A lot of otherwise smart people who understand the importance of improvement place a huge emphasis on learning. They read and read, apparently expecting something to magically click inside of their heads and then they'll become awesome.

I've seen it in guys struggling with the red pill, they read the sidebar and devour content but don't get anywhere with their romantic life. I've seen it in managers, always reading books about leadership and saying the right buzzwords but applying so little of it in their actual work.

What they lack is execution focus. Understanding a concept is by far the smallest part of doing something well. Nobody gives a fuck about book smarts. You can know every single relevant thing about making a perfect golf swing and still suck at making shots. That's obvious to everyone, but as soon as we leave the realm of physical skills many people forget that.

To learn how to do stuff well, you have to practice. And that takes time and effort. You do it, again and again, until you get good. That's how you build skill, and building skill is absolutely essential for being able to execute.

This sounds like a nobrainer, but the reality is that a lot of people will read and read, but never take the time to practice and build skill.

If you read a book or watched a youtube video on something you'd like to be able to do, and you can't do it well yet, then ffs don't move on to the next book or video. Make a plan for how you'll practice, and go practice. Again and again. Stop focusing on learning and instead focus on execution and building the necessary skill.

There's been many studies done on how to develop skill. Some basics I won't touch on further is being motivated, finding joy in what you do and take a break before you begin hating it, and visualizing.

What I'm going to focus on here is having a solid self evaluation loop.

Studies in sports have shown that for most people, their skill development is slow and after just 50 hours it drops to almost zero. The people who not just learn things quickly, but more importantly who continue to progress after they got the basics, all have a strong focus on self evalution.

First, you break it down into smaller parts. There might be 5, 10, 100 different aspects to a skill, and if you try to just "learn to golf" there are way too many aspects for you to consciously comprehend and evaluate. The solution is to identify one aspect you want to improve on, ideally the one that will have the largest impact for the time and effort put into it, and work on it. Focus consciously on improving it when you're practicing, and evaluate on how well you did afterwards, and do that as often as possible.

Self evaluation is essential to building skill.

Let's take an example: you want to signal stronger frame. Part of that is to appear more confident, but that's still too broad. You identify that your body language is tense and fidgety. Presenting a relaxing and calm body language, that's something you can work. So you consciously check your posture to ensure that you have a wide and tall stance, that your hands are open and apart, etc. That's a self evaluation and improvement loop you can have running many times a day, and over a few days you'll be able to eliminate some bad habits and work in some good ones. Then you switch to another aspect and repeat the process, run the loop again.

The key parts are actually practicing, ie. doing it, and the self evaluation. A lot of the time, neither of them are fun initially, but find the motivation to do it. Often it does take long before you turn a corner where you begin feeling competent and seeing some progress, and then it becomes fun and easy to do. Take something like talking to strangers to learn approaching and dread game, most guys find it horrible initially, but then it works one time and then another and then they get hooked on it.

How good is this process of execution focus and improvement loops? Imagine a guy who read a book, then went back to the chapter on approaching and every few days picks a new aspect of it, puts in effort to practice it by actually doing it, self evaluating each time and working in improvements. He does that for a few weeks, then picks another chapter on something else and goes out and practices that, self evaluating on one aspect at a time.

How well can that guy execute in 6 months? Pretty damn well. He'll have built real skill, he'll have seen real success, and that'll built real confidence and frame.

Compare that to a guy who instead read 4 books, and along the way he tried to half-ass a few things, found it didn't work too well and instead of practicing he went back to read about something else.

Bottom line is, it's not about what you know. It's about what you can do. There are way too many red pill aware guys who never went out and did the work needed to become awesome.

Stop the content consumption, stop thinking that if only you knew more you'd get that insight that would make you get it. It's bullshit and doesn't do shit for becoming red, learning to play golf or anything else in life.

Focus on execution. Build skill. Self evaluate. Run the improvement loop, over and over.