Keep this thought in your pocket and you can learn anything
Schools should teach this to combat depression and feelings of low self worth.
Twenty-three years ago I was laying down in an ’87 Ford Bronco sobbing my eyes out.
I had walked back to where I parked it in the parking lot of my university (UMBC in Maryland) between classes.
I had finished my 90 minute Calculus lecture that started at 8 a.m…
And at this point it’s about 4 or 5 weeks into the semester. It’s not the first time I’d gone from class to crying in my car.
I was failing rapidly… and I knew it at week 2 when I couldn’t even begin the second quiz.
You see, I was “never good at math.” Once I hit grade 9 and sat in Algebra, I made that realization. In fact, it was the earliest time I can remember where I tried to pay attention but failed to do so. Next thing I knew I was going to school two hours early for one-on-one math lessons. The hallway lights weren’t even on yet. And my Algebra teacher would struggle to put information into my brain.
The thing is, though, if you fast-forward 10 years I got straight A’s in 400 level engineering classes…
Doing “chalkboard hieroglyphics” math…
So I went from turning my brain off every time I sat in a math class to throwing it on autopilot and doing three dimensional calculus on napkins. But I’m here to tell you, there was a long journey from one end to the other… and it was not necessary.
I want to show you an idea that would’ve made a world of difference.
If you’re thinking that, at the core of my struggle there was belief, you are dead right.
Whether or not I believed I could learn math influenced my ability to do so. And in those 10 years I forced myself through math lessons and drills and homework so much that a new belief started to form. Against my will, and unconsciously.
But… that’s not what I want to talk about today.
“Knowing” that you should believe you can learn something isn’t going to be enough for everyone.
I know people who are at constant war with depression, anxiety, and excruciating inner pain because they can’t reconcile their doubts.
They can’t bridge the gap between who they want to be and who they see in the mirror.
And you better believe they’ve heard advice like: “You gotta believe in yourself! You can do it!”
I think these people need more powerful ammo to justify the truth in their minds…
Because the truth is they can do it.
What if we Google “how to learn?”
If you Google “how to learn” you’ll find brilliant concepts that help dictate how someone should go about learning.
- You’ll read about chunking… which will make complex concepts digestible by breaking them into “chunks.”
- You’ll learn about mnemonics and start leveraging your imagination to remember names, dates, etc.
- You’ll find tricks to smooth the process like pomodoro. Suddenly taking breaks actually helps you move forward.
- You’ll even hear more about everyone’s favorite… the Pareto principle. Good old 80/20. Which, I reckon, gets a little too much attention. You can find plenty of people who advertise “success” because they learned the most apparent part of a skill in a day. All respect to them… but there’s rarely a shortcut to real expertise.
The ideas above can be helpful with the process of learning… but there’s something missing.
Something that can derail these things…
Even if we use those learning “tricks,” we might get discouraged early on and struggle to resonate with the process.
What a jump rope taught me about learning
When I was a teenager I got picked on a lot.
Other guys would write on me with pen or call me names.
And while I had plenty of friends and didn’t get bullied as badly as some others…
I did feel a strong desire to learn how to defend myself. I wanted to learn how to box.
I was pretty scared of walking into a boxing gym and signing up at first, so I tried to learn a few things at home. The internet came in handy here (hat tip to Ross Enamait and his brilliant resources).
But what really got me thinking, and has helped me to this day to fix my attitude about learning, was trying to skip rope…
Because when I first brought home a new jump rope to condition myself, I hadn’t tried to skip since I was 5 years old. It looks like the easiest thing in the world.
But I couldn’t skip even 4 times in a row to save my life.
I must’ve spent 20–30 minutes trying over and over again to get a flow going and it wasn’t happening for me. I was whacking myself in the ankles and feeling dysfunctional. Actually, I found it annoying and wasn’t sure if I’d end up using the rope as a training tool at all.
Eventually I set it down and moved on for the day.
But then the very next day when I grabbed that rope to try again…
I hit 13 skips right away, first go.
And that sudden, instant success gave me an immediate “gut level” realization.
Learning a skill works exactly like trying to grow your muscles works…
The training part requires effort, repetition, and most importantly pushing yourself into discomfort. But improvements don’t happen on the spot.
The gains come from the healing part… during rest and overnight during sleep.
Why does this matter?
It’s easy to feel like your training efforts are futile. In a single session sometimes your ability to even do the activity is so weak that you can’t imagine it’s helping.
