A Simple Key To Success: The Power Of Consistency & Daily Action

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another podcast episode. And if you love this podcast and you love the stuff that I teach, you're absolutely 100 % gonna love my new and first book, which is called Level Up, How to Get Focused, Stop Procrastinating, and Upgrade Your Life. If you wanna pre-order it, you can actually go ahead and go to robdial.com slash book. Reason why you wanna pre-order is because with every pre-order, I'm giving a free course, which is called the Get Off Your Ass Masterclass, teaching you how to stop procrastinating and take action.

0:41And you'll be entered into a drawing for a pool of over$25 ,000 cash and prizes. Once again, if you want to enter yourself into all of that and to get the book, all you have to do is go to robdial.com slash book. Today, I'm going to give you a secret to mastery and I'm going to give you a secret to success. And it's often believed when I talk with a lot of people, one of the reasons why they're so hesitant towards working towards the life that they want, towards the success they want, the the happiness they want, the money that they want, the business that they want, all of that stuff is because they think that there's really big strides that have to be taken, like almost insurmountable strides.

1:17And most people think that the path to mastery or success involves really extreme effort, extreme amounts of being out of balance, countless hours of working, blood, sweat, tears, never seeing your family, all of that. And while there is a little bit of truth, like a tiny bit of truth in some of there, there's also a slow, small, steady steps to mastery into success as well. And I'm going to teach you something that I like to call a 30 by 30 strategy. Okay. The 30 by 30 strategy is one of the simplest things that I think I've ever worked through. And the principle really involves committing just 30 minutes a day to a desired skill or a desired habit for 30 consecutive days.

2:05So why is it 30 by 30? It's 30 minutes for 30 days. That's it. It's not much. Like anybody listening to this podcast episode right now can find 30 extra minutes in their day. Whether that means that you have to wake up 30 minutes earlier, go to bed 30 minutes later, or if I'm being honest with you, just get a little bit better with your time management so that you have 30 extra minutes in your day. because I guarantee every single person has 30 minutes in their day somewhere if they just become better at it. And so, you know, with the time management, you come in a little bit better, you find a few extra minutes and over 30 days in 30 minutes, that's 900 minutes that you're working on a skillset or you're working on a habit.

2:46And so that's 15 hours, 15 hours of practice. And so let's begin with talking about why consistency in doing this is really critical in improvement and progress. Because all too often we think, like I said, that success and mastery has to be this big, like whenever you see like success in pictures and drawings, it's always like a guy that's moving a boulder up a hill. And it's like, you don't have to struggle your way to success. You don't have to struggle your way to mastery. How can we make all of this easier on ourself? And according to the British Journal of General Practice, habit formation typically occurs when an action is performed regularly and on a consistent basis in a consistent context.

3:30And so it doesn't have to be like once a week we do this really big thing and that takes a lot of effort and it's so hard. It's like, no, it's just about day in, day out, day in, day out. And these little teeny tiny steps compound into massive results over years. And it's like me, when I first started getting into, you know, wanting to master myself and learn about mindset and all of this, I was 19 years old back in 2006. And I just started reading. I started reading more and I started to try to put it in practice. And I would do a little bit of reading here, a little bit of reading here. I would try to teach what I was learning and work on myself.

4:02And now that I've been doing it for 17 years, it's like the stuff that is like common knowledge to me now, I would have never thought was even possible when it was 17 years ago. And so it's really about like these little steps. It's like the phrase, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It's just like every day is just one little step. It's not some massive strides that need to be taken. It's this consistent repetition that leads to automated response patterns and habit forming and skills in your brain. And the more that you do something, the more it gets hardwired into your brain.

4:38So if you've ever heard the phrase, neurons that fire together, wire together, What the hell does that mean? When they say fire together, your brain sends an electronic signal from one neuron to another one. And what happens is they start to wire together. So the more your neurons in your brain actually start to fire together, if you do it day in, day out, it actually gets stronger. That wiring gets stronger day in, day out because of you actually putting the time in. And these 30 minutes that you put in every single day, prime your brain to new habit formation and skill sets. Now, let me take a step back because I already know this always happens anytime I teach people or any of that stuff.

