CFD 579 – Learning Is The Only Skill That Matters

December 16th, 2019

Jonathan Levi is an experienced entrepreneur, angel investor, and lifehacker from Silicon Valley. Jonathan is known for speed learning his way to all achievements in life: from entrepreneurship to podcasting and even dating. Since 2014, Jonathan has been one of the top-performing instructors on Udemy, with his course Become a SuperLearner® (now retired) earning him over 60,000 students.

He has since snowballed this success into the launch of his own brand and platform, SuperHuman Academy, which produces such products as the award-winning SuperHuman Academy Podcast (3 million+ downloads) and numerous online courses. He is based in Tel Aviv, Israel, preparing to release his 3rd book “The Only Skill That Matters”

Podcast Highlights

  • Who is Jonathan Levi?

Jonathan grew up in Silicon Valley and was always meant to be an entrepreneur. In many ways he struggled in school because he couldn’t learn the same way that everyone else seemed to do. Deep down, Jonathan is a maker and a creator that is focused on solving problems and learning new things all the time.

Jonathan was always a bright kid but he had problems in the classroom environment. The only way he made it through high school and got through the curriculum was by being medicated. When he got into business school, he knew that medication wasn’t going to cut it. He needed to figure out another way to learn that made sense for him. It was around that time that he found someone who had developed a methodology for speed reading and accelerated learning that completely changed Jonathan’s life and gave him his first real world super power.

After meeting multiple real world super humans, Jonathan learned that anyone can do these incredible things simply by learning the techniques and practicing.

Jonathan is a big believer in the law of attraction, but he’ll be the first to tell you that it only works if you implement the law of action first. There are very few things in life that can’t be accomplished if you put in the work to learn the ropes. Whatever challenge you are facing in life, the difference between excitement and anxiety is knowledge.

For Jonathan, it was a series of individual moments that culminated in his super power. He didn’t plan for online courses to be his business, it just sort of happened after moving to Israel and exploring entrepreneurial opportunities. After discovering a course on coding and seeing how successful it was, Jonathan dug into what it took to create a course and put out his first one on Udemy. Slowly but surely, it developed into a full time business.

  • Learning Is The Only Skill That Matters

Learning is the ultimate meta skill and the only skill that matters. There are proven techniques to improve your ability to learn. There is no genetic advantage that the world’s best learners have over everyone else. Studies have shown that with six weeks of training anyone can rewire their brain to resemble the brain of a memory champion. There are people well into old age who are learning new skills just as efficiently as their younger counterparts.

You don’t have a lousy memory, you just don’t know how to use it right yet.

Our current education system hasn’t been modified for a long time. It hasn’t taken in the new ways of learning that we’ve discovered in recent years. It’s actually theorized that the ancient Greeks used similar techniques of visualization that advanced meta learners use today, but the techniques were suppressed by the early Church.

  • Learning vs Memorization

There is a difference between memorization and learning but we can’t learn anything without committing it to memory. You need to be able to apply your knowledge in order to make use of it, but that’s not possible without memorization first.

Reference: The Only Skill That Matters, Jonathan Levi

  • Jonathan’s Takeaway

Make it simple, if you experience a quick win you will likely want to experience more. In the next 24 hours you are probably going to encounter five to ten new people. Introduce yourself and memorize their name by creating a unique visualization for each one. Before you go to bed, set yourself a reminder to review how many people you remember. If that intrigues you, you are ready to experience something that is exponentially more powerful.

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