Tim Ferriss shares how to master any skill by deconstructing it | The Next Web

so I showed that video primarily for the wine at the end how excited is everyone about drinking after this whole thing is wrapped up yeah okay this presentation is about emulating the world's fastest learners and trying to decipher the recipe if there is one that they share in common and in fact at least from what I've seen it is possible by emulating these people to become world class in almost any scale and by world class I mean top five percent in the general population in six to twelve months and that sounds ridiculous but even recently yesterday made an announcement that in partnership with a company called memorize which is based out of the UK built software for teaching people how to memorize a shuffled deck of cards and for context the u.s. record up until very recently and we're not as dumb as we look was roughly one minute and forty seconds and in five days had a twenty four-year-old out of the Ukraine learned how to do it in less than 60 seconds so it is possible to do some pretty impressive things by embracing what I call in this case the for our ethos and this is an optimal minimalism okay this photograph or pair of photographs that you see here is actually of a linear restaurant which when I wrote the 4-hour chef was the number one ranked restaurant in the United States we'll come back to why that is relevant but in the meantime as we go through this what I'd like everyone to do is hold in mind one skill that you would like to acquire or that perhaps you've given up on whether that's learning to play the guitar learning to speak another language like Spanish could be anything the guiding tenets for all of this is questioning the obvious question best practices what if I did the opposite here's a quote one of my favorites from Mark Twain whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority it's time to pause and reflect and we'll do that several times throughout this presentation you can also apply this thinking to business just for those of you who may be wondering how can I apply this to my professional life these are just a few startups that I advise or have invested in among 30 or so the first Evernote how do we put all of our money what if we took all of our money and put it into product development as opposed to marketing and PR could we give away something for free that's good enough for 99% of our users and the answer is of course yes uber instead of creating something from whole cloth how can we capitalize on excess capacity much like TaskRabbit another company that I use what if what if what if duolingo some of you may know caption reCAPTCHA those forms you have to fill out that prove you're not a robot the inventor of that Luis von Ahn started duolingo which does two things simultaneously teaches you how to learn a foreign language for free and then translates the web for everyone else to read in other languages automatic last but not least they're the people behind wordpress.com they power about 17% of the internet if you include the the.org side of things what if your entire company were virtual and instead of that being a weakness you were able to use that as a selling point so you can actually spend that money on other things to recruit the best talent so this applies far beyond the classroom my interest in performance enhancement started at the biochemical level this is vasopressin or its synthetic version desmopressin which you saw in the video that I was snorting through my nostril and it is prescribed for bedwetting children it passed a certain age that's not why I personally used it but I used it based on my research into time travel but you weren't expecting time travel some of you may experience this this evening where you have one too many drinks and you're here and then all of a sudden you're at 7-eleven then all of a sudden you're staring at yourself in your mirror and you don't remember 90% of what happened that's because alcohol inhibits vasopressin it's also why you pee so much if you drink a lot of alcohol and my hypothesis was that if I took one or two shots of this in each nostril I should be able to on the opposite end improve short-term memory which I was able to do so I would take one or two shots before taking Chinese character quizzes flip through the pages almost as quickly as I could turn them and score 90 200 % as you might imagine this isn't the best long-term strategy and so at that point this is my sophomore year in college I began to look for anomalies in the world of learning that I might emulate to find a method the first step is being very very confident and you have to have some optimism that you can actually achieve what you might perceive goes beyond your limitations in this particular case in the world of athletic performance turns out however that genetics even are oftentimes negotiable you need to establish a baseline and to take a realistic inventory of what your strengths and weaknesses are this is in the Sports Science Institute of South Africa that is my right leg I'm filming this on a flip cam back when they were relevant and it's anesthetized I encourage you to look away if you're easily nauseated but I'd been told effectively by 23andme and Navigenics that I lack the ability to produce fast twitch muscle fiber which I would need for any type of power training sorry you lost the genetic lottery you cannot eat because of a nonsense allele with actin three become very good at power sports I decided to actually test this and have tissue removed from my leg to go past the theorizing you don't have to do this this is just an example of how far I've taken this being a human guinea pig over the last few years this is a muscle biopsy and the way it's done is they take a hollow tube insert it into your leg apply a vacuum and then twist off the muscle tissue inside doesn't actually hurt because you don't have pain receptors on the inside