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  • Translator: Oriel Yu Reviewer: Queenie Lee

  • By a show of hands.

  • How many of you believe you could replicate this image of Brad Pitt

  • with just a pencil and piece of paper?

  • Well, I'm going to show you how to do this.

  • And in so doing,

  • I'm going to give you the skill necessary

  • to become a world-class artist.

  • And it shouldn't take more than about 15 seconds.

  • But before I do that,

  • how many of you believe you could replicate this image

  • of a solid gray square?

  • (Laughter)

  • Every one of us.

  • And if you can make one gray square,

  • you can make two, three, nine ...

  • Truth of the matter is,

  • if you could made just one gray square,

  • it'd be very difficult to argue

  • that you couldn't make every gray square necessary

  • to replicate the image in its entirety.

  • And there you have it.

  • I've just given you the skills necessary to become a world-class artist.

  • (Laughter)

  • I know what you're thinking.

  • "That's not real art,

  • certainly wouldn't make me a world-class artist."

  • So let me introduce you to Chuck Close.

  • He's one of the highest-earning artists in the entire world, for decades,

  • he creates his art using this exact technique.

  • You see, what stands between us

  • and achieving even our most ambitious dreams

  • has far less to do with possessing some magical skill or talent,

  • and far more to do with how we approach problems

  • and make decisions to solve them.

  • And because of the continuous and compounding nature

  • of all those millions of decisions

  • that we face on a regular basis,

  • even a marginal improvement in our process

  • can have a huge impact on our end results.

  • And I'll prove this to you

  • by taking a look at the career of Novak Djokovic.

  • Back in 2004,

  • when he first became a professional tennis player,

  • he was ranked 680th in the world.

  • It wasn't until the end of his third year

  • that he jumped up to be ranked third in the world.

  • He went from making 250,000 a year to 5 million a year,

  • in prize money alone,

  • and of course, he did this by winning more matches.

  • In 2011, he became the number one ranked men's tennis player in the world,

  • started earning an average of 14 million a year in prize money alone

  • and winning a dominating 90% of his matches.

  • Now, here's what's really interesting

  • about all of these very impressive statistics.

  • Novak doesn't control any of them.

  • What he does control are all the tiny little decisions

  • that he needs to make correctly along the way

  • in order to move the probability

  • in favor of him achieving these types of results.

  • And we can quantify and track his progress in this area

  • by taking a look at the percentage of points that he wins.

  • Because in tennis

  • the typical point involves one to maybe three decisions,

  • I like to refer to this as his decision success rate.

  • So, back when he was winning about 49% of the matches he was playing,

  • he was winning about 49% of the points he played.

  • Then to jump up, become number three in the world,

  • and actually earn five million dollars a year

  • for swinging a racquet,

  • he had to improve his decision success rate

  • to just 52 percent.

  • Then to become not just number one

  • but maybe one of the greatest players to ever play the game,

  • he had to improve his decision success rate

  • to just 55 percent.

  • And I keep using this word "just."

  • I don't want to imply this is easy to do,

  • clearly, it's not.

  • But the type of marginal improvements that I'm talking about

  • are easily achievable by every single one of us in this room.

  • And I'll show you what I mean.

  • From kindergarten, all the way through to my high school graduation -

  • yes, that's high school graduation for me -

  • (Laughter)

  • every one of my report cards basically said the same thing:

  • Steven is a very bright young boy,

  • if only he would just settle down and focus.

  • What they didn't realize was I wanted that

  • even more than they wanted it for me,

  • I just couldn't.

  • And so, from kindergarten straight through the 2nd year of college,

  • I was a really consistent C, C- student.

  • But then going into my junior year,

  • I'd had enough.

  • I thought I want to make a change.

  • I'm going to make a marginal adjustment,

  • and I'm going to stop being a spectator of my decision-making

  • and start becoming an active participant.

  • And so, that year,

  • instead of pretending, again,

  • that I would suddenly be able to settle down and focus on things

  • for more than five or ten minutes at a time,

  • I decided to assume I wouldn't.

  • And so, if I wanted to achieve the type of outcome that I desire -

  • doing well in school -

  • I was going to actually have to change my approach.

  • And so I made a marginal adjustment.

  • If I would get an assignment, let's say, read five chapters in a book,

  • I wouldn't think of it as five chapters,

  • I wouldn't even think of it as one chapter.

  • I would break it down into these tasks that I could achieve,

  • that would require me to focus for just five or ten minutes at a time.

  • So, maybe three or four paragraphs.

  • That's it.

  • I would do that and when I was done with those five or ten minutes,

  • I would get up.

  • I'd go shoot some hoops, do a little drawing,

  • maybe play video games for a few minutes,

  • and then I come back.

  • Not necessarily to the same assignment,

  • not even necessarily to the same subject,

  • but just to another task that required just five to ten minutes of my attention.

  • From that point forward,

  • all the way through to graduation,

  • I was a straight-A student, Dean's List,

  • President's Honor Roll, every semester.

  • I then went on to one of the top graduate programs in the world

  • for finance and economics.

  • Same approach, same results.

  • So then, I graduate.

  • I start my career and I'm thinking,

  • this worked really well for me.

  • You know, you take these big concepts,

  • these complex ideas, these big assignments,

  • you break them down too much more manageable tasks,

  • and then along the way,

  • you make a marginal improvement to the process

  • that ups the odds of success in your favor.

  • I'm going to try and do this in my career.

  • So I did.

  • I started out as an exotic derivatives trader for credit Swiss.

  • It then led me to be global head of currency option trading

  • for Bank of America,

  • global head of emerging markets for AIG international.

  • It helped me deliver top-tier returns

  • as a global macro hedge fund manager for 12 years

  • and to become founder and CIO of two award-winning hedge funds.

  • So it gets to 2001,

  • and I'm thinking, this whole idea,

  • it worked really well in school,

  • it's been serving me well as a professional,

  • why aren't I applying this in my personal life,

  • like to all those big ambitious goals I have for myself?

  • So one day, I'm walking to work,

  • and at the time my commute

  • was a walk from one end of Hyde Park to the other, in London.

  • It took me about 45 minutes each way,

  • an hour and a half a day, seven and a half hours a week,

  • 30 hours a month, 360 hours a year,

  • when I was awake, aware, basically wasting time,

  • listening to music on my iPod.

  • So on my way home from work that day I stopped at the store.

  • I picked up the first 33 CDs in the Pimsleur German language program,

  • ripped them and put them onto my iPod.

  • But I didn't stop there.

  • Because the truth of the matter is, I'm an undisciplined person.

  • And I knew that at some point,

  • I'd switch away from the language and go back to the music.

  • So I removed that temptation by removing all of the music.

  • That left me with just one option:

  • listen to the language tapes.

  • So ten months later, I'd listened to all 99 CDs

  • in the German language program,