The UnStoppables: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial Power

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 ...