Speaker A
Most people are not exceptional at anything. Therefore, if you want to be exceptional at something, you've got to do things that no other person is willing to do.
Learn how to become exceptional by studying top performers, breaking down habits, and practicing with deliberate repetition and reflection.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
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Key Takeaways
- Exceptionalism demands more effort and work than average performance.
- Study and model the top 1% to understand what excellence entails.
- Practice deliberately with frequent repetition and thoughtful reflection.
- Incremental improvements by changing one variable at a time accelerate progress.
- Becoming exceptional is a gradual, sustained journey, not a quick fix.
What the video covers
- Becoming exceptional requires doing things others are unwilling to do and putting in more work than anyone else.
- Understand what exceptional looks like by studying the top 1% in your field through 20 detailed examples.
- Analyze each example deeply over time to identify gaps between your current abilities and theirs.
- Build 'bridges' to close these gaps by developing small, repeatable habits that can be practiced 100 times.
- Focus on deliberate practice with reflection after each attempt to learn and improve continuously.
- Change one variable after each repetition to avoid repeating the same mistakes and foster growth.
- Reject the idea that perfection is needed on the first try; instead, embrace trial and error.
- Exceptionalism is a long-term process requiring sustained effort and patience.
- Use your brain as a prediction machine by feeding it detailed models of exceptional performance.
- The speaker shares personal experiences of growth in academics, content creation, and entrepreneurship to illustrate these principles.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: The Challenge of Being Exceptional
- 00:18The Need for Extraordinary Effort
- 00:36Speaker's Background and Credibility
- 00:52Finding and Understanding the Top 1%
- 01:19Studying Exceptional Examples in Depth
- 02:05Long-Term Commitment and Sustained Effort
- 02:49Identifying Gaps and Building Bridges
- 03:38The Power of Small Habits and 100 Reps
- 04:09Deliberate Practice and Learning from Mistakes
- 05:13Conclusion: Embrace Experimentation and Growth
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
So, you might be watching this and thinking that a lot of these methods are very difficult and will require a lot of hard work. That is true. They are very difficult, and they will require a lot of hard work. But, if you want to become
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exceptional, if you want to do things that other people are not able to do, you've got to be able to put in an amount of work that is in excess of what anyone else is willing to do. So, with
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that caveat being said, this is how you become exceptional. For a bit of background, I'm Aaron. I wanted to be a good student, and now I'm a student at Cambridge. I wanted to become a content creator; I grew to a million followers
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in a year. I wanted to start my own company; I'm now in the world's top accelerator Y Combinator doing just that.
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I know how it takes a lot of work to become exceptional in any one field, and I'm not claiming to be exceptional in these fields, but I am claiming to be above average. And these are some of
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the mechanisms that I use that are helping me climb towards that feeling of being exceptional. So, you want to be exceptional, and you want to be in the top 1%. The first thing that you need to do is you need to find the actual top 1%,
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because you've got to go right back to fundamentals and understand that your brain fundamentally is a machine of prediction. And in order for your brain to be producing outcomes that are above average, that are exceptional, it needs to know what exceptional actually looks
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like. So, you need to feed it some material. If you want to become an exceptional speaker or an exceptional writer, you've got to find exceptional speeches and exceptional books. You want to become an exceptional student, find exceptional students. An exceptional
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founder, find exceptional founders. And the first step is so practical, you're going to find 20 examples. 20 examples of what exceptional looks like in your field of interest. Then, what you're going to do with each of these is you're
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going to say, "Okay, what is this example? What makes this exceptional?" And you're going to write two or three sentences. Because fundamentally, you cannot become exceptional if your brain does not have a detailed model of what it means to be exceptional. That is the
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fundamental neuroscience that underpins the way that you learn, the way that you develop, and the way that you can harness the capacity of your brain to do whatever you want to do, to achieve those goals that you're trying to hit.
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Now, you're not going to stop there, because if you just go, "Okay, so this is what exceptional looks like, and this is why." Great, but that's going to serve you for approximately a week. You want to be picking apart every single
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one of these 20 examples. You're going to do one a week. You're going to sit there. You're going to be sat there, and you're going to think, "Oh, 20 examples and one a week, that's going to take forever. No, I'm going to do them
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all in one week." No, you're not. Becoming exceptional is not something that you can rush. It is a long-term process. It requires long-term sustained effort. If you're not willing to put in long-term sustained effort, you're not willing to be exceptional.
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And the reason that you're going to spend a week on each of them is because I genuinely want you to dive in in a lot of depth. Understand the story of the individual. Understand what it is that they are doing here. What is unique?
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Look at other people's interpretations and make your own. And the driving question that you should be thinking about whenever you're going through these is, "What are they doing that I am not doing?" What is the difference between where I am now and where they
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are? And identifying what these sort of stopgaps are, what are these bridges that you need to be building to overcome and to move towards being this sort of exceptional person that you want to become, that is
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that is the key. That
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is the crux of it all. And now that you know what bridges you have to build, you have to think about how am I going to build the bridges? And you can't just conjure a bridge in your head and crane
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it down from the sky somehow. No, think about how a normal bridge is made. A bridge is made through nuts and bolts and engineering and a lot, a lot of different components. So, the rule that I like to put into place is you're going
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to pick small habits. Habits that you can do 100 of. So, you might have heard this sort of idea of if you can do 10,000 hours, you're going to be an incredible person, exceptional at that particular thing.
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And I want to raise to you that you don't need 10,000 hours. You need 100 reps.
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If you want to become a better writer, write 100 essays. If you want to become better at speaking, 100 opportunities of public speaking.
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Anything that you can break down into something that you can do 100 times, you should be doing it 100 times. And you're not going to do it arbitrarily. You're going to record every single one of these attempts. And after every single
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one of these attempts, you're going to think, "What went well? What went badly? What do I want to do next time?" And this stops you thinking that there's ever a be-all and all situation where it has to be perfect that time. No, that's
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never the case. You always get a repeat opportunity. And if you reframe the way that you're looking at this into, "Okay, so what can I learn from attempt number 17 that's going to inform attempt number 22?" then you're building up a much more
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positive mindset around the trial and error that is needed to become exceptional at anything. And the only reason that you would be doing things multiple, multiple times is to not repeat the same mistakes over and over
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again. So, inevitably you're going to repeat certain mistakes a couple of times. That's absolutely fine. But what I want you to be doing is between every single rep, you want to be changing one thing. Change one variable to improve.
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And this beats out any advice you will ever have been given in your life because you don't want to spend loads and loads of time practicing. Practicing is working up to that one eventuality when you're going to do the thing and
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you've got to do it perfectly. That's exactly what I'm telling you not to do. Do the thing as many times as you can do the thing. Run experiments on yourself to become better and better, and that is how you truly become
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exceptional. And if you really do care about using your brain to become exceptional, then make sure you stick around because that is exactly what I post about. So, if you have any questions, let me know in the comments,
Topics:exceptionalself improvementdeliberate practicehabit buildingtop 1 percentpersonal growthlearning strategiesproductivitymindsetgoal setting
