Chapter 2

Accelerated Proficiency

IF OUR TASK IS TO UNLEASH VAST NEW NUMBERS of entrepreneurs, Accelerated Proficiency is at its heart. It’s an all-purpose concept that goes against long-standing educational and consulting methodology—an entrepreneurial approach. But new, it’s not.

Accelerated Proficiency is what happens whenever the underdog has an acute survival problem and doesn’t have the resources, money, people, time, or technology to figure out the answer—just the emotional will to solve it anyway. For example, Accelerated Proficiency is what has happened throughout history when your peace-loving nation is surprise-attacked by a totalitarian power and you have to turn millions of ordinary citizens into superior pilots, soldiers, submariners, and commandos—not to mention convert whole industries into war production—overnight. It is also the approach that has enabled many entrepreneurial companies to survive against an onslaught by far bigger, richer, longer-established, and seemingly better-equipped competitors—and even to sweep up the pieces after their larger rivals ultimately bite the dust.

Accelerated Proficiency runs on two things: a concentrated set of high-yield principles that launch you and keep you on a winning path, and the emotional mechanics to do it, which we’ll explain in detail in the Emotional Mechanics Crash Course.

Of all the a-ha! moments we experienced when researching the UnStoppables, perhaps the most important was the realization that you can apply Accelerated Proficiency to anything—including our acute national need to mobilize thousands of new, effective entrepreneurs to control our economic future.

WAX ON, WAX OFF

During my research for the book, I re-rented the 1984 movie The Karate Kid to see that legendary scene where the old karate teacher makes the Kid, Daniel, wax his car. It makes a game-changing point about learning anything, entrepreneurship included, in the fastest, most frugal1 way when you’re strapped for time and resources—like the Israelis have been for the past two millennia, for example. You find out quickly that it’s 100 times better to spend two weeks immersed in the essence, get Minimally Functionally Qualified (MFQ), and start doing it for real, than it is to spend two years studying without the essence.

It’s remarkable how many people remember this scene, which is more than 25 years old. Daniel is desperate to learn karate to compete in the local championship against the rich bully, who is also harassing Daniel’s girl. The old Japanese janitor in his apartment building—who happens to be a karate master—promises to teach him. Of course, he only has three weeks!

But when the Kid shows up for practice the next day, there’s no karate lesson. Instead, the old man takes him out back to his car, puts a wax buffer in his hand, and shows him how to make wide, circular motions with the cloth, back and forth. Left hand, right hand. “Wax on, wax off, Daniel-san,” he says. Hours later, he makes him sand the floor and paint the house the same way.

After a couple of days of this, the Kid is flipping out. The teacher tricked him into waxing his car and painting his shed! He’s terrified that he’s going to get murdered on Saturday. He turns to storm out . . .

But then the master shows him, cutting graceful circles in the air with his hands: “See: Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off.” It’s the perfect karate motion. The essence of every kata Daniel needs has been absorbed into muscle memory. He does it without having to think. It’s internalized in a custom-fit way. There would never have been enough time for Daniel to learn 100 karate combinations. But he could learn a few deep principles from which all balance, speed, power, and everything would become aligned.

The Kid gets the trophy. The audience gets a big life principle. We got one of the central tenets of accelerated learning for this book. (Incidentally, you can search “Karate Kid, Wax on, Wax off” and watch the scene on YouTube. It’s still good.)

We discovered later that there’s a hugely successful, real-life entity that actually uses the same principles to train hundreds of thousands of people in self-defense, among other critical skills, in an incredibly short amount of time. It’s the Israeli Army.

THE KRAV MAGA KIDS

In real life, the martial arts are built on exquisite, technique-driven motions that instill an almost mystical power into the practitioner. It takes years of training to get proficient.

That, of course, doesn’t work for the Israelis. Their army has to take teenaged kids of all shapes, sizes, and abilities away from their iPads and turn them into the bulwark of national defense. It doesn’t have big budgets and it doesn’t have years to work with. It has weeks.

So the Israelis found an entrepreneurial solution. They developed Krav Maga: a super-effective self-defense system that teaches hand-to-hand combat to anyone in about a month.

The approach works because it’s not built on a large number of strict techniques and refined motions. Instead, Krav Maga teaches a small number of essential, open principles that the user can apply to a whole variety of situations—for example, always attacking the body’s most vulnerable spots, and using your natural instinctive reactions in a fight. The critical thing is that anyone who learns it can become MFQ in a super-accelerated amount of time. From then on, the rest is only practice.

