 I am obsessed with how the best become the world's best. You know, when I was young, I would read all these books on spiritual masters, because I was always intrigued to learn what were the practices they did to supposedly be able to perform these miracles. But now later in my life, I'm more interested in the practical aspects of mastery. Like if you took the top athletes, the top musicians, the top authors, and you could learn exactly how they think and how they act. Wouldn't you want to know that? Now in this video, I'm going to share the three key practices I've learned from Anders Ericsson's The 10,000 Hour Rule, as well as how you can apply this to become a master in any field. Hey guys, Alex Hein, author of the book Master of the Day. One of the key traits I've noticed in a lot of masters is the habit of journaling. You see it in Da Vinci, Einstein, in Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, and many successful business people. The first link in the description is how I use journaling to completely reinvent my life. So if you'd like, check that out, get the free little PDF, and you'll get a journaling lesson every three days that's free, just an email course on how to get started. So the first question you need is to figure out who the best are. Now that is easy in a field where there's performance. You know when there's a martial arts death match on a square platform in your village and one person lives and one dies, you can be safe to say that you know which one's better. But how do you compare art? How do you compare the best doctors? How do you compare the best musicians? So how do you come up with these criteria to figure out who the best really are? Now I'm going to use this to apply it in my own field. I'm doing a doctorate in traditional Chinese medicine, so how would you find the best traditional Chinese medicine practitioner? Since they are not getting up on a platform and seeing 100 patients each and comparing the results or punching each other in the face, how do we know who's good? I came up with three criteria. The first one is who do the people that are in practice send the most difficult cases to? Who has a busy practice? And who seems to get consistent clinical results? You hear through the grapevine, this person is always getting great results. Those are my mastery questions. You could apply that to becoming a YouTuber, becoming an author, or becoming a top athlete too. The second exercise is you do kind of like a yin-yang exercise, this divergence. What makes the best practitioners good? And you often can know that by looking at what makes the bad practitioners suck. So what makes the great practitioners in my field good? The first thing is they've all studied one particular lineage of writing specific herbal formulas that are clinically proven throughout time. They all use one particular diagnostic method, a training technique, which is the pulse diagnosis. And 90% of them use a certain method of treatment, which is herbs, to treat chronic conditions. So if you saw these three consistent traits and the top performers in your field, those are the things you emulate. But sometimes you don't know unless you compare them to the people who are not very good in your field. So then we can say, what are the bad performers in my field do? So the bad performers in my field tend to be people who have modernized biomedical training versus a traditional lineage, a mentorship type approach. They write generic herbal formulas and do generic treatments that are not individualized for each patient. They tend not to use herbs rather than a traditional mentorship with a doctor that has been standing the test of time and has experience. The next thing is what Anders Ericsson calls mental representations. Now, all that means is, how do the best think to get the results that they get compared to how the worst suck? For lack of a better word. What are the best doing in terms of their mindset, the way they approach their craft that allows them to become good and stand out? So there were three lessons I came up with for mastery in my field. The best people don't treat symptoms, they treat the whole person and the pattern. The best people use one specific training method for honing in on a more accurate diagnosis. In athletics, you can compare this to a very specific way a sprinter may train for faster performance. Now, the last question is, how do the best people train to get those results? Because ultimately, you want to emulate their training methods and their way of thinking to get those same results. So the few things I came up with here are the best practitioners in my field, instead of like reading textbooks, they train with traditional case studies. So when you read case studies and case reports, you can learn how great physicians before you think. And so you can spot blind spots and poor ways of thinking. The second thing is they use traditional mentorships. So again, rather than just jumping into their own practice or trying to emulate people, they work closely with a previous physician or a doctor in their field. So they know exactly, oh, you're making this consistent mistake and the experienced person can point that out. And lastly, because my fields consider alternative medicine and you're dealing with mind, body, and spirit, the best practitioners I've seen have come up with their own criteria for an objective clinical assessment. So how do you deal with treating emotions in a clinic where a patient reports they have anxiety or depression where we may see it on them, but it's really a subjective complaint they have. The best practitioners come up with their own criteria, maybe sleep or bowel movements or appetite or the pulse or physical facial color. That's how they assess their performance and their improvements, rather than just relying on what the patient subjectively reports. So once you've done this analysis in whatever field you want to become a master at, you can say, this is what the worst do, this is what the best do. You know, now we've got the best, we take them like this and we break it into the mind versus the habits. How the best think and how the best train. You can apply that to do anything in your life and I feel very confident you will become the top 1%, no doubt in my mind at all whatsoever. And if you emulate how they think and how they act, you will reach that too. So that is my own plan to become the top 1% in history in my field. And again, if you want, one of the best ways to get started is journaling. Obviously, I started doing this exercise for myself by journaling out these traits and this kind of mental analysis of what the best do versus the worst. So you can check out the first link in the description. They'll give you a free journaling worksheet as well as a journaling email course on how to use journaling to reinvent your life and has your most successful year ever. And again, you can check out my last videos also right there and there.