These gaps between knowledge bases will become evident during step two of this process. As you start to figure out how to think your way around a topic, especially if you’ve been paying attention to its boundary lines, you’ll begin to get a feel for the questions not being asked by the experts. So once you get to the point that you’re asking intelligent questions, it’s time to follow those questions into the gaps.
This is also why we’re following our curiosity around a subject. By leaning on our natural interests, we’re creating the conditions needed to develop Johnson’s slow hunches. But it’s worth mentioning what this won’t do well: help you prepare for a standard exam. If someone else is driving the learning bus, you can apply these techniques and they’ll work up to a point, but because the curriculum is not your own, its goals will be different. Remember where we started—with the question of what was required before I was willing to have a public opinion about a subject. An opinion means both a firm grounding in the core ideas and some new thinking on the matter.
While books formed the foundation of step one, here, in step three, I prefer blogs, articles, talks, and such. Back in the passion recipe, we spent ten to twenty minutes a day “playing” around with ideas we were curious about. Take a similar approach here.
For example, say you’re interested in animal behavior. Well, one category up in scale from animal behavior is ecosystem behavior, so get into that gap. Learning how whole ecosystems function can help shed light on how their independent parts work. Or you can take this another step up in scale: animals form ecosystems, but ecosystems are simply one example of a network. What can you learn about animal behavior by studying network behavior? Get into that gap.
Because of specialization, expert knowledge tends to become balkanized over time. As a result, most interesting topics are usually the ones that are stuck between categories. These are the gaps. And after you’ve surrounded a subject, you’ll typically end up floundering around in those gaps. The floundering is what you’re after: it’s where slow hunches really emerge. If you suddenly find yourself with more questions than answers, well, that’s how it’s supposed to work. You’ve now managed to stumble into the true blank spots on the map. And if you’ve done this right, because you’ve followed your curiosity to get into these spots, suddenly you’re stuck with burning questions that no one can answer. So you’ll end up trying to find those answers yourself.
Out of this frustration, that’s where real learning actually begins.
STEP FOUR: ALWAYS ASK THE NEXT QUESTION
This advice is a throwback to the concept of truth filters. Remember the standard reporter’s creed: three sources make a fact. This means that if three people independently tell you the same thing, then you can be pretty sure that thing actually happened. But, as I mentioned earlier, I discovered that something unusual occurred when I called that fifth expert—typically I got an answer that conflicted with everything else that preceded it.
This is the why behind always asking the next question. It means that, at this point in the process, you want to start hunting conflicting answers. Seek out experts who disagree with the experts with whom you’ve already spoken. When you get to the spot where everything you thought you knew was actually wrong, then you’re in the right place.
And now that you’re in the right place, try to solve the puzzle you’ve encountered. Sure, it’s entirely possible that the puzzle you’ve stumbled upon isn’t actually answerable. That’s fine, too. The goal here is to have an opinion about the answer. Pick a side and be able to defend the side you’ve picked. Be able to say something akin to: “Experts tend to disagree about this point, but my own feeling is . . .” and then explain why you feel the way you feel.
Personally, I don’t really think I’ve learned a subject until I’ve had this kind of revelatory butt-kicking. If my position hasn’t been thoroughly reversed at least once, then I still have more work to do.
STEP FIVE: FIND THE NARRATIVE
Our brains are designed to link cause with effect. It’s a survival mechanism. If we can backtrack the why from the what, then we can learn to predict the future. This is why the brain loves narrative, which is just cause and effect on a much larger scale.
Yet, whatever the scale, the underlying biology remains the same.
When we link cause and effect, it’s pattern recognition. To reward this behavior, we get tiny squirts of dopamine. The pleasure of dopamine is what cements the relationship between the what and the why, essentially amplifying learning. In the late 1990s, for example, Cambridge neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz gave monkeys a squirt of juice, which is a favorite monkey reward, and watched dopamine levels spike in their brains.10 At the beginning of the experiment, their brains released dopamine only when they got the actual juice. In time, this dopamine spike showed up earlier, for instance, when the lab door first opened. By the experiment’s end, those spikes arose even earlier: when they heard footsteps in the hallway outside the laboratory’s door.
Essentially, what Schultz’s experiment confirmed was dopamine’s role in learning. Whenever we get a reward—like juice—the brain scours the recent past, hunting for what might have triggered that reward: the cause of the effect. If this pattern repeats, when we notice this cause again, we get even more dopamine. Next, we start backtracking the cause even further—before I got juice, the lab door opened and this human arrived—and reinforcing those additional connections with even more dopamine.
Now that we’ve reached the fifth step in our five not-so-easy steps, we want to take advantage of this exact neurobiology. The goal is to couple those initial dopamine hits—from the pattern recognition that already arose from following the first four steps in this process—to the even bigger rush of dopamine (and, as we’ll see, a host of additional neurochemicals) that comes from narrative construction and social support.11 This is what truly cements new information into long-term storage.
