Dave Chong

The One Who Shares Learns the Most

| Founder Insights | by Dave Chong

There is a secret about leadership that few people talk about: The teacher always learns more than the student.

When I started EliteOne, I made a commitment that scared me. I promised my team that we would have a culture of relentless growth. We formalized this into two institutions: Wednesday Elite Training (WET) and the EliteOne Academy (EA).

Every Wednesday, without fail, the team would gather. It was designed to foster a “family culture,” a ritual where we could sharpen our swords together.

But for me, it was a ticking clock.

Every Thursday morning, the clock would reset. I had exactly six days to find something valuable, something profound, and something actionable to share with my team. I couldn’t just stand there and fluff my way through an hour. These were hungry agents; they needed meat.

This pressure became the greatest architect of my own success.

The Hunt for Wisdom

Because I had to feed the team, I had to hunt.

I realized very quickly that my own reservoir of knowledge would run dry in a month if I didn’t refill it. So, I became a radical student.

I didn’t just read books; I flew across oceans. I traveled to Sydney to attend Tony Robbins’ unleash the power within, walking on fire to understand the psychology of fear. I invested in the Internet Income Intensive by Peng Joon to decode the algorithms of digital marketing. I sat in countless seminar rooms, taking feverish notes, not just for myself, but for the dozens of people waiting for me back in Kuala Lumpur.

I spent tens of thousands of Ringgit on these trainings. To an outsider, it looked like an expense. To me, it was R&D (Research and Development).

The Synthesis Engine

Here is the magic trick: You never truly understand a concept until you have to teach it to someone else.

When you sit in a seminar, you consume information passively. You nod your head. You think, “That makes sense.”

But when you have to take a 3-day intense seminar and compress it into a 90-minute syllabus for your team, you are forced to engage with the material on a deeper level. You have to strip away the noise. You have to structure the chaos. You have to find the core principles.

I would come back from these trips and spend nights synthesizing my notes. I turned thousands of dollars of external training into the proprietary syllabus of EliteOne.

I was the filter. I absorbed the complexity, filtered out the fluff, and delivered the pure signal to my team.

The ROI of Sharing

This culture of “Learn, Synthesize, Share” did two things.

First, it built a ferocious team. EliteOne wasn’t just a group of individuals; it was a collective mind. The “Family Culture” we spoke of wasn’t built on happy hours; it was built on shared struggle and shared growth. When you grow together, you stay together.

Second, it accelerated my own growth by 10x. If I had just attended those trainings for myself, I would have retained maybe 20% of the information. Because I had to teach it, I retained 90%.

The pressure to lead forced me to master skills I would have otherwise ignored. I became a better speaker because I had to speak. I became a better marketer because I had to teach marketing. I became a better leader because I had to explain leadership.

The Blueprint for Growth

If you feel stagnant in your career or business, here is my challenge to you: Commit to teaching.

You don’t need a team of 100 agents. You just need a schedule.

  1. Create a Ritual: Set a recurring time—weekly or monthly—where you must present a new idea or skill to your peers, your team, or even publicly on social media.
  2. Invest Aggressively: Don’t be afraid to pay for speed. Buy the course. Go to the seminar. The money is lost only if you don’t use the knowledge.
  3. Synthesize and simplify: Don’t just copy-paste. Chew the information. Digest it. Reformulate it into your own “Syllabus.”
  4. Give it Away: Don’t hoard knowledge. The more you give away, the more room you create in your mind for new ideas.

At EliteOne, we thought we were just running a weekly meeting. In reality, we were building a high-performance engine. And as the driver of that engine, I had no choice but to become a Formula 1 driver.

The one who shares really does learn the most.