5:14If you're listening to this, a good amount of you guys are overachievers and you always want to do more. So you're thinking, okay, well, this is cool. Well, I could do 30 minutes. I want three new habits. So I'm going to do 30 minutes of this thing and 30 minutes of this thing and 30 minutes of this thing. It's going to be an hour and a half every single day. Stop. Stop trying to do that. Or you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do an hour every day instead of 30 minutes. Stop. The more that you try to lift, the less likely you are to do it. The more that you put, the more changes, the more things you want to shift up in your life, the more that your brain is actually going to resist it.

5:43And so when you look at 30 minutes, it's just a small little increment and everybody can find a way to make it work. While an hour a day might seem more beneficial to you overachievers out there, doubling the time doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to actually double the results because the law of diminishing returns applies here as well. The efficiency of learning decreases as the length of a single practice session increases.

6:35in as little as 30 to 60 days. So if you're dying to see what it's like to be your own boss, work remotely, and create a business that helps people change their lives and feels fulfilling to you, head over to schoolforonlinecoaches.com right now. That's where you can learn more information about how to grow your business. Once again, it is schoolforonlinecoaches.com. Let me say that again. With the law of diminishing returns, the efficiency of learning decreases as the length of a single practice session increases. So with a 30-minute time slot, you're more likely to stay focused in that 30 minutes because you know you only got 30 minutes.

7:11You're more likely to absorb information effectively in making that practice more potent. So 30 minutes is a perfect time slot, right? And so when you look at and to really start to appreciate why the 30 minutes for 30 days, why that strategy actually works, it's important to understand the science of something called skill acquisition. The science of skill acquisition is when you learn something new, you create new neural pathways in the brain. These pathways strengthen with the repetition, enhancing your skills to whatever that thing is. But what you want to do is use something called deliberate practice.

7:47And so there's a difference between practicing and deliberate practice. So I've been playing guitar since I was 15, so 22 years at this point. I can pick up a guitar and play songs without having to really think about it for some of them. Some ones I've played over and over and over and over and over again. But if I just play the same song for 30 minutes, every single day for 30 days, I'm not going to really get better. What I want to do is I want to focus on deliberate practice. What is deliberate practice? Harvard Business Review says that deliberate practice involves focused, consistent effort aimed at improving performance in a specific task.

8:21And so it's a task or a habit or a skill set that is a little bit out of your comfort zone. and what I've heard Andrew Huberman says with this type of stuff is you want to be at like 85 % success rate, 15 % failure rate. And so it's like, maybe you're, if we just keep using guitars an example, right? Maybe you're wanting to learn a new solo. You don't want to play a solo you've been playing forever. You want to play one that's about 15 % out of your comfort zone. So you can get most of it, but then there's parts of it that are like, shit, this is really, I'm really struggling on this one part.

8:56I need to do it over and over and over and over and over again. And so it's just about 15 % out of your comfort zone. And with the 30 by 30 strategy, it fits into this mold perfectly. Another reason why 30 by 30 works so well is because it has something called the spacing effect. And so the spacing effect is this psychological principle that suggests that learning is more effective when it is spread out over time. So instead of taking like 3.5 hours of trying to learn something, like if you're studying for school, right? Instead of trying to take a three and a half hour block of just trying to learn, it would actually be better for you if you did 30 minutes a day for seven days.

9:35And so with that principle of the spacing effect, you actually learn better when you're, and it's more effective when you're learning is spread out over time into smaller increments. And this further strengthens the case for why daily practice is really good for all of this. Practice is where your brain fires together. Sleep is where your brain wires together. And so when you actually do this, and then you give yourself time to distance yourself, you're working on this scale, whatever it is, this new solo, and then you give yourself time and you come back tomorrow, you got sleep in between there.