Thus, once again, it’s time to take things public.
For me, the only way I can be sure I’ve learned something is to tell it to someone else as a story. Actually, two people. The first person I tell is someone who is completely ignorant of and, usually, a little bored by the subject. I find family members are useful for this, but absolute strangers can work as well. If I can turn everything I’ve learned into a narrative compelling enough to hold this hostile audience’s attention and still convey the story’s critical information, then I usually feel like I’m halfway there.
The second person I tell the story to is an expert. I always look for someone who’s not afraid to tell me when I get things wrong. If I can satisfy both camps, then I’ve produced enough dopamine along the way to have cemented my knowledge—essentially I’ve learned the material. I also feel like I’ve really earned my way to my opinions and am comfortable having them in public. And if you’ve come this far, then you, too, should feel this way.
The reason for this confidence: neurobiology. By turning your own learning into the chain of cause and effect we call narrative—that is, telling it to someone as a story—you’re going to find more patterns and release more dopamine. Couple this to all the neurochemistry that shows up from taking things public—more dopamine for the risk-taking, norepinephrine for the excitement, cortisol for the stress, serotonin and oxytocin from the social interaction itself—and you have an incredible tool for memory reinforcement.12
One final note: There are two consistent problems people encounter when using this technique. The first is to finish up those first five books and assume you know something. In martial arts, they always say that the yellow belt and the green belt—that is, advanced beginner and lower-intermediate—are the most dangerous times for a student. People think they know how to fight around this point and often want to test their skills. Often, they end up getting their asses kicked. The same is true here. Five books on a subject is a great foundation, but don’t mistake it for actual expertise.
The second issue is equally insidious. If you
’ve followed this five-step process all the way to the end, then you probably have a huge sense of all the stuff you still don’t know. Expect this. Experts often feel dumber about their subject than novices. They know what they don’t know and they know there’s a lot they don’t know they don’t know. It’s a daunting combination and one that can be crippling. Forward progress feels like backward progress and this can be demotivating. Instead, use this to your advantage. Those additional knowledge gaps are the foundation of curiosity, so follow them into five more books, and repeat the process.
11
The Skill of Skill
From learning how to master new subjects to learning how to master new skills, that’s the next step in this process. To help you take that step, I spent time talking to best-selling author, angel investor, and all-around life hacker extraordinaire Tim Ferriss, who, as much as anyone I know, has gone deep into the question of accelerated skill acquisition.1
A couple of years back, Tim took this investigation to new heights, when he set out to learn thirteen very difficult skills—including playing a musical instrument, driving a race car, and learning a foreign language—under some very difficult conditions. Without knowing how to read music or keep time, Tim gave himself five days to see if he could learn to play drums well enough to perform onstage in front of a live audience. Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police, was his teacher. To make things interesting—as a final test of his skill—he convinced classic rockers Foreigner to let him drum during one of their live shows, in front of a packed house.
He did the same thing with Brazilian jiujitsu. Five days to learn the martial art, and a trip into a ring to fight world champions to test the results. And poker—even risking hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money in a game with top pros as his final exam.
In other words, what came to be known as the Tim Ferriss Experiment (available on iTunes) was a full-contact investigation into the outer possibilities of accelerated skills acquisition. As Tim explains: “[The experiment was designed] to explode a bunch of bad ideas people have about adult learning. The idea that it’s hard for an adult to learn a foreign language or play an instrument. The idea that developing real expertise takes years of practice. These things just aren’t true. The show is about teaching people how to get superhuman results without them having to be superhuman.”
Tim released thirteen experiments in total, and if you watch all of them, you’ll start noticing some similarities among methodologies. There’s overlap. Sure, on the surface, it may seem like learning how to surf and learning how to speak Tagalog, two other experiments he ran on the show, are worlds apart.
Yet, there are commonalities—and that’s what we’re after.
Mastering fear, for example, is a commonality shared in almost every learning situation. Which means, the same calming techniques that Tim learned from surfer Laird Hamilton—in an attempt to learn to surf overhead waves in a week (something it takes most novices a couple of years to figure out)—were absolutely applicable when he was risking hundreds of thousands of dollars at the poker table. And they were also just as relevant when he was playing the drums in front of a live audience.
Thus, when Tim approaches a new skill, the first thing he does is hunt for commonalities. He breaks the activity apart, deconstructing it into its individual components. He’s looking for both the raw materials from which to learn and the common mistakes to avoid.
Next, he hunts for overlap, or those components that show up across the board. These are the components that provide the most leverage. For example, most pop songs are constructed out of four or five chords. Mastering those chords will get you farther faster than learning any other set of musical skills.
This five-chord approach to mastery is an example of the Pareto principle, or what’s sometimes called the 80/20 rule. It’s the idea that 80 percent of your consequences stem from 20 percent of your actions. To apply this principle to learning, when approaching a new skill, focus your efforts on the 20 percent that really matter. Think the four or five chords used in every pop song.
