The Art and Science of Learning Anything Faster (#191)

I am interested, Tarique. Can you copy and paste it in this page (as another comment entry) ? I am guessing Tim Ferriss wouldn’t mind. Thank you in advance.

Here is the Transcription of the Audio (Hope u will not mind for few of my mistakes) I skipped the sponsorship intro.

The Art and Science of Learning Anything Faster

Meta or Meta Learning;

Meta is where you will learn to mimic the world’s fastest learners. It is possible to become world class in just about anything in 6months or less, it is based on everything I have done and everything I have seen armed with the right framework you can seemingly perform miracles whether it is Spanish, swimming or anything in-between.

Smart design became one of the top industrial design frames in the world by being you guessed it smart with locations in New York, San Francisco and Barcelona – Smart design represents clients ranging from snowboards to Starbucks.

The company has also been strategic partners with Oxen international since 1989 that ubiquitous line of good kitchen wear with the comfy black handles, the one that covers an entire wall of Bed, Bath and beyond – yeah they made those. In the documentary objectified Dan Famousa PHD then with smart designs research department explained one of the first steps in its innovation process –“we have clients coming to us and saying here is our average consumer for instance female she is 34years old she has 2.3 kids and we look at him politely and say well that’s great but we don’t care out that person – what we really need to do to design is look at the extremes the weakest or the person with arthritis or the athlete – the strong, faster person because if we understand what the extremes are the middle will take care itself”.

In other words the extreme form the means but not vice versa that quote average user can be deceptive or even meaningless just as all averages can be – here is a statistician joke for your next hot date –

Person A; what happens when Bill Gates walks into a bar with 55 people?

Person B; I don’t know what,

Person A; The average net worth jumps to more than a billion dollars (laughs) it is not exactly Chris Rock but the joke makes an important point.

Sometimes it pays to model the outliners not flatten them into the averages, this isn’t limited to business – take for instance the seemingly average 132 pound girl who ended up anything but average –not to listener imagine average looking high school girl here, her picture was sent to me by Barry Ross a sprint coach, or track and field coach who creates world record breaking athletics to illustrate an ab exercise called the torture twist. He nonchalantly added on the phone ‘oh yeah and she dead lifts more than 400 pounds for repetition’ what for those of you not familiar with the dead lift Google Mark Bell – even more impressive she developed this worldly power the wrong way at least according to all conventions.

Rather than train the conventional full range of motions she focused on only the weakest strength of motion lifting the bar to knee height and then lowering it. Total muscular tension actual weight lifting was limited to 5 minutes per week, this all makes our average looking high-schooler extreme – but the real question is was she an exception?

In the outside world absolutely even in track and field she was a total freak, had she been thrown into a study with 40 random selected sprinters she would have been a ridiculous exception must have been a measurement error the baby would get thrown out with the bath water but WWBF what would Warren Buffet say – I suspect the oracle of Omaha would say what he said at Columbia university in 1984 when mocking proponents in the efficiency of marketing hypothesis.

First he pointed out that yes value investors that is DVT of Benjamin Graham and David Dodd who constantly beat the market are outliners but then he posed a question which I have condensed here

“What if there was a nationwide competition in coin flipping? 250million flippers in total in the population of the US, each flipping once per morning and we found a select few – say 215 people who flipped 20 straight winning flips – flips for the results was guessed correctly on 20 mornings” then he continued “Some business school professor will probably be rude enough to bring up the fact that 225million orang-utans that engage in a similar exercise the results will be much the same. 215 egotistical orang-utans with 20 straight winning flips- There are some important differences in the example of value investors that I am going to present for one thing if A. You are taking 225 million orang-utans distributed roughly as the US population is, if B. 215 winners were left there for 20days and here if for emphasis if C. You found that 40 came from a particular zoo in Omaha you would be pretty sure that you were on to something”

So you would probably go and ask the zoo keeper about what he is feeding them, whether they have special exercises, what books they read and who knows what else –if you found any really extraordinary concentrations of success you might want to see if you can identify concentrations of unusual characteristics that might be cause or factors.

So back to our sprint coach Barry Ross, he has the most unusual zoo; in fact he can engineer mutants at will. His best female distance runner has dead lifted 415pounds at a body weight of 132 pounds. His youngest male lifter 11 years old has dead lifted 225 pounds at a body weight of 108 pounds. So our extreme high-schooler is the same standard in his gym, this naturally led me to ask could I a non elite runner average possibly replicate her results? I tried and it worked flawlessly.

In less than 12 weeks with no coach and following a print out from Barry, I went from a max lifter of 300 pounds to more than 650 pounds. Just about everything you need to know about Meta Learning can be understood or at least observed by watching two videos on YouTube related to freestyle swimming of all things.

The first is from Michael Phelps you probably know that name, and the second is from Shinzu Takei Young a much