How Small Daily Actions Lead To Massive Results

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 episode. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, you'll definitely love getting my inspirational text messages directly to your phone for those of you that live in the United States or Canada. So text me right now, 1-512-580-9305. Once again, 512-580-9305. Today, I'm going to talk to you about the secret to mastery. And the thing that I love about being a human is that we can master ourselves and we can become a master at pretty much anything that we want to become a master at.

0:49And I actually have, I only have two tattoos. And the second one that I got is right here on my wrist for those of you guys that are looking on YouTube. And it is a Roman numeral for 10 ,000. And it is a X with a line above it. And the reason why I have that is because I love the idea of the 10 ,000 hour rule. which is if you put 10 ,000 hours of deliberate practice, which I'll explain what deliberate practice is today. If you put 10 ,000 hours into deliberate practice of a skill or something that you want to get better at, you can master anything that you want to. And I think that is an amazing part about being a human is that we can master anything that we want.

1:27And I have this tattoo to remind myself that I am on this path of self-mastery, which I believe is probably more than 10 ,000 hours. It's probably to the day I die. You know, and it's often believed that the path of mastery involves extreme amounts of effort and countless hours of labor, and it's got to be hard. And there's definitely some truth to that, but there's also a whole lot of truth in slow and steady wins the race. So what we're going to talk about today is something that I like to call the 30-30 rule. And this principle is basically the idea of committing 30 minutes a day, that's it, to something that you want to get better at.

2:05A desired skill, a habit, whatever it is, 30 minutes a day for 30 consecutive days. It's not that much. And if it's important to you, you'll figure out how to make it happen. Anybody can find 30 minutes per day. Stop saying that you don't have enough time. You know, if something is important to you, you will find a way to get it done. And the part that you have to understand about life is that you will never get more than 24 hours in a day. You understand that. You know that. And you can either find excuses as to why you don't have enough time to do it, or you can say, no matter what, I'm going to find a way.

2:41And the people who don't make excuses, and I used to be a person who was an expert at making excuses, but the people who sit there and say, I'm going to find a way, are the ones that always succeed in life. And so you can either sit around and you can give yourself excuses as to why you don't have enough time, because you've got a full-time job, because you have children, because you have this and this and this going on. Or you can find a way to carve out 30 minutes of time in your schedule every single day to improve yourself at something that you want to improve at. And so you can either find a way or you can find at the end of your life that you have regret.

3:14So which one do you want? But over the course of these 30 days, if you do the math, 30 days, 30 minutes, that's 900 minutes. that you will be spending in your desired skill set, craft, habit that you're trying to create, 900 minutes over the course of a month. That's 15 hours over the course of a month that you're dedicating into improving yourself at something that you want to improve at. And you have to understand, you have to really get the value of consistent practice every single day. Consistency is really critical for improving yourself and improving your progress. And according to the British Journal of General Practice, habit formation typically occurs when an action is performed regularly and on a consistent basis.

4:03And so if you want to turn something into a habit, you have to do it consistently. Consistency is really, really critical when you're trying to improve at something. And according to the British Journal of General Practice, habit formation typically occurs when an action is performed regularly and very consistent. Whenever you do something over and over and over again, it is triggering to your brain, hey, this is something that we should turn into a habit. And it actually makes you way better at it. And it's kind of like, you know, like I used to play guitar a lot. I started when I was 15 years old.

4:39And it's really interesting how when you play over and over and over and over and over again, your brain can kind of turn off. And there's a lot of times where I'll pick up a guitar and try to play a song I haven't played in a while and I like struggle at it. But if I sit there and I'm like, okay, I'm not even going to look at the fretboard. I'm just going to look off into the distance or close my eyes. It's like it's embedded into my brain and my fingers can start to play it if I don't think about it. So imagine if you wanted to master something and you didn't have to think about it. Well, that's what you're trying to get to when you have consistent daily practice with something every day.

5:13And it's this consistent repetition that leads to basically this automated response pattern in your brain, which is what you want when you're forming your habits and when you're forming your skills. And you have to understand the more neurons in your brain that fire together, the more that they're going to wire together. And so there's a phrase in neurology, which is neurons that fire together, wire together. Fire together means that they're starting to connect and start to use neurons together that have never been used before, wired together means you're actually starting to hardwire them. And the more you do it, the more it becomes hardwired.

