How smart & lazy people can learn things FAST with no effort and surprising results

Heyo 👋 Jordan here,

Confession time:

I’m a lazy dude.

I don’t care for hustling, discipline, or working hard. I’d rather spend that time doing fun stuff. Sometimes that’s learning something I’m excited about.

And other times it’s playing Hogwarts Legacy and looking for forbidden curses.

But playing games and learning for sport all day doesn’t make money.

So, I had to find a way to stay on top of things, learn more than people expect me to, and use that to provide insane value… while being lazy.

Here’s how I did it:

🪄 Learning Magic

8 years ago I saw a clip of Shawn Farquhar and got obsessed over card magic.

It was not mainstream, interesting, and entertaining. The perfect combination.

But it was hard – that meant it required a lot of practice. I struggled with that part. I was hyped about it, so I was spending a few hours per day already, but I wanted to do all the TV magic stuff faster.

That’s when it hit me – I was already watching a ton of anime, so why not combine those?

I did.

Result: after just 2 years, I was already performing moves so hard, that most of the pros didn’t even practice them. But, even better, I learned about this thing called tangential learning.

📖 Learning without actually learning

This is the key secret sauce to this whole thing – learning in such a way that you don’t even realize you’re doing it.

There are two ways to do that:

A] The Straightforward Way: finding something so cool that you can’t stop yourself from exploring.

If you can do that, do that. But you won’t always be able to.

Some stuff, like economics (example coming), is just boring to learn.

B] Tangential Learning: learning one thing while enjoying something else.

Now, if this is enough for you – just go ahead and test it.

But, if I would have struggled to get this from one example 2 years ago, so here are two extra examples:

🧘 Learning Patience

In 2012 I found myself teaching a class of 50 people a class on Programming Basics in C#.

I wasn’t prepared for the number of people that joined. But, more importantly, I wasn’t prepared to teach a big class.

I was too impatient.

This had to go. There’s no way people trust me if I can’t spend 15 minutes explaining the basics.

Fortunately, I was playing Dark Souls back then – a game known to test people’s patience. So, I raised this to the 100th power.

I ran through the entire original game using only daggers.

If you play – you know how incredibly ineffective that was in the first game. If you don’t:

It was hard. It was very, very hard.

I died and tried again 100s of times.

But replaying the same thing 1,000 times taught me patience.

🤑 Learning Economics

Everything I know about economics comes from 2 places:

1. Harvard’s Microeconomics of Competitiveness (great course)

2. Path of Exile

I have a lifelong love for the Action RPG genre of games. A genre currently led by Path of Exile.

One thing that happens in that game is that every 3 months, the game “resets” – everyone starts from scratch and you get to build your character once again.

I do a lot of that by trading.

And trading and competing in a completely new economy is something I practiced time & time again in Path of Exile, but I’ve never had the chance to even experience in real life.

I found that incredibly useful in my business career as most ideas just “clicked” with me while more than a few people struggled to get them.

Hell yeah, for being too lazy to learn the classic way.

Your biggest fan,
Jordan

💡 Idea of the Week

⚙️ Tools, Apps, 'n' Gadgets

Here are today's picks:

• Relight — This tool allows you to shape light like a professional photographer… but the AI does all the work instead.

• Fontshare — Free fonts that are not Google Fonts. I snatched a few of them for my videos.

• Bing — ChatGPT did the impossible… it made me want to use Bing. ChatGPT 4 is coming to Bing and you can sign up for early access (a few people are already in).

🔦 Creator Spotlight

Kasey is compassionate, nice, and knows business better than most of us. She also swears way more than I thought she will. A pretty fun combo to watch in action. Check out her newsletter here:

📰 Last Week with Jordan

I made a tech short. Totally new to me – I was unprepared for the massive amount of work it took me:

Plus a 30-minute/day Twitter strategy for busy people 👇️

That was it for today. Have a great week and I'll see you next Sunday!

— Jordan

PS: Help me out by sharing this with a friend who'll find it useful 🫶