As the manuals warn you right up front, “Krav Maga is not pretty. It leaves art and beauty at the doorstep. It has no rules except what works to keep you alive against an attacker.” Krav Maga has a very simple focused mission that never varies—disable your attacker just enough so you can escape with your life. Everything grows out of and comes back to the same few principles. But with those in mind, you learn quickly to think on your feet and adjust to the most unexpected variables. It’s exactly what you’ll need in combat—not to mention as an entrepreneur.

The Israeli experience with Krav Maga is representative of the approach they’ve used to solve problems since David with his slingshot went up against Goliath with his huge size and strength advantage and his giant wooden club. Since their beginnings, Israelis have faced existential threats with no resources, no superiority in numbers, no time to waste, and no allies—and won. Their Krav Maga–like approach to surviving and thriving against the odds points directly to a huge principle for us in our own quest to train a high volume of entrepreneurs, including you, in a smart, fast, inexpensive, and effective way.

ACCELERATED PROFICIENCY 101

Accelerated Proficiency is the art and science of getting people to be Minimally Functionally Qualified (MFQ) in a sharply accelerated time frame so they can get in motion, start doing, and effectively teach themselves, rather than talking and observing. It centers on visualizing, remembering, and practicing the essence, which makes it the key for creating learning programs that scale. Accelerated Proficiency provides you with a Skill Set, a Rules Set, and a Power Set. These are what enable you to visualize the whole process, get yourself to do it one time on your own, and repeat it at will.

The Skill Set contains the basic elements that you need to perform the function. The Israelis call these your technicals. In tennis, it would be how to hold the racquet, hit a forehand or backhand, and serve. In sailing, it’s knowing how to pull up the sails, steer with a tiller, and tack.

The Rules Set is a few key heuristics (rules of thumb) to avoid the likeliest hazards and keep you safe enough to come back another day. In sailing, for example, one rule says, “When you’re in trouble, point into the wind.”

The Power Set is the emotional ability to start and complete the whole sequence without your instructor—for instance, untie the boat from the dock, go out to sea, and come back—more than once. It’s the unconscious and conscious belief that “it’s possible for me” that lets you flip the go-switch and leave the dock.

Accelerated Proficiency gives you the MFQ to get you in motion so you can start learning all the unconscious things and develop the expert intuition2 that a seasoned practitioner can’t really articulate to you—the things he does automatically, the things he “just knows.” His intuition is really not magic; he has simply seen so many cases that after a while he sees patterns that others don’t see. He can connect the dots in a flash of insight that others don’t have because his unconscious recognizes the connections. He’s “been there, solved that.” The whole point of Accelerated Proficiency is to get you on the road to this transcendent level of expertise so you can keep on going by yourself, without the help of a teacher.

The Accelerated Proficiency approach to emotional mechanics is handled the same way—starting with understanding and conceptualizing, then physically experiencing the situation to gain a Skill Set, Rules Set, and Power Set. This gives you the tools you need to get started doing just about anything.

Using Accelerated Proficiency principles, we are going to explore the Krav Maga model for entrepreneurship.

THE FOUR STEPS FOR ACCELERATED PROFICIENCY

We’ve named the three components needed to achieve MFQ: a Skill Set, a Rules Set, and a Power Set. Whether you are learning a simple skill or the elements of emotional mechanics, you’ll need to follow a four-step sequence:

THE LAW OF MOTION

There is a fitness rule that says simply “Moving heals, sitting kills.” Our high school physics teachers told us that one of Newton’s three laws of motion is that objects in motion tend to stay in motion; objects at rest stay at rest. A SEAL told me that, in house-to-house combat, moving forward is what keeps you alive.

Getting into motion is how you see where the markets are, where the need is, how the prototypes work, and where the doors will open for you, all of which you can never see from the confines of your comfort zone. Motion presents you with examples, experiences, problems, and solutions, and variations on themes. Motion has been said to cure depression and malaise. It begets momentum. And it introduces you to that all-important factor in business and life: people.

Crucially, forward motion moves you closer to your entrepreneurial vision, and the clearer your vision, the more powerful it is. This is why motion is our first, second, and third law of UnStoppable dynamics. It’s why so much of our doctrine is geared directly toward enabling it. In any aspect of your career, never forget the law of motion.

HOW TO DO ANYTHING THE AP WAY

There are a few unbreakable principles that are always required to give yourself Accelerated Proficiency. Use these and they’ll make you more effective at anything you do.

Legendary coach Vince Lombardi once told his team before a big game: “Gentlemen, today’s football game will be decided by three or four plays. Unfortunately, I don’t know which ones they’ll be, so you’ll have to play them all.”

