How I Learned 50 New Skills | Mike Boyd | TEDxUHasselt

in my heart here I have the 2019 Guinness Book of World Records I'm not actually in this edition nor am I in any addition however hopefully I can still use this same pressure here we go let me try that again slightly embarrassing there we go that's much bad you know when I learned this trick many many people told me this was a all totally useless trip but you're laughing but as we funded a really great icebreaker for opening up a TED talk so this is my TED talk and this skill took me nine hours and nine minutes to wear exactly how do I know exactly how long it took me to learn this seemingly pointless skill well I actually set up a camera push record and recorded every moment I spent practicing this scale and that's how I was able to quote the type of see I have some footage here of my Earley I was learnin I got slowly bad and then I got really good you get the gist this is actually why do I make videos documented my process of learning skills from scratch this is my job is a real job I assume it is my job I make these YouTube videos I record every moment of my learning process so each month I choose a skill at random from complete scrubs I've never attempted before and I just begin learning a skill recording every single second of it and I edit video down to it five ten fifteen minute video and upload it to my youtube channel I've been doing this for three and a half years and during that time channo has grown substantially now amassing over 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube and I'd like to tell you a little bit about how this all began so I was studying for my master's degree in engineering and I was writing my thesis at the time I'm sure some of you have either done this are going to do this very shortly and it was an agonizing process I was sick and tired of making no progress with my research with calculations with errors and I needed an escape I needed a creative active outdoors escape from the monotony of thesis writing so this is what happened there was a show on television and they were talking about on the show the 10,000 hour rule not sure if any of you have heard of this but it's a common phrase that's chopped around and what it basically states is that it is estimated it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate dedicated practice to become truly world-class at any particular skill and what interested me about this way of quoting tiny was it the magnitude of the time it was however it was the units of measurement I was granular it was it wasn't quoted in years or months or weeks or days it was quoted in hours and then this was so much more tangible to me and our is something I can wrap my head around and our is something I can I have done an hour of practice and so I thought about this idea and it crept into my head a little bit I thought 10,000 hours seems like a bloody long time 1000 hours well as bear $100 still too much what can you learn and something like 10 hours and this is where the idea hatched from so I came up with this idea I've copied this idea where 10,000 hours of practice by its shrink it down to 10 hours so I needed this skill so I chose one at random something I've always wanted to do and that skill was skateboarding chosen skateboard I set myself a milestone and the milestone was the simplest skateboarding trick there it's a sack a flip maybe not the simplest but the second most simple trick and why did was I just sell my camera on a tripod to record and just started practicing and progress was admittedly quite slow eventually I nailed this trick I got it down I was able to do it I was able to land why say I had to do so I took all the footage and I spent time going through it looking at what the progress I was making and I decided to add a little video done but first I added up the duration of each cutlet shot which gave me the total practice time and I was amazed fine that I'd achieved this trick in less than six hours under six hours so why did with all the footage was I edited it all together made a little cute YouTube YouTube video and uploaded it to the platform and this idea this seemed to resonate with people the concept of a guy learning something in X amount of hours average man loves skateboarding in five hours 47 minutes this resonated with people people like this idea so I decided to do more of this thing I did some unicycle then I went on to the Rubik's Cube before moving on to juggling and landed wheelie spending the basketball and three and a bit years later I have learned 50 novel skills from scratch all of which the stories are on my youtube-channel I'm often asked how did you learn all these things how do you turn your hand to so many different things how do you learn so quickly how did you learn to solve a Rubik's Cube blindfolded or how did you learn how to break a wineglass using only your voice the fact that people ask me these questions the fact that I get these questions of how did you manage this provides more insight to the general public's perception of learning and adulthood this is good for me people tend to think that I am special and this is good for a career on YouTube I don't want competition on the platform I want to all to myself it makes my life a little bit easier if people think I'm special maybe they won't try it but here today I'm going to be candid with you and tell you that I am actually an extremely regular person there is one key and very simple difference between me who can do 50 of these skills and you perhaps can't do any of them let me explain my job my strange job which is a job forces me to learn new skills it forces me to do it just in the same way that many other jobs force you to send that horrible email to keep the lights on I need to learn something new that's my thing that's my stick it is the best job in the world I have all the freedom but there is a pressure to get stuff done as with all jobs and I really wanted this career to work for me when I started out with YouTube I really wanted to make a go of this so I was quite key and this slight push to learn and record the video and complete the challenge has had an interesting consequence to my mindset and I want to talk to you about that it removes any hesitation that I might have had before I started learning I don't have time to worry about how I am gonna suck at skiing or how agonizing land and JavaScript will be or how painful jumping in the cold water every morning will be when allowed in to acclimatize to cold water I just don't have time to worry about that sort of thing I just have to start and that's because it's my job there's a there's a pressure to go before this unusual set of circumstances that created this