Learning Speed: What Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, And Bill Gates Know That Most People Don’t

Author’s Note: This article was written over 60 hours with love and care using the blockbuster mental model. If you like my writing style, and you want to create high-quality viral content using the blockbuster approach, you’ll love my Blockbuster Blueprint newsletter, which delivers three in-depth articles every week.

Over the last five years, I’ve spent over a thousand hours uncovering the most surprising and important learning habits of the world’s top innovators, like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos.

More recently, I’ve realized there is a deeper pattern that connects all these innovators together. That pattern is what I call hidden games.

Most people play popular games — games with predefined boundaries that are played in crowded sandboxes. Popular games are often those with the most short-term, concrete rewards. For example, a popular career game is getting good grades, going to a top university, and then graduating into a prestigious job.

Hidden games are played in sandboxes that people don’t even realize exist. Hidden games have a higher return, but they are more long-term and abstract. For example, a hidden game is starting a business in an unsexy industry (i.e., building tunnels with Elon…