To identify these component parts, you want to survey and simplify. Start by removing the extraneous. For example, when Tim gave himself a week to master Brazilian jiujitsu, instead of attempting to learn the entire martial art, he focused on only one choke hold—the guillotine choke. He then learned to use this one hold from every possible position, both attacking and defending. That choke hold was his 20 percent chunk, but his mastery of this one skill gave him the ability to maneuver in 80 percent of the situations he encountered, which is a fairly incredible return on five days’ worth of effort.
The larger point is that you can take more than Tim’s five days to get good. Even if it takes months, this 80/20 approach to skill acquisition will absolutely save you time in the long run.
But one thing to note: 80/20’ing is fantastic if the skill you’re trying to learn will help you go from A to B faster. When training a weakness, for example, this can be a great fit. What it’s not ideal for is mastering any of the skills that are core to your massively transformative purpose.
For example, I would never consider 80/20’ing anything that pertained to flow, as flow is core to my mission. But I’ve applied this idea to learning the legalese necessary to understand business contracts, because that’s enough knowledge for me to have informed conversations with my lawyers. If my lawyers had 80/20’d the legalese—well, that would be a problem.
If the skill or information you’re learning is at the dead center of your massively transformative purpose, then your real goal has to be total mastery, and that requires more learning than Pareto’s principle can offer (if you’re wondering why, return to Gary Klein’s list of the things experts know that others don’t). That said, consistently focusing your learning on the 20 percent of information that will make 80 percent of the difference—and doing this over and over again—will absolutely shorten the path to mastery. Tim has argued that this approach can get you to real expertise in about a year and a half of dedicated work, or about eight and a half years faster than those purported ten thousand hours.
Now, to be sure, Tim’s experiment got ugly. He fell down. He broke bones, especially when he tried to master parkour in a week. But that’s actually the point. “Look,” he says, “I wasn’t a great learner. I sucked at foreign languages as a kid. I didn’t learn to swim until I was thirty. This is exactly why I know this stuff works. If I can do it, anyone can do it.”
12
Stronger
Up to now, we’ve been exploring the skills and meta-skills that surround learning. Here, we want to switch focus and discuss exactly what you want to be learning. There are three categories to explore.
First, the obvious. If you’re chasing high, hard goals, then learn whatever you need to learn to chase those goals.
Second, the unpleasant. A few chapters ago, we talked about developing the grit to train our weaknesses. One way or another, developing that grit requires adding new skills or new knowledge to your repertoire, so that’s also what you want to learn.
Finally, we want to turn our attention to the exact opposite side of this coin, to our core strengths. Learning to identify our core strengths—literally identifying those things we’re best at—then learning how to get even better at them, is fundamental to peak performance. From the 1940s onward, psychologists from Carl Rogers and Carl Jung to Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson have argued that using our core strengths on a regular basis is one of the best ways to increase happiness, well-being, and the amount of flow in our lives.1 In fact, Seligman has argued that the best way to increase flow is to spend as much time as possible on activities that utilize one or more of our five top strengths.2
At a psychological level, working with our strengths—that is, getting better at what we’re already good at—increases feelings of autonomy and mastery, two of our more potent intrinsic drivers. In turn, these drivers amp up confidence, focus, and engagement, which all c
ombine to increase learning and foster flow. Finally, since flow further amplifies learning, this strengthens our strengths and starts the cycle over again.
Neurobiologically, strengths appear to have a number of different functions. Most important is dopamine. We like being good at things, and this produces dopamine, which tightens focus, increases motivation, and helps us get even better at what we’re already good at.
Many researchers also believe that our strengths play a role in “sensory gating,” which is what helps the brain decide which bits of information make it up to the conscious mind for processing and which get weeded out as irrelevant. We like being good at things and we like getting better at things, so anything that can aid that cause gets tagged as important and is passed along for conscious processing.3
Yet, because the idea of training our strengths is still new to psychology, there are open questions about the complete list of strengths to train. Seligman and Peterson, in a recent book on the subject, list twenty-four core strengths, while Gallup Organization’s CliftonStrengths raises that to thirty-four, and the Strengths Profile has sixty different potential strengths, weaknesses, and learned behaviors. So whose diagnostic should you trust?
Your own is my answer. Sure, if you want to take Seligman and Peterson’s ideas for a spin, their website—www.viacharacter.org—provides a free 240-question diagnostic. The results are confidential and get sent right to your in-box. You can also find CliftonStrengths and the Strengths Profile and a host of other assessments online.4 But an easier way to solve this puzzle is by trusting your own history.
Start with your five biggest wins—that is, those five achievements that you are proudest of and produced the largest positive impact in your life. Then break each of these down, looking for all the key strengths that helped you achieve this victory. What matters most is specificity. Don’t just add “persistence” to your list; add the specific type of persistence. If your victory was aided by a willingness to repeatedly go back to the library and gather as much information as possible about a subject, then “intellectual rigor” is a much more useful identifier than “persistence.”
The Art of Impossible Page 12