strange pressure I had in my head the same three thoughts that I feel that most people have prior to starting something new learning something new and that is that learning is unpleasant learning is difficult if you have no talent for that particular skill and Lamech takes an enormous lay long time these thoughts that crept into my head would invariably prevent me from starting something new time and time again I would come up with an idea these thoughts to pop into my head and I was just quite there man before I'd even try it and looking back on this this is crazy this is crazy talk but I think that a lot of people experience this sort of pressure prior to start something new why do we think like this why is our default position to assume that we cannot learn change in you I think that we're conditioned to think like this we live in a society of specialists highly skilled people who have honed their skills and their particular field to become experts in that field this is a good thing I'm not hating on this model I want my brain surgeon to be good at brain surgery I want them to have practiced I want the plumber repairing the pipes to be really really good repairing flat pipes I want the air traffic controllers to be really good at controlling planes I hope the politicians that are in Brussels now are gonna start out this mess with Bragg's it might being focused on this problem I want people to be specialists I remember this process of forming a specialist when I was young at school I was promptly placed and the good group from us the middle group for literature and the bottom group for stuff like sports and creative writing and art and so I lived my life believing that I was a math guy who was OK at writing but sucked at sports and art and I focused my efforts on studying things that I was good at and everyone around me supported this idea of a specialist and numbers going on to study maths and science then furthering your education at university by studying mechanical engineer and then entering the engineering industry when I was in my 20s just a lot by the way and everyone around me supported this idea that you do what you're good at the downside of this model for me it has many upsides but the damn side of his model for me was they cultivated a certain mindset if I was a mask guy that meant I couldn't be a creative guy I remember saying things like I can't I can't learn French I have no capacity to learn French because I've used all my points upon maths I genuinely believed that there was archetypal people in the world like an RPG video game where you're assigned stats and choose your character this is why I actually believed I can be very good at certain things at the expense of others I've devoted all my XP points to the technical skills so subsequently I suck at poetry writing in sports it was a compromise that I chose to make to become an engineer and I had to live with that so my thinking was that when learning something I'm signed up my specialism outside of master engineer they would be unpleasant that if I would have no talent for that thing therefore I would be very very difficult for me pickup and it would take a horribly long time to do so but then this YouTube thing happened right and I was forced to change I was forced to change how they thought about learning and picking up new skills I was supposed to have a quick turnaround of content to try lots of different things that's the whole point of my channel that's what I do and I really really wanted this to work so I invested effort and to trying different things thus meant learning things without the hesitation that I might have had earlier on jumping straight into the deep end I had to bypass my usual train of thought off I can't do this because I'm good at this or I was never good at this so I there's no point trying it was out of necessity I couldn't afford to worry about it I was too busy schooling around trying to get my career off the ground and what I found was this works it works this method of just simply ignoring those three thoughts that you might feel before embarking on a new project with when it comes to learning ignoring them that works it's a new mindset when I started doing this and I forgot about what I could and could not do trying out things I thought I would be interested in rather than trying things that I would be naturally good at and I was amazed that what I found learning doesn't suck I can be good or I can be okay a bunch of different things and learning or at least getting to a reasonable skill level it doesn't take that long I've never sang and no in my life but when I was able to smash that wineglass with my voice for the first time I was amazed that I was able to do that I'm not supposed to be able to do that I'm not a music guy I never got my 50 meter badge at swimming lessons at school been 28 years old within six months I taught myself to swim and then I then proceeded to cross a mile wide stretch of freezing cold river and skaaland battling wind waves currents I discovered I was okay a bunch of things I can learn it and I can like to shoot video I can say up lights I could run this business the preconception of what I could and could not do was a mess the XP points they was a load of garbage the byproduct of a highly specialized society thee is these thoughts telling you that you can't do you can't learn to speak French because you studied astrophysics or that you can't write poetry because you can write JavaScript these thoughts and limit you enormous Li the simple act of changing your mindset however you want to do that for me I created a scenario where it was necessary for me to change my mindset however you want to do it try out this is my call to action you will be amazed at the horizon opens up for you and the years of new skill learning that you can do and hobbies that you can explore specialism is something that humans fabricated our hardware our brains are designed to be all runners so choose a skill that you've always wanted to laugh and do not allow yourself to hesitate jump straight in to the deep end start as soon as you can try to avoid there's three common thoughts that tend to creep into the back of people's mind that prevent them from starting and make them throw in the towel before they've even Magana test my PT I believe it can have a substantial impact on your life just by trying the simple simple mindset and it has really worked for me and opened up a whole new range of possibilities including this one today [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 167,913

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Learning, Media, Self improvement

Id: GtOqpvAoQMA

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019