It is helping.
It’s also easy to expect results during a session. There’s a little bit of flex in your abilities. You can get better at throwing a basketball through a hoop on the spot by adjusting.
In fact , people selling hacks, tricks, and shortcuts benefit from the idea that you can get good at stuff by doing it differently.
But it’s not the same as deep, internal change. The kind of change that truly shifts your ability to think or move in a certain way.
Those changes do not happen during a training session.
Think of it like you’re building a pyramid out of bricks.
Every day when you study or practice you are placing a brick on the pyramid. You can’t put more than one on in a day. And if you don’t study or practice, you have to start taking bricks down.
Early on you have to add bricks to the big bottom level. The foundation. You’ll need a lot of them and the pyramid won’t be very high. But as you keep training yourself, you will start to add bricks to the higher levels of the pyramid. And your skill will start to stand out… to you and to everyone else.
Putting bricks on the lowest level feels futile because the results hardly show.
And this is where it becomes most important to realize…
One brick at a time, you are growing. One brick, one day. The only way forward is in increments that consolidate while you’re at rest.
Here are two examples I like to go back to
Making direct eye contact while having a conversation.
This might be easy for some people, but I have always had social anxiety and often find this is hard to do. Sometimes I can do it without even realizing it. And other times I’m unable to do it without feeling awkward.
But if I think about how my nervous system works, it no longer feels like a problem. Instead I just feel “rusty” and know I need to get back into the habit.
One day I intentionally tried to make eye contact with people at my job while talking to them, and found it felt weird.
Which means it’s harder to listen to what they’re saying while doing it (not good).
But I insisted on doing it anyway… despite feeling weird and despite risking the conversation. And it didn’t get any better (on the spot).
Until two days later I noticed I could look strangers directly in the eye without a single shred of weirdness.
I could have easily given up. It feels like a futile exercise when you’re doing it. It feels hopeless because you aren’t getting any results.
But pushing myself into discomfort repeatedly put me into a state of disrepair. And, presumably overnight, things healed up and my anxiety was reduced.
I know a lot of people with crippling anxiety who don’t bother trying. It feels pointless and uncomfortable. If only they knew… and trusted… that the only way up was to push through.
Reading focus and retention.
Many people get into a bad habit of hating reading because they struggle to pay attention to the words they’re looking at.
I’ve gotten rusty at this myself many times…
Making the time and pushing through anyway really does feel like a waste of effort. How can it be helping if you simply can not pay attention?
Believe it or not, it does help. And you will wake up one day suddenly taking the words in. It won’t take weeks, it will take a few days.
(Needless to say, don’t stop there!)
Like the eye contact example, this activity truly feels like a hopeless waste of time while you’re doing it. But if you push anyway… set a timer if you need to… you’ll sit down and realize you can pay attention. All because…
Those activities rely on real, physical synapses that you can grow.
People are saying don’t expect to find your passion… and they’re right
If you’ve ever read the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, you are familiar with the idea that “follow your passion” is crappy advice.
The main idea is that we are all taught to try and figure out what unique purpose we have in life. And that it will be the most fulfilling thing we can do. It will be the career we are meant to pursue. But since this is actually false advice and people do not have a singular purpose it ends up causing loads of problems.
Not the least of these is the fact that people start to doubt themselves and whatever it is they’re doing. Because it doesn’t feel awesome or they’re not automatically good at it.
If “follow your passion” is bad advice, then, what are we meant to do?
The answer seems pretty clear:
Immerse yourself in something. And do it long enough for it to become a part of you.
Why is it so hard to get started?
This idea puts a common problem into perspective. And if I had to sum up that problem…
Our endeavors require internal confidence, and often, internal confidence gets attached to external results that we can’t control.
Or in other words, we have to feel like what we’re doing matters.
And if we think it only matters if we’re getting visible results, we quickly lose motivation. We stop doing the thing, and we stop “loading” our systems to grow.
But if we create internal results for ourselves…
And we understand that the nervous system needs time, intensity, and repetition to adapt…
We will keep moving forward through the hardest part of trying to get better.
We will slog through the first layer of our “skill pyramid.”
We will believe that we can learn regardless of the external results.
And if we push our efforts into discomfort we will start to grow, even if we have no natural “talent.”
How to apply this to your life
1. Keep it in your pocket.
The most important thing you can do is avoid derailing your own efforts. And the only way you can do that, is by replacing negative thoughts that tell you it’s not worth it with the truth…
Attempting one thing until it’s uncomfortable will lead to growth during rest.
