The Daily Learning Diet

The right diet has the potential to change your life. It can buy an unhealthy man more years on the ticket of life, or cause a spotty teen’s acne to miraculously disappear. But what really is the right diet? To a fruitarian they would tell you that all meat is wrong and fruit and veg is the chosen food, an advocate of the Atkins’s diet would suggest that a low carb high protein and fat diet is the way to go. Everyone has their choice, and rightly so, us humans are individuals and every single one of our bodies reacts in different ways to whatever we put into it. However what if I told you there was a diet which could change your life? A diet where results were noticeable after only a couple of days and there was no need to resist terrible temptations. This diet does not directly affect health but it can change your body, this diet has no relationship to finance but will do wonders for your bank account. This is a diet which the most successful and influential people throughout history have used — in one way or another. This diet is in fact, one of the most important factors throughout all of time. It is The Daily Learning Diet.

Show me one hundred successful people and I could guarantee at least 95 of them followed this diet. The likes of Alexander The Great , Abraham Lincoln, and Socrates indulged in it. Warren Buffet and his partner Charlie Munger are subscribers of this wonderful diet. Bill Gates, Eric Bezos, Richard Branson all titans of industry who have used this diet to achieve their goals. I may seem like I am rambling on, but I want to make it very clear that this is a diet which the most successful people in the world use. Now that you know how powerful this can really be, let’s discuss what The Daily Learning Diet is and how you can use it.

The name is self explanatory, The Daily Learning Diet is when you spend each and everyday learning. This sounds suspiciously simple, and it is! But the results come from how it is used. You may ask yourself ‘If learning everyday could make you a billionaire wouldn’t everyone do it?’ and that is a great question to ask, and to answer it imagine this; You are on a game show where they ask you questions based on different categories and go up in levels from novice to master. The categories are as follows : Health, Wealth, Social Relationships, and Happiness. Now you may get by the first couple of rounds answering the novice questions based on your general knowledge (and your general knowledge might be excellent) but this is not a game show quizzing general knowledge. No this show looks at those four areas in great depth. As you slowly go up the levels you begin to get questions wrong, you simply do not know enough about these areas. You end up losing out on the cash prize because, although your general knowledge got you by the first few levels you were not educated enough specifically on how to win at the higher levels. This is exactly like life is, if you spend your day simply learning random or useless information then you will be unprepared to move up the levels of life and will be stuck at the bottom with all the others who think their general knowledge is enough to get by. Now picture the scenario where you went on the gameshow after using The Daily Learning Diet everyday for a year prior but instead of learning things that were irrelevant you studied the four areas until you could study them no more. The outcome would have been greatly different. So what changed, simply your strategy towards learning.
Let’s look at what a strategy is before we go any further. A strategy is a way to tackle a problem, it is any thing you employ within your means to try and create a solution to any problem or issue you have. If You Have no money then a strategy could be to rob a bank (not a very good one though!) If you are unhappy with your weight then your strategy could be to go to the gym. These are both very broad strategies. Within these strategies you will have much more specific one, such as what exercise and nutrition plan will I follow? How can I rob this bank without triggering the alarm (again, very bad idea)? If I were to ask you something that you were struggling with your life at the moment what would you say? Have a think about it and say it out loud. Have you tried every strategy? If you say yes then name them. Name every strategy and count how many you say. I can almost guarantee you will have missed many out. If you say no then congratulations on being honest, and I have some good news for you. Instead of having to try the hundreds or thousands of strategies for yourself to see what we works we can do something far more efficient and less time consuming. Learn the strategies from those who have succeeded to or past the point we are striving for. And how do we do this you ask? By using the Daily Learning Diet of course.

So now you know what you need to improve, and you know that you must learn strategies from those who are where you want to be but how do you go about doing this? There are a few ways. The first is to read. It is as simple as that. Do you want to find out what makes Sam Walton, The founder of Walmart, different from you, then pick up his book and read it. Do you want to know what the most successful people in the world do on a regular basis then pick up ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and read it! You may be saying to yourself “but the books cost money I do not have”, “if I spent all my time reading books then I would have no time to work”, or the most common (and worst of all) “I don’t want to become book smart it won’t achieve anything”. These all make me think of a great little parable in Jim Rohn’s book ‘7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness’ which goes like this; I say, “John I’ve got this gold mine. I’ve got so much gold. I don’t know what to do with it all. Come on over and dig.” John says, “I don’t have a shovel.” I say, “Well, John, let’s get you one.” He says, “Don’t you know what they want for shovels these days?”. This is exactly what people are like with books. Warren Buffet one of the wealthiest men in the world, a man who keeps $30 Billion Cash, reads for over 8 hours a day. You don’t need to do this a simple 30 minutes will suffice. When buying books do not see it as a normal item, see it as an investment, an investment in your future. The second way of learning is by osmosis, this is simply being in the presence of those who are where you want to be. These are peoples like mentors or coaches who have the results that you want. You will easily pick up their strategies by just being around them and asking them questions, this is crucial and cannot be understated. A third way is by all other means like podcasts and courses. These are just as valuable as the other two but are a bit harder to stay focused and really get the results with. YouTube and Spotify or Apple Music are great resources for any topic you want to master.

Now let’s look at how you want to schedule your Daily Learning Diet. There was a method of learning I missed out above which is simply learning from yourself, this can be done by just going over your day for ten minutes and writing down a couple of sentences and this should be included in everyone’s diet. Like Oprah said “Turn your wounds into wisdom”. So I think everyone’s day should begin with three things. Learning something new , reading something interesting and listening to something motivational. I like to take part in my courses in the morning and read a book which I would deem as a classic. This helps stimulate my brain and allows me to go into the day after already booking a win. After you listen to a inspirational talk while going about your business I then think you should focus on your one goal for around four hours or break it up into slots of four hours throughout the day. You should always have one true goal which I will discuss in another post. Then once you have done that I always like to look into the one area in my life where I am working on improving, this could coincide with your one goal or be something else entirely. After that you are free to spend your day how you would like but at night I would suggest some journaling and then reading a biography before you go to bed. Of course you can adjust it to suit yourself but these are the minimum requirements for a successful Daily Learning Diet:

30 Minutes of reading
10 Minutes of inspiration
3–4 hours working on your goal
20 Minutes of Learning new skills.

This is a diet that can change your life, you may think the 3–4 hours is a bit ludicrous but trust me if you want extraordinary results you need to put in extraordinary efforts. This may seem overwhelming at first, but if you create a plan and work this diet in to your life you will see unbelievable results in all areas. So start today, get a piece of paper out and write down what you want to master, buy the books and find the people, set the time for your personal improvement and do not let anyone else stop you. It still is very simple, it just may require a bit more work than you originally thought to get started. But do not wait anymore. Carpe Diem!

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” — Dr Seuss.
-Stephen