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What if you could compress decades of learning into days and unlock success faster than ever? Sharran reveals how to extract and apply mental models from the world’s top performers to transform your business and life.
In this enlightening episode, Sharran unpacks the transformative power of mental models and how they serve as cheat codes for success. Learn the right questions to ask, the secrets to uncovering operating frameworks, and how to adopt these models to accelerate your growth. With real-world examples and actionable advice, this episode equips you to think, decide, and act like the best in the business. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, coach, or ambitious learner, this is your roadmap to unlocking your full potential.
Are you ready to unlock the success cheat codes? Tune in now and start building your mental model library today!
“The mental model, in a lot of ways, is a shortcut to the skill that you need.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
01:20 – Why we fail to learn from successful people
03:04 – Asking the right questions: Why and how vs. what
07:22 – The importance of mental models in decision-making
09:17 – How to extract diagnostic tools and thinking patterns
12:53 – Building your library of success frameworks
13:33 – The “when-then” strategy for applying mental models
Resources:
– Grow Faster with Unicorn Assistants
– Join the 10K Wisdom Private Partner Podcast, now available to you for free
– Join Sharran’s VIP Community
– ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Sharran’s Partnership Program
– Grab Sharran’s 4-Week MBA for Free
Connect with Sharran:
– YouTube
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to the Business School Podcast. And in this episode, I’m going to show you how to compress decades into days. Imagine compressing decades of learning for each person that you meet and compressing that learning into days, the experts that you meet, the great entrepreneurs that you meet, the successful friends that you have.
[00:00:14] Imagine taking each of their learnings and compressing decades into days, compressing days into seconds. How can you take these mental models, these heuristics The secrets that they have built and put them into your life as the cheat codes of success. I show you step by step how you break down unlimited cheat codes, and it all starts right now.
[00:00:40] One thing is for certain, just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand [00:01:00] and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:01:02] That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa and welcome to Business School.
[00:01:15] So let me start by giving you a pro tip that could potentially make you millions of dollars for free, of course. So we know that when we meet somebody, Ultra successful, whoever we deem to be successful, right? In any field in life, we know that when we meet somebody extraordinary, when we meet somebody that’s a master, when we meet somebody that has, that is an expert, when we meet somebody that is deeply successful in what they do, we know that we can learn something from them.
[00:01:39] But the problem is no one’s ever taught us how to learn something from successful people. No one’s ever taught us how to learn something from successful people. Therefore we try to figure out the best questions to ask and the best conversations to have. If you were to spend time with a really successful entrepreneur, what questions would you [00:02:00] ask?
[00:02:01] To extract the best of the best of their thinking and their working and how they look at the world, what would you do? And It’s important because it collapses time, right? Even if you can’t take something out of their head, there’s something that they’ve learned and experienced and put it into a learning that you can use in your life or teach it with someone else, then we’ve failed in our ability to.
[00:02:24] Take the lessons, the human lessons learned. So what do you do? Well, I think a lot about this because by the very nature of the work that I do, I spend time, I’m around a lot of very successful people and selfishly, I just like to learn from all these successful people doing amazing things, entrepreneurs, business owners, coaches, consultants, top salespeople, et cetera.
[00:02:45] And here’s what I’ve learned over the last 10 plus years, I’ve. Try to think about the questions that I ask and the scenarios that I put myself into to figure out how I can extract this greatness and extracting this greatness is hard. So I want to tell [00:03:00] you how I’ve seen other people do it and how I used to do it.
[00:03:03] And the first is I started realizing the types of questions I would ask. Right. And so if I asked somebody who was a billionaire, how to make the first million dollars, that’s just, the scope is so different and it doesn’t, it makes it for a hard question to answer. You’ll get things like, you know, if I can do it, you can do it too.
[00:03:20] You’ll get these hallucination falls, like make you feel good, better about yourself answers. So I stopped asking that. And then I said, all right, what if I just figure out the type of questions I ask? And so do I ask why questions? Well, if I say, why did you make that decision? Why did you start that company?
[00:03:35] Why did you come to the United States? Why did you get into this? Why did you buy that? Why did you sell that? Why did you create that? Well, the why behind that. That instantly makes them have to defend because it’s a judgment question. They have to defend why they did what they did, or if they’re not going to defend it, they’re going to give you the sales pitch, the sales pitch that they use for their company, the sales pitch that they used, and their, the stump speech that they [00:04:00] have.
[00:04:00] They’ll give you the why. If it’s a question that they’ve already received, they’re just going to go with the standard answer that they already have. It’s your job to Do not ask the question that they’ve already received. And a why question is a nice big picture question, which is a curve ball that you throw at people, right?
[00:04:16] But most smart people have figured out a stump answer for that curve ball saying, Hey, why do I want to change the world? Why do I want to build this company? Why do I want to become a billionaire? Why do I want to help a billion people? All of that stuff. So you’re not going to get much from that. And you also blow your chances of the next question.
