources and courses, and everything about skill acquisition

over the past decade or so, has all been really focused on the long game, right? What does

it take to become the best in the world at something?

That whole conversation really started back in 2007, 2008 when Malcolm Gladwell published

Outliers, which very publicly broadcast some research by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida

State University about that topic. What does it take to become the best at something?

So Dr. Ericsson was researching things like if you want to step onto a golf course and

be able to compete with Tiger Woods, what does that process look like? How much are

you going to need to practice to get there? And his answer was this whole idea of the

10,000-hour rule. It takes about 10,000 hours to "master" a

new skill, or become one of the best in the world at whatever it is that you're doing.

And so the skill acquisition and rapid learning books that have come out over the past decade

or so have all really been focused on that mastery aspect or mastery take on the subject.

But I was interested in quite the opposite. What if you're not so concerned about being

the best in the world at something? What if you want to learn something to get a particular

result? So maybe you're learning something for your business, maybe you're curious about

a personal interest or a hobby. You're interested, but you have absolutely no idea where to start.

You don't know where to begin. It's frustrating. It's intimidating. What

does it take to learn something new? So not the really long game of skill acquisition.

What does the first zero-to-20 hours of practice look like, and how can we learn as much as

we possibly can and improve as much as we're capable of in the early hours of skill acquisition?

>> Pete: I think as part of it, too - because those first 20 hours can be quite hard for

a lot of people just to stick through it, keep their bum in their seat, so to speak,

and get through it as well, so having a good plan and process to follow is very helpful,

too, I would imagine. >> Josh: Yeah, it's a double challenge. So

getting started, going from being interested to even putting in your first 10 minutes of

practice, that's a hurdle in and of itself, right? So what does it take to get started

practicing something? Then once you start practicing, those early hours are always frustrating,

for everybody. Because you're horrible and you know you're

horrible. And so what does it take to get started, and what does it take to make sure

when you get started you put in enough practice to see some results from your practice? The

method I talk about in The First 20 Hours is designed to do just that.

It's designed to help you identify something you want to learn, figure out a smart strategy

to get started, and then make sure you practice long enough to see results. In my experience,

you can go from knowing absolutely nothing about what you're doing, to being really demonstrably

good in about 20 hours. >> Pete: Awesome. You mentioned a word there

quite a bit, which I really want to delve into in the conversation, and the word is

"practice." But before we go there, could you give a little bit of a cheat sheet for

people who haven't read the book yet and inspire them to go out and buy it, in terms of some

of these steps that you're talking about? >> Josh: Yeah. So the general method of learning

anything - and when I say anything, I really do mean anything. It could be anything from

a skill that you would use at work to something that you just want to do for the fun of it.

So things that require physical movement, called motor skills, or cognitive skills,

anything that you can practice in a way that can improve, the method applies to.

And the core method for rapid skill acquisition is very straightforward. The first thing is

just decide what you want to do. I call this setting a target performance level. Specify

exactly what it is you want to be able to do when you're done. The common mistake at

this stage is saying, I want to learn golf, or I want to learn how to speak French.

And the problem with those kinds of constructions is they're way too general. They're way too

broad to be very useful. So Step One is decide what exactly do you want to be able to do,

in as specific terms as possible, before you get started. Because the more you specify

it, the easier it is to figure out ways to get there as quickly as possible. So step

one is decide what you want. >> Pete: I think you mentioned the book from

memory, the quote that "a well-defined problem is half-solved." I'm sure I just completely

messed that quote up, but that's the essence of it anyway.

>> Josh: Absolutely. I think that was a Peter Drucker quote. And there's another quote that

I put in there that was by Voltaire, which is, "No problem can withstand the assault

of sustained thinking." So what we're really trying to do in this process is be very clear

what it is exactly we want to be able to do. And then formulate a smart strategy to get

started and practice that thing so you can get there as quickly as possible. After you

decide what you want, the next step is to deconstruct whatever it is that you are practicing

or want to learn into smaller parts. Most skills are just bundles of much smaller

subskills. A good illustration of this is, imagine a game like golf. "Be good at golf"

is not very helpful because it's not very specific. But if you think about it, all golf

is, is really just a collection of much smaller skills that you use in combination.

So, "hitting a ball off the tee with a driver" is very different from "putting the ball in

the hole on the green with a putter," is very different from "chipping out of the bunker."

There's a lot of things that you do in the context of playing golf, but in isolation

they're all very different. So Step Two is break whatever it is that you're doing down

into those small parts, because those are the things you can practice.

>> Pete: Let me ask you this question. I'm going to stop you there, because if we equate

this to business - and I think I say this so often talking to people in our community

who listen to this show and just people in general who are trying to be "entrepreneurs"

and start a business - is that they want to become a businessperson and "master" this

art of business. But they have a problem seeing the forest

from the trees and breaking it down to realizing that the business comes down to things like

traffic generation, conversion, repeat business, maximizing your profits, and the skill required

to do each of those five, six, or seven key elements of business.

They have trouble seeing that forest from the trees. So is there any real easy way to

have that deconstruction happen and work at - in the game of golf it's a bit more clear

that you've got tee off and you've got putting, and all that stuff. Is there a skill around

that? >> Josh: There is. Actually, this is a subject

near and dear to my heart because my first book, The Personal MBA: Master the Art of

Business, does that. Basically, you can treat business as a skill that can be developed.

It's something that you can practice, it's something that you can learn about, it's something

that you can intentionally choose to get better at.

And so the way that I first like to deconstruct business is, figure out exactly what every

single business does on a fundamental level. So instead of imagining a business as something

that you do that brings money into your bank account, let's get very specific about that.

Based on my research, every single business does five things, in roughly the same order.