5:48And so what you have to understand is there's a part of your brain inside of your neurons and neurotransmitters that's called the myelin. And myelin is basically, if you think of like when you plug something into a wall and you plug a cord into a wall, there's rubber on the outside of it. On the inside of it is typically a copper wire. And the rubber that's on the outside of the actual cord itself, what it does is it allows the copper wire to send a signal more efficiently. And so the more that you do something over and over and over again, your brain creates more myelin, which is basically like that rubber that's on the outside of the copper wire, which allows your brain, the more that you do it over and over and over and over again, the stronger that the myelin gets, and the more that you actually have, you send the signal in your brain more efficiently and easier for you to actually send.

6:44When you look at someone that has like a neurodegenerative disease, usually that actually starts to attack the myelin in their brain, which is why the signal doesn't get sent as easily. And so when you take 30 minutes every single day and you start to try to wire this into your head, these 30 minutes prime your brain for a new habit. They prime it for a new skill set. And we will be right back. And now, back to the show. Now, what about you people that are overachievers? Because I know there's a lot of overachievers in here. So you're like, okay, well, if Rob says to do 30 minutes, I'm going to do two hours every single day.

7:21Okay, well, in this 30 by 30, I know that you want to do more. And while you might think like an hour a day or two hours a day might seem more beneficial, you know, you're basically doubling or quadrupling, it doesn't necessarily double the results. So if you go from 30 minutes to an hour, it doesn't necessarily double the results. And there's the law of diminishing returns that happens where you're going to get to a point where you're doing more than you need to, and it's not really necessarily hardwiring your brain. The efficiency of learning decreases as the length of a single practice session increases.

7:57And so with a 30 minute time slot, you're more likely to stay focused because you know you only have 30 minutes versus an hour. You might be on your phone a little bit more. You might be thinking about something, might run to the bathroom. And so when you have a 30 minute time session, like it's like, let's get it done. Let's stay focused. Let's absorb the information more effectively. And I want to make this 30 minutes as potent as possible. Sometimes it's easier to work hard for 30 minutes than it is to try to do it for an hour and to extend it. And so when you look at the actual science of skill acquisition, to appreciate why the 30 minutes for 30 day strategy works, it's important to understand how the science of skill acquisition works.

8:41When you learn something new, basically what you're doing is you're creating new neural pathways in your brain. and these pathways, as I told you, strengthen with repetition, which enhances your skill in whatever it is you're trying to learn. So what you want to focus on is something that's called deliberate practice. And so if you're trying to learn the guitar, you're not going to sit down and play the exact same song every single day. You want to find a song that is a little bit outside of your comfort zone and you want to fail about 15 % of the time. When you're 15, 85 % of the time, you're getting the song down, you're doing well, 15 % of the time you're like, I can't get this down.

9:20My fingers don't move this way for this chord. I can't get this solo down. And so the reason why is because you're doing a little bit outside of your comfort zone every single day. And Harvard Business Review says that deliberate practice involves focused, consistent effort that is aimed at improving performance in a specific task. And it's just a little bit out of your comfort zone. So maybe you sit down and you're like, okay, you know, when I listen to this solo, I know I can't play that yet. I can get close, but I'm going to probably fail a little bit. That's what you want. When you fail at something, your brain actually becomes more focused on whatever it is that you're trying to get better at.

10:00And so the failing at 15 % of the time is really, really important. That's what deliberate practice is. Not just sitting down and playing the exact same thing every single day, playing something that's a little bit outside of your comfort zone. And so that's why this 30 by 30 strategy fits really perfectly. And the other reason why 30 by 30 works so well is because there's something that's called the spacing effect. And so there's a psychological principle that suggests that learning is more effective when you spread it out over time versus trying to get it all at once. And this is why daily practice is important.

10:32So practice daily is where your brain fires together and then you go to sleep and sleep is where your brain wires together. And so the way that you want to think about it is practice is where the change in your brain initiates, but your brain doesn't actually change until you have rest, which is when you sleep. There's a really interesting thing that your brain does is you can go here and you can, if we keep going down this road of talking about playing the guitar, right? You're trying to get better, trying to get better guitar, trying to get better guitar, trying to get better guitar. and you work at it, work at it, work at it, and then you go to sleep, your brain will replay that session 60 times more than you did yourself, faster than you did yourself.