[00:04:33] The second. Is the how question. Well, how did you do that? Like, how do you run a Facebook ad? How do you actually hire this person? How do you implement this offer? How do you get the supply chain working? How, how, how, how, how? It’s a hard to approach the how. It’s a heavy amount of cognitive work. So this person now who is ultra successful has to stop.
[00:04:54] They’re kind of. thoughtful way of being there and thinking about the world and give you a mechanical implementation of [00:05:00] how to do something, which most of the time you can figure out, or you can hire a consultant, or you can watch a YouTube video or what have you to figure it out. So the how gets people Like they’re doing work for you.
[00:05:13] So in fact, you’re asking a question that’s selling them work. So they have to work hard to answer a question for you. So instead of the why and the how questions, I have started to ask a lot more of the what questions, right? What questions. And when I say the what questions, I try really hard to not ask how’s and why’s.
[00:05:33] And I just ask what’s because when you ask a what, it’s a very neutral question. And whatever the answer they give you. is okay, right? They don’t feel judgment with the what question. They don’t feel pressure to deliver with the how question. They’re just asking, Hey, what does it feel like to do this? So for example, I would say, as you’re thinking about what ice cream to have, like what goes through your mind, what mental choices do you make to choose ice cream?[00:06:00]
[00:06:00] And so now they’re just telling me, Hey, I’m just a vanilla kind of guy. So anything with vanilla and some nuts in it, I take. Now you got something there, right? Which was there’s an option, which is vanilla, and he can do something with it. The what question is really important. Quick heads up. If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or executive, listen up.
[00:06:20] If you don’t have a virtual assistant team or offshore team yet, you’re doing it the hard way. Look, I’ve hired. Uh, 11 plus virtual assistants just in the last two years, just on Sharran brand. And since then, my brand has over five times, 500%. No exaggeration. I used to do everything myself or pay bloated us salaries, but hiring offshore has been a total game changer.
[00:06:42] So here’s the deal. Finding a great VA honestly is not that easy. Vetting, interviewing, onboarding. It’s a lot. That’s why I work with assistantly. They handle all of it. Job descriptions, headhunting, interviews, onboarding, even setting you up for success. The whole shebang, you get three to four top tier candidates to choose from [00:07:00] super quick, and they don’t stop until you’re set up for success.
[00:07:03] I work with assistantly, my network works with assistantly. And if you’re serious about growing and scaling your business, you should work with assistantly too. Uh, check them out at hireyourunicorn.com. Hireyourunicorn.com. Let’s get back to the show. So understanding this is a big function because what you want to do is to really understand these thinking models from people.
[00:07:27] You want to understand how people approach questions, approach situations. And that is a really powerful way of extracting the best of the best. So if someone asks me, Hey, Sean, what should I do if I don’t have any leads is a much better way of asking the question, Hey, how do I get more leads? Like think about that, what should I do if I don’t have any leads is a significantly better way of asking, how do I get more leads?
[00:07:53] Because now I can give you a framework to think about it. So if I would say, Hey, what do you have to do to get more leads? I’d say, well, I think about [00:08:00] leads in three ways. It’s doing kind of like organic or paid or JVs and activities. Which one are you currently working on? So now you’ve made this discussion and dialogue process a lot more helpful, but.
[00:08:11] What you saw with my answer was I instantly gave you a framework. I instantly gave you a mental model for thinking about stuff. I said, Hey, what, you know, is it organic paid or JV inherently? I gave you the answer to your question because now I’ve given you a way to all think about lead generation. Or if you think about how to grow a service business, I can say, Hey, Sharran, what do you think I should do to grow my service business?
[00:08:35] Did you hear what I said? What do you think I should do to grow my service business? Nod. How should I grow my service business? So if you say, what do you think I should do to grow my service business? I’ll say, Hey, you know what? There’s probably three things that help you grow your service business. It’s traffic systems and skills.
[00:08:48] Traffic allows you to fill the funnel. Systems allow you to set appointments and skills allow you to get paid. Let’s talk about traffic. All right. Do you feel like you have enough eyeballs on your business? Did you see what I did? Right. So all I did there [00:09:00] was you asked me, what does it take to grow your scale, your service business?
[00:09:04] I gave you a framework back. I gave you a way to think about it. And the most successful people will ask very simple diagnostic questions. And that diagnostic first approach is your key answer, your job. When you talk to successful people is to extract the diagnostic tools that they use in every single part of their life.
[00:09:25] And every single part of business, you want to keep throwing questions at them that allows you to glean, that allows you to understand, that allows you take away their operating framework for thinking about the world, because the more you have of that, the easier. It is like when, when someone tells me, Hey, how do you actually scale a agency business when it’s broken?
[00:09:47] It’s very simple. It’s rapport and results, right? If you don’t have rapport, you, they’re not going to continue to pay you. If you don’t have results, they’re not going to continue to pay you. So the question you ask yourself is, do you have the right rapport? Meaning you have great [00:10:00] relationship with them.