10:06And when you sleep, your brain replays what you went over for the day 60 times faster and 60 times more than you did. So that solo is actually being practiced in your brain 60 times if you only did it one time. And so, you know, when you get sleep, once again, practice is where your brain, the neurons are actually going to fire together. The sleep and the rest is where your brain actually wires together. So it's awesome because by dedicating 30 minutes a day, you give your brain time to consolidate all of that information, allowing the new neural pathways to actually solidify. Pretty awesome, isn't it?

10:40And it really comes down to the concept of like micro progress. Each 30-minute session serves as a small step towards a broader goal that you have. And while each step might not seem really significant individually, the compound impact is substantial. And so when you look at it, there's going to be days where you do 30 minutes of practice and you don't feel like you got much better, but you did. And you might feel like you made a whole lot of mistakes. But I've heard many neuropsychologists and neurologists talk about this, is making mistakes is actually the most important thing your brain can do because it actually pays more attention.

11:19Your brain gets more focused after mistakes. And so when you have really bad days of practice or bad days of lifting, or if you're trying to learn a new language and you don't feel like it's getting in there, it's getting in there. And so each day is just a small step in the direction that you're trying to go to. And so how does all of this stuff work? How does that work? Well, getting into the 30 by 30 approach isn't really complex. It's really simple. So let's talk about how you want to do it, right? So you're like, okay, this sounds great. You've sold me on this is a thing that I should do.

11:52Well, how the hell do I do it? Now let's talk about it, right? The first thing is you want to select one, everybody, one specific skill or habit that you want to improve or cultivate in your life. Not 12, not two, not five, one. And what I want you to do is be really explicit about what your goal is so that you can measure your progress. So if you're saying, I want to improve this thing, don't just say, I want to improve this thing, but actually say, what is your specific goal? So maybe it's like, if you're, once again, we go back to guitar. Maybe it's like, I want to be able to play, you know, this song.

12:26I want to be able to play Children of Bodom, you know, six pounder solo, right? That's a really fast solo that you're going to have to play. And it's probably going to put you out of your comfort zone, but then you're going to have to say, okay, what do I need to do in that? Well, it's much faster than I am. and I'm not really sure with the progression of what I need to do. So I need to get really good at measuring my speed. Okay, well, how the hell do I do that? Well, maybe I should actually get a metronome and maybe with that metronome, I can actually start to challenge myself to get faster, right?

12:51And so instead of just saying, I want to learn the solo, it's like, how can you actually get really clear about the goals that you have so that you can measure your progress? You know, because if you go from only be able to do 90 beats per minute up to 120 beats per minute, even if you don't know the song at the end of those 30 days and you can't play that solo, but you go from 90 beats per minute and how fast you're going to 120 beats per minute and your, your, you know, your finger speed and all of that, I would say that's pretty good. You're, you're getting better. And so you've got to be really explicit about what your goals are and what you're trying to do.

13:24And I just decided to make a list of just a bunch of different ideas that you could try to improve at. If you're like, I want to do this, but I don't know what I should try to improve it. Here's a couple of ideas. All right. Take 30 minutes and try to learn a new language every single day. Take one language. If you're like, you know what? I know a little bit of Spanish from the two or three years that I took in high school, but I don't really know how to speak it. What if you just did 30 minutes a day for the next 30 days, 900 minutes, 15 hours total, right? That's going to help you out. What about improving your physical fitness?

13:52It could use improving your physical fitness. You could do writing and actually commit to writing for half an hour every single day. That would be 15 hours of writing. I mean, think about how you'd halfway through your book that you're trying to write. It could be playing a musical instrument and trying to get better at a musical instrument or just starting to learn a musical instrument. It could be computer programming. It could be cooking. It could be reading so that you can get better at getting knowledge into your brain. It could be 30 minutes of meditation or mindfulness. It could be learning to draw.