of your leg thankfully if you feel it the next day though doesn't feel very good the next day at all what you hear of course is not Dutch for those of you who aren't Dutch that's Afrikaans why I did all right so it's Tim tartare as I started calling it a punch you start and the upshot of it was turns out because of my training I had roughly forty to between 60 at 40 and 60% faster falsifiable all trainable okay so let's go to the next this is very different from the bodybuilder you saw who based on attributes things you cannot copy was was big and large he also had some some chemical enhancement I'm sure in this case this is a normal-looking high school girl very normal-looking not normal in performance this was sent to me by coach Barry Ross in Los Angeles she weighs about 130 pounds so let's just call that 50 55 kilos and can deadlift meaning pull 400-plus pounds so let's just call that 200 kilos off the ground for repetitions and she's not a mutant she is not a freak of nature barry ross is able to take almost all of his athletes to that point realizing this I felt very masculine of course and once I got over that decided to try to examine the technique is this something that I could apply to myself and it was I took the exact same method which was questioning the obvious rather than pulling from here to here which a lot of trainers recommend it's a strongest range of motion they would pull from the ground only about 4 or 5 inches up and then drop the weight and I added more than 50 kilos to my maximum deadlift in less than three months back to cooking you wouldn't think that would have anything in common with cooking but it does so this is a table at a linear restaurant and chef Grant Achatz along with this co-founder Nick OCONUS questioned everything they questioned everything in their restaurant instead of getting the menus at the beginning you get the menus at the end instead of limiting themselves to plates they design their own custom service where they wanted to make a four foot wide plate problem was it would couldn't get in and out of the kitchen so they instead found hypoallergenic latex originally I believe from a sex shop in Paris imported it and turned the table into the plate as you see here they also apply that to business so after Alinea they they actually found a restaurant called next and if you look at the primary costs or losses in a restaurant a few of them are four tops I four-seaters that only have three people out them and then no shows people who reserve and don't show up so they decided to sell all of their seats as tickets almost like the like us like season tickets to the Opera or to sports games and they sold them online guess how long it took to sell out their entire season for next not one week not one day not one hour 10 seconds they sold out their entire inventory for the entire season in 10 seconds again this applies to everything this is a type of thinking and when you learn to think creatively about one thing this is actually something that happened during my meal at Alinea you start thinking creatively about everything else I had weeks of design deadlock for the cover of my book and after one one very peculiar dish at Alinea was able to sketch this out I had my breakthrough and it became the cover so this type of this type of thinking question the obvious transfers everywhere else the method that I have arrived at after 15 20 years of testing looking for a method a framework that could be applied to everything from language learning to sports is this up here dis and it's an acronym with the exception of I and we'll go through each in turn the first step is deconstruction deconstruction means taking something very very large and breaking it down into smaller pieces it also means identifying why you might fail before you start what are the reasons that you've quit what are the reasons other people have failed and the goal look at swimming the goal is to avoid those problems for at least the first five sessions that's it this is based on Nike+ data once you log your data or just practice in this case for five sessions that can be very short you can establish that as a habit that's your goal avoid these failure points for the first five sessions so for swimming in my case I didn't learn to swim until a few years ago just very embarrassing for someone who grew up on Long Island with a rat tail it was always due to difficulty breathing and exhaustion from kicking all of the lessons I tried focused on those things and I failed so I found a method which is called Total Immersion swimming that completely avoids it and you practice by practicing in shallow water and then kicking off from the wall you don't have to worry about breathing you don't have to worry about kicking it looks like this streamline left to streamline right and repeat almost no kicking involved now I can go swimming for an hour in the ocean to relax it's crazy you can apply this everywhere in cooking for instance it could be too much gear too much expense too much time and it's also a matter of realizing that cooking as we think of it is not just one skill for most people it's shopping prep cooking cleanup so you need to take those away so you're only focusing on the cooking in the beginning the next is selection and selection is in effect the 80/20 principle or Pareto's law where you're trying to identify the 20% or fewer of activities tools etc that produce 80% or more of the results and you can you can determine this pretty easily there's a lot of research looking at different fields searching for exactly this the axis of Awesome some of you may know the awesomest band in australia perhaps if you've ever wanted to learn to play the guitar as I had for a very very long time found it intimidating for whatever number of reasons the axis of Awesome has a video online you can find on YouTube very easily where they use four or five chords to play almost every pop song you've ever heard