Accelerated Proficiency rules are like that. It turns out three or four is the universal constant for learning and applying anything—the prime numbers for planning, breaking down problems, team building, and executing—especially in dynamic environments, which is where entrepreneurial ventures always occur. It has to do with the elemental geometry of triangles and squares. Three points define a plane or the support required from a piano stool. Four points determine everything from a table’s legs to the compass quadrant to the four corners of the earth.

You’ll learn hundreds of principles throughout your career. But when you’re planning and running your mission, you’ll default to three or four top-level principles, and these will be the trusted success-makers that you will use to remind yourself, over and over, of what works best.

Likewise, you’ll adopt sets of three or four principles for everyday functions—like positioning your brand, prospecting for leads, or bringing your tugboat into a dock. And that’s all you’ll need. “Three or four, no less no more.” From here on, always be on the lookout for your magic three or four. Some may jump out at you in a big explosion. But don’t overlook the quiet, subtle ones, because they’re often the most profound. Remember—a temperature drop of one degree can change the whole world from rain to snow. Home runs win in the movies. But a bunt base hit that rolls thirty feet up the third-base line is often the winning difference in real life.

So now let’s consider the three master principles of Accelerated Proficiency.

THINK ON YOUR FEET

Being UnStoppable includes the power to think and innovate on your feet under real conditions in real time. That means carry-on wisdom is what you need. Ask any entrepreneur or SEAL, and they’ll tell you that the rules and procedures you can use on the fly are worth 20 times the ones at home in the file. These are the ones you’re going to think in the shower with, brainstorm strategies with, synthesize answers in presentations with, and get out of jams with. UnStoppable lessons are compact and portable—one reason the rule of three or four is essential to thinking on your feet.

The best principles to rely on in times of stress are what we call heuristics—the mental “rules of thumb” that guide all human decision-making. When survival’s on the line, we shift to intuition that is fast and accurate—unconscious intelligence that skips past normal reasoning. We often call this intuition “gut feeling,” but it actually comes from the preset rules-of-thumb we carry around wherever we go. Our brains love heuristics because they get us to the heart of the matter on minimal bandwidth, enabling snap judgments that are usually right.

I’d like to say I invented heuristic learning, but I didn’t. It’s copied from my mother and yours. They used heuristics when they taught us lessons like “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” “Look both ways when you cross the street,” “Practice makes perfect,” and “Honesty is the best policy.”

Rules of thumb expressed in nifty little word packages like these are fastest way to learn and remember. These powerful mini word packages are called Micro-Scripts, and Accelerated Proficiency is full of them.

Before writing this book, I thought Micro-Scripts were mostly for marketers and political campaigns. The greatest advertising taglines are made from them—lines like “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand,” “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” or “A diamond is forever.” Then I noticed that the SEALs and the Israeli Maglan special forces also learn this way—and so do pilots and sailors, doctors and world-champion athletes, whose lives or livelihoods depend upon thinking on their feet.

So we constantly condense big principles into heuristics, then pack them in a Micro-Script. “Teach me a lesson, give me a rule.” That’s the SEAL method of training, soon to be yours.

SIMPLE BEATS COMPLICATED

Peeling back the onion to its core requires us to sacrifice complicating factors that let some people hedge their bets. These factors are the reason that many people who talk about K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) seldom do it. But simple is the express lane to UnStoppable. Simple beats complicated every time.

The Ten Commandments fit on four and a half lines. The Gettysburg Address runs half a page. The greatest ideas expressed throughout human history—the only ones we remember—are invariably simple and generally brief. So if your business plan is complicated, it isn’t a business plan. One of the most legendary venture capitalists from Silicon Valley once said, “The best business plans can fit on the back of a business card.” If your Unique Difference can’t be explained in that little space, you don’t have one yet. If you can’t say what it is in a sentence of two, you can’t say it.

Remember this when you tell your story, whether in the form of a business plan, a mission statement, or a marketing or investment pitch. There is virtually no idea, no process, no vision that simplicity and brevity can’t improve—and never let a bureaucrat, business consultant, or attorney try to tell you otherwise.

DEFINE THE CENTER—AND GO ALL IN

Accelerated Proficiency principles always point to the center of any problem, because the center is the place to go all in. UnStoppables wake up every day on a quest to keep the center of their brand, their performance, their culture, or their status as the customers’ #1 choice locked in the crosshairs. As any pilot on landing approach knows, it takes constant vigilance to stay lined up. UnStoppables win by going all in where it counts. And nothing counts more than the center.

1 Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (New York: Penguin, 2008).

2 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).