The increments will be tiny at first.
It will take a long time to get real results.
But they will come. (Suddenly).
(Notice how I didn’t say “replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts.” It’s more than that… you’re replacing them with the truth.)
Then when you do start seeing wins, notice them. Let them drive you forward. But stay humble… if your ego celebrates too much it will derail you just as quickly.
2. Know that intensity powers plasticity.
The training experience has to have some level of intensity to create any effect.
This applies to memories as much as it does skills.
I was sitting at dinner with some Australians in Sydney and they recounted exactly where they were on September 11th when they learned about the attacks in the USA.
They weren’t doing anything special… but the magnitude of the news kicked their “inner recorder” into high gear.
You probably have a handful of vivid memories attached to important moments yourself.
And this makes sense… if our biology is built for economy, our systems won’t bother growing and changing for mediocre input. So if you’re not pushing into discomfort (and even pain) it’s not going to work.
3. Understand talent.
We love the idea of talent. We love to idolize world champions. We love to tell others about our own talents.
In fact, people who have talents will often argue mercilessly that the only way to get good at stuff is to have talent. This ability defines their identities. So the idea that anyone can get good at their thing threatens that identity.
I’ve been sandbagged by “mentors” who were like this.
But… it is true that there is a level of performance that won’t be accessible to everyone.
And those with talent have an advantage in their “thing.”
If you’re 65 years old and suddenly decide you want to start playing professional tennis as good as a 30 year old who’s been playing 8 hours a day since he was 5… it’s probably not going to happen.
But that’s what I believe talent is… it’s a deep ability within us that ties back to whatever we happened to do a lot when we were very young.
And it’s not like “tennis” is a talent. It’s the small skills that make someone good at tennis. For a talented player, the motor skills, visual cues, and thought processes were wired in at a young age. It’s a bit harder to wire them in that deep at a later age.
So never let comparing yourself to highly-talented people drag down your own efforts.
Even if you do start at a later age, you can develop exceptional abilities in something if you push hard and stay consistent.
“Talent” isn’t required to compete at a high level, get paid well, or be regarded as an expert in something. But hard work and consistency is.
4. Remember it’s OK to stop and rethink your investment.
So you’ve decided on some skill or knowledge base that you want to become awesome at.
For whatever reason you feel some desire to tackle the project… but keep in mind that during the process, that desire may change.
You’re going to find out things about that skill as well as yourself, and it will be a journey. And it may end up being something that actually isn’t worth it.
You have talents and characteristics within you. And while they don’t have to align with what you spend your time doing for you to be happy, they will have an impact.
Is your desire to do that thing worth the lack of talent you have at the start?
Did you truly understand the thing that you wanted?
Are the little trade-offs and downsides of that thing miserable for you?
It’s always OK to refocus.
And on a different note…
Even if you float from thing to thing and never become exceptional at one…
You can still be an awesome human being and have a fulfilling life.
How raw garlic is like learning
I’ll leave you with this summary:
If you put raw chopped garlic on top of your steak, it kind of sucks.
It’s too strong. It overpowers the other flavors. It’s a bit tangy, in a bad way.
But if you cook it in… it’s freakin delicious.
If you think about it, this is a lot like learning. Or at least, it’s like the way learning actually is. The way people need to see it.
You see, when you’re learning, the first part of the process is hard work.
It’s forcing yourself to read despite your mind wandering. It’s stumbling constantly while trying to skip rope. It’s forgetting what the knight does in your first game of chess. It’s a bit tangy, in a bad way. And it can leave you thinking, this is unpleasant and I’m getting nowhere… I should do something else.
You have to cook it in. Meaning, you have to sleep on it. You have to let your nervous system grow. You need to give your biology time to integrate the lessons.
One thing is for sure…
I don’t care WHO you are or WHAT you think about yourself…
You can learn to develop a meaningful level of ability in anything.
It’s up to you to dial down the number of things you’re trying to do at the same time.
It’s up to you to eliminate toxic habits or people who suck up your time and attention.
And it’s up to you to act despite your inner fears when they stand in your way.
Because that’s what it will take to get those big superficial results… you have to LIVE it.
Don’t try and 80/20 the whole thing. Focus… if you are deciding to become proficient at something, do it for real.
Never forget that it will take time.
Do NOT let yourself believe it’s not in you.
Oh… and be sure, one day, to teach your children this too :)