all the most popular pop songs you can imagine and they play them with four or five chords that is an example of minimalism another example of minimalism would be language learning so to become really functionally fluent in almost any language you really only need 1,200 to 2,000 words to express any concept and to understand most concepts communicated to you this is Cardinal mitzvah fonti Giuseppe Metz Avanti born 1774 and he he was an incredible guy one of the most famous polyglots in the world he'd been tested in 29 languages fluent in 29 and was purported to speak as many as 72 how did he do it you can't exactly go to amazon.com in 1774 and buy materials he did it by using the Lord's Prayer he had the Lord's Prayer and that to him in one page encapsulated all the fundamental grammar in any language and you would have native speakers simply translate that for them and I took a very similar approach with languages in these twelve or thirteen sentences I've applied this to Spanish to German to Gaelic and I don't necessarily recall and retain all these languages but I have done it with four or five that I've wanted to pursue to fluency this encapsulate Saul the most important grammar is its subject object verb subject verb object indirect object treatments and so on and you can you can completely be construct and in select in effect the grammar of given language and let's say one to two hours here these are from from from flights with Arabic and Russian including the Cyrillic alphabet it's very straightforward keeping in mind also that I had actually failed effectively Spanish when I had to take it in junior high in high school I'd concluded that I was bad at languages I wasn't bad at languages I just had a bad method so the minimalism the 8020 approach can be applied to gear as well as it applies to cooking and I chose cooking by the way to explore accelerated learning in the 4-hour chef because it had beaten me many times before something I quit many times so I wanted to take that on as challenge you don't need an entire set of 1215 pots or pans to cook effectively and in fact when I was doing research for this book which took me from Tokyo to Silicon Valley to India and elsewhere in the in the best Thai restaurant India the executive chef uses two stainless steel skillets and a chef's knife Victorinox chef's knife that you could buy at Walmart for $20 that's it you don't need a lot cast iron skillet basic knife you're set in terms of coffee just for those people who might like coffee you see a number of tools here that I've used I recommend the Aeropress and all you need to remember is that you're grinding each serving not grinding in advance and then using water that is 180 degrees Fahrenheit or less so that's about 82 degrees Celsius I believe someone else can check that I'm sure and you won't ever have bitter coffee again the next is sequencing this is the secret sauce in a lot of ways and the question you ask here is what if I did things in the opposite order what if I omitted what people tell me are best practices and this has been applied elsewhere it in manufacturing for instance with lean manufacturing with Toyota this is Josh Waitzkin one of my favorite people Josh if you've ever seen the movie searching for Bobby Fischer or read the book is the chess prodigy from that book he's the little kid turns out that he has a framework it's not that he has the inherent skills alone he's a smart guy he has a framework that he can apply to many many skills and he's since from being one of the world's best chess players applied it to Taichi push hands to become national and world champion it's applied it to Brazilian jiu-jitsu to become the first black belt under Marcelo Garcia who's like the Wayne Gretzky Michael Jordan Tiger Woods combined to Brazilian jiu-jitsu in the case of chess what he did is he learned how to do it completely backwards his first coach took him and said rather than starting with openings that are very seductive and will lead you to memorize things much like stealing the answers from the teacher for a math test we're going to start with board control which means you're going to have pawn and a king versus another pawn and that's how we're going to play so doing things in Reverse actually can be extremely beneficial when I was training for Argentine tango in Argentina this was in 2005 very accidental in fact but I looked at a number of ways that the best people competed what they trained what they taught explicitly versus doing in competition but not teaching and I decided that I thought I could make more progress by learning the female role first so instead of learning the male role first which is a real hassle real pain in the ass and very embarrassing I decided to learn how to follow and I trained one of the best female dancers in the world to learn how to follow and five and a half months later as part of that was able to go to the world championships and make it to the semi-finals I'm not a tango dancer I'm built like a monkey look at me so if I can do it I think you guys could probably do very much the same these next two photographs are related to earning skills under pressure or not learning them under pressure the worst time to learn how to cook or for instance knife skills is when you're under pressure to make a meal it's the worst time to do it you should actually look for opportunities to practice what I call no stakes practice so if you look at this second photograph here I'm learning how to saute which means to jump in French and I'm not doing it over the stove I'm actually practicing the wrist motion with dry beans and a skillet and I'm kneeling on a carpet so they don't fly everywhere on a hardwood floor you do this for 20 minutes two or three times you'll have the motion down and then you can use two hands over the stove and you won't have any problem no omelettes on the walls all right the last photograph knife skills this is something it's