11:19Your brain will just repeat it over and over and over and over and over again. And that's when the actual change in your brain occurs. And so it's important to understand that practice is where your brain fires together, but the sleep is where it wires together and your brain actually changes. So when you dedicate 30 minutes a day and then you give yourself time to rest, you give that brain that you have time to consolidate and organize all of that information, which allows you to create new neural pathways and to actually solidify those neural pathways. And so when you look at it, the 30 by 30 principle really leverages all of these concepts that I'm giving you.

11:58And it's just little tiny micro progress is what you want to think. You know, each 30-minute session is just a tiny little step towards the bigger goal that you're working at. The point, though, is you have to understand you will not see massive improvements from one session to another most of the time. Maybe you'll see one from one day to another, but not every single day. But over 30 days, it's very substantial how much you'll start to improve. The longer the time frame is, the better you're actually going to get. So if you do every single day for a month, you're going to get better. If you do every single day for six months, a year, you're going to be a different person with a completely different skill set.

12:39And so some days you won't feel like you got much better, but you got a little bit better. And you know, it's like working out. You don't go to the gym one time and you lose all of the weight or gain all of the muscle that you wanted from one session. But over one, two, three months, you'll start to see a huge difference. And so how does this work? When you look at it, The 30 by 30 principle, it's very simple. It's extremely simple, which is what I like about it. I like to make things as simple as possible. You figure out what it is that you want to get good at first and be very, very explicit about what your goals are.

13:10So write down your goals. What's the end result? What are you trying to do every single day to get better? Where do you want to be in 30 days? And so some things that you guys could try to improve at. Maybe you want to learn a new language. Spend 30 minutes a day trying to get better at a new language. Maybe you want to improve your fitness. And so maybe you want to lose weight. Maybe you want to gain weight. Get very clear on what it is you're trying to do. I want to lose five pounds, right? Maybe it's that you want to get better at writing. And maybe it's you want to get better at playing a musical instrument, like I said.

13:39Maybe it's programming and becoming better at computer programming. Maybe it's cooking. You want to spend 30 minutes a day getting better at cooking. Maybe it's reading and actually getting more knowledge into your brain. Maybe that you're very anxious or very stressed often. And so you want to get better at mindfulness and you do meditation every day for 30 days. And you try to calm your nervous system. Maybe you've been wanting to learn how to draw for a really long time. And so you're going to take 30 minutes a day to learn how to draw. And maybe you go onto YouTube and you say, oh, how do you get better at drawing a nose?

14:10How do you get better at drawing an eye? And you just focus on that. Maybe it's public speaking you want to get better at. Then you practice public speaking. And maybe you do some research on how to get better at public speaking. and then you just literally speak to a fake audience inside of your house in your living room. Maybe it's photography. Maybe it's painting that you want to get better at. Maybe it's dancing. Maybe it's gardening. Maybe it's improving your memory, enhancing your financial literacy and starting to learn how to get better at investing or get better at savings. Whatever it is, you figure out exactly what it is that you want to get better at and then you take 30-minute slots and put it in your schedule.

14:47Put it in your schedule to make sure that that time is free from distractions, from interruptions, and consider it an appointment with your future self that you cannot afford to miss. Don't give up on yourself. And then what you do is just write a sentence at the end of every single 30-minute session and just say, this is what I worked on and this is what I improved at. Tomorrow I want to work on this. And you're just tracking yourself. And tracking, the reason why is because tracking your progress is actually proven to increase your motivation and reinforce that habit, which makes sure that you're going to show up tomorrow.

15:22That's what you want, right? And then lastly, the thing I want you to understand is you have to be patient. Progress, it doesn't always feel very linear. And so it might be days where the improvement, like it just feels like you showed up and you got punched in the face the entire time. You screwed it up, you screwed it up, you screwed it up. but more than anything else you have to trust the process stay the course the the power of this 30 by 30 principle is that it's so simple 30 by 30 means 900 minutes a month which means 10 ,950 minutes a year it's 7.6 full days imagine where you could be in one year from today if you took seven and a half days of just mastering a skill and getting better and better and better.

16:09If you do that, you'll notice in a year from today, you'll be massively different. And so I want you to take the 30 by 30, figure out what you want to get better at, put it in your schedule and start taking action at it. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on your Instagram stories. Tag me at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And also, if you love this podcast, please do me a massive favor. or give us a rating and review, however you listen to us. The reason why is because those platforms, the more positive ratings or reviews you get, the more that those platforms show this podcast to people who have never listened to it before, which allows us to impact more lives, which would be you paying it forward.

16:45So if you would do that, I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way, leave you every single episode. Make it your mission, make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.