[00:10:00] Cool. If you’re doing that and they want to, still want to quit, then you’re not getting the results, right? So all I gave you there was a mental model of how to organize your thoughts when it comes to a certain topic. And that comes from years and years of thinking, writing, practice, clarity, operations.
[00:10:17] Investing, making mistakes, et cetera. And the most successful people realize that they’re going to come up with these mental models. Ray Dalio calls it the idea of principles, right? He’s reduced the different thinking models in his head to a certain set of principles, and that’s one way. But I like pulling out the mental models, the way people deconstruct and diagnose things.
[00:10:38] So if you. Kid could learn anything from anybody it is this and that is if you’re talking to somebody about something instead of the why or the How questions reframed as a what question so instead of asking how do you do? XYZ thing you ask what is your advice on the best way to do XYZ? And then they’ll give you their mental model for thinking about the world.
[00:10:59] [00:11:00] And that’s why this stuff is really, really important. Your job is to find the diagnostic. Your job is to find the framework. Your job is to find the mental model. Your job is to find the thinking pattern. Your job is to find the heuristic. Your job is to find the thing that they’ve thought and learned, because here’s what this is, what is the mental model?
[00:11:17] The mental model in a lot of ways is a shortcut to the skill that you need. I’ll say it again. The mental model in a lot of ways is a shortcut to the skill that you need. What is the skill? A skill is a learned behavior. If I have to go through 10 years of building businesses and my investing and winning, investing and losing, investing and struggling, building large companies, building small companies.
[00:11:42] If I have to go through 10 years of this. Right. If I have to go through 10 years of this, then what you’re going to get is a skill. I have a skill of entrepreneurship. I have a skill of building businesses and that skill has been developed over time. And now that skill is a learned behavior. It’s a [00:12:00] heuristic.
[00:12:00] It’s built into how I think and work in my nervous system. And that learning and thinking you can never replicate. And that’s why I probably have several mental models that allow me. To operate in a better way because of the learning that I’ve had, what all my mental models are a gateway, a cheat code to the skills that I have.
[00:12:20] Now you’re not just because Tiger Woods tells you what he does from a thinking perspective before he hits a sand wedge, then you’re not going to get his skill right away. But if he tells you, Hey, whenever I’m hitting the sandwich, I think about these two things. That is. 15 years worth of one of the world’s best golfers giving you their heuristic, giving you their mental model that is the gateway to their skill.
[00:12:46] That is a cheat code to their skill that will get you there so much faster. You don’t have to go through that experience. That’s what I want to give you your job. When you talk to anyone that does anything great. It’s to figure out their diagnostic, it’s [00:13:00] to figure out their mental model, it’s to figure out their heuristic, it’s to figure out their thinking pattern, it’s to figure out what it is, and once you get it, your job is to get it, take it, and find a way to put a name and a label around it so that You can use it in your life and in your business.
[00:13:14] So if I give you something, you can be like, Oh, that’s Ron’s model to do X. Great. Let me try to implement it in my life. In my thinking, in some way, you just use the model to think for a minute. And now that you’ve used it, it becomes a part of your heuristic. It becomes a part of your cheat code. It becomes a part of your diagnostic framework.
[00:13:29] It becomes a part of your lives. When then statement. And when I say when, then I mean, when X situation happens, then use this model. Hey, when I want to grow my business, then I use Sharran’s model for growth. Right. So now you’ve just saved it in your kind of heuristic and mental models library. And now you’d be like, Oh, when X situation happens, I can get to utilize Y model.
[00:13:52] That is the best thing that you can do when you talk to someone successful, when you hang out with someone successful, it’s not about five people [00:14:00] that you spend most of your time with them talking just, and just, just shooting the shit. That’s not it. What you want is to pull out. How people think about the world, because it’s a cheat code to their skill.
[00:14:10] And it gives you the heuristic that you’d have never gotten otherwise. I know I went a little bit outside of scope of what I normally talk about, but this was a really, really big idea that I wanted to share with you. And hopefully it changes your thinking, your joy and your relationship with people and mentors forever.
[00:14:27] Hey, if you liked this episode, do me a favor. Could you just screenshot this and tag me that way? I know you like this and I can build on this and make more like this for you.
[00:14:45] Hey, it’s Sharran, I have a cool gift for you. Since you like this podcast, I actually have an ultra super secret private podcast that I make just for my partner companies and the CEOs and influencers that I advise. It’s called 10 K wisdom because I try to wrap 10, 000 worth of value in every single episode in just under 10 minutes.
[00:15:08] That’s why it’s called 10 K wisdom. It’s raw. It’s real. It’s got no intro or outro or anything like that. It’s just straight to the point and to the insights. Since you like this podcast, I think you will like that. So for the first time, I’m making it available to you. Just go to 10Kwisdom.com the number 10K wisdom.com and my team will activate it for you as my gift. Go to 10Kwisdom.com. I’ll see you there.
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