very intimidating for people and it need not be intimidating you just need to learn when you can't cut yourself so this is a lettuce knife the green knife is a lettuce knife has the same form factor as the chef's knife next to it so all you have to do is learn how to hold the knife properly which you see here and then practice while you're watching Game of Thrones or whatever the hell you might be watching on TV and just cut celery just get used to cutting celery again do that for 20 minutes 2 or 3 times you'll be comfortable with a knife and then you can use the stuff that can stab people but start with the nose steaks approach speaking of steaks this doesn't mean steak ie piece of cow it means steak like vampire stake through the heart steak or Consequences if you don't stick to your diet what happens you just stay the way that you've been you don't get fired from your diet you don't have someone chastise you necessarily about it of course in your job you do get fired if you don't do something and you therefore are inclined to do it you have an incentive it is extremely extremely effective to build incentives into whatever behavioral change you want your life to whatever skills you want to require this is AJ Jacobs AJ Jacobs is a human guinea pig much like me and in this particular photo or set of photographs he decided for a year to try to follow all the rules in the old and new Testament which is Emily extremely extremely difficult he lives in New York City so the after photo that you see with with the beard there and is when he was dressed in full white robes and had his beard grown out and he did everything in fact when he had to stone adulterers plays a pretty big part in the Bible he was he was at a bit of a quandary because he didn't want to get arrested or just feel guilty or just kill anyone by stoning them and he realized they didn't specify the size of the stones so he got a pocketful of pebbles little tiny pebbles and he went to Central Park asking people if they were adulterers and then he would flick one out them and run away check and AJ following this this is a great book called the year the year of living biblically it's a wonderful book decided he wanted to get in shape and he had never been in shape he had what he described as a Python that swallowed a goat physique which he was not happy with and he didn't need a new special trainer he didn't need a secret technique from the former Soviet Union he needed motivation so AJ is Jewish and he wrote a check to the KKK for $1,000 and gave it to one of his friends and said if I don't lose X number of pounds 30 pounds by it why point in time I want you to mail this to the KKK that's an incentive money is a great incentive as all of you know and you don't have to do what he did you can use a tool like stick comm I have no affiliation with them I'm just a fan stick comm came out of research done by professor at Yale it was initially called The Commitments tour what do you do you set your goal I want to follow ABC diet next you set your stakes so I'm going to take one percent of my pre-tax income and put it into escrow as my stakes my motivation all right then it's not in this in this list right here is you choose an anti charity so you choose a charity that you would rather nuke than give money to that you would hate to have your name on the record for giving money to the most popular and this is not a political statement just following the data is the George W Bush Congressional Library that is the most popular anti charity at the moment so choose whatever you like then you find a referee this could be a merciless friend who's willing to punish you if you don't do what you say you're going to do or it could be someone from the site and then you have support and on you go and I've seen the data from this site when you take someone and apply stakes and a referee their compliance goes from something like 25 up to well over 70% it is it has a huge impact so consequences what's the the overlying principle for all of this it's simplified is to keep things simple and when you're looking for solutions to try to remove things first rather than to add things this is a really really critical principle unless can be no can be more in this particular respect especially for behavioral change this is a sign that I have over one of my doorways in my house simplify and above that I have a knife Y knife because when you make a decision the word decision is related to incision it means to cut off it means to cut away other options and to commit and to focus that's what I recommend all of you do with whatever that skill is that you have in your head still hopefully this is a beautiful example an elegant example of simplification to me this is one of the most delicious scones might think of it as a scone or ash cake in this particular case that was made for me and it was made for me by cliff Hodges who is a former MIT engineer runs a company called adventurer out and this was made in the Santa Cruz Mountains by simply taking a cornmeal which used to provide 75% of the calories for native Californians and laying it directly on top of the embers of a fire and it came out it was absolutely incredible and I think that that's what your results can be as well if you focus on removal so I would encourage you in closing to hold in mind a quote from the author of the little prince I love the little prince what a lot people don't realize is the author was also pioneer in international flight and postal delivery very very smart guy Antoine de saint-exupéry it's my horrible French for you but in English what he said was perfection is achieved not when there's nothing more to add but when there's nothing more to take away and I'll leave you with that thank you very much

Channel: TNW

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Id: DSq9uGs_z0E

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Sadbitcoiner]

This guy is incredibly over rated.