14:24It could be public speaking. It could be photography. It could be painting, it could be dancing, it could be gardening, it could be improving your memory, it could be enhancing your financial literacy, it could be learning stocks, it could be learning Bitcoin. There's so many different things that as a human, you can get better at. And so what I would recommend is figure out the one thing that's like, really, what I would say is follow your energy. Where do you feel the most energy like being pulled towards this thing? I kind of got this thing I want to learn, like I want to learn about cryptocurrency.

14:54Okay, I feel like that might be something I want to learn. Okay. Spend 30 minutes a day, find the best websites, the best articles, start to read, start to learn about blockchain, start to learn about all of these different things. And by the end of the month, you're way further ahead. And when I say way further ahead, I mean like further ahead than 99.99 % of people on the earth, right? You're already on the path towards being an expert at it if you just keep on going. And so that's the first thing is figure out exactly what it is that you want to get better at and what your goals are around that thing.

15:23Next thing is to look at your schedule and put in your schedule right now the next week. So if today is Sunday for you and you're listening to this, go ahead and put 30 minute blocks in your schedule, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Don't try to find the time the day of or in the moment and be like, well, I got to get 15 minutes here and 15 minutes here. No, like find a 30 minute time slot, put in your schedule, and then just have boundaries around that. Do not let anything distract you, right? You got to make sure that this period is free from distraction and interruptions.

15:56So, you know, make sure if you got kids, make sure they're at school or make sure that they're at a friend's house, whatever it might be. And consider it like an appointment with your future self that you cannot afford to miss. Next thing you want to make sure that you do is keep a record of the daily sessions. So what I would recommend is taking five minutes. Like you don't have to do this, but if you really want to get better, This will make you exponentially better and take you two to three to five minutes, right? Keep a daily record of your sessions. And so you're going to actually track your progress because the tracking of the progress increases your motivation.

16:28It reinforces a habit and it helps you refine your approach based on what's working and what's not working. And so if you sit down and let's say learning that guitar solo is what you're working on and you sit down for two minutes after and you say, man, like I was really struggling here. And you write it down and you think to yourself, well, I did pretty well on this. How can I make sure that I get better at this part? How can I make sure that I do this? What do I need to make sure that I do tomorrow? So therefore, you're not just like Tokyo drifting into tomorrow's session, but you're actually being very intentional by recording all of your daily sessions.

16:58And when I say record, I don't mean like record them on your phone. What I mean is like actually writing them down and saying, you know, how can I get better? What could I do well? What can I improve on? All that stuff. And the last part of it is just remember to be patient. So many people are just so impatient. Progress is not really a linear thing. Like you're not going to be 5 % better every single day. There's some days where you're 4 % better. There's some days where you're 9 % better. There's some days where you're 1 % better. There's some days where you feel like you're 5 % worse, right?

17:25It's not linear, but really what it comes down to is just making sure that you show up every single day. Because if you just show up every single day, you're going to get what you want. And so really what it comes down to and the reason why the 30 by 30 strategy is so powerful because it's so simple. It's so easy. And it compounds. Like little teeny tiny things compound over time. 30 minutes over 30 days is 900 minutes a month. That's 10 ,950 minutes a year. So if you're just really trying to get better at one thing and you stick to that thing, 10 ,950 minutes a year. That's 182 hours per year.

17:59That's 7.6 full days of your life on deliberate practice. You want to talk about exponential growth, exponential improvement? That's how you do it. That's how you master your life, master a habit, master a new skill set. get yourself further than 99.99999 % of people that exist on this earth in that one thing and make yourself into a master. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Please share it on your Instagram stories and tag me in it. Rob Dial Jr. R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. The more people that share this podcast, the more that people are able to find it, the more that this grows and the more that we can impact more people's lives.

18:39So if you would share it, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. Once again, if you want to pre-order my book, you can go to robdial.com book. And with that, I'm going to leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and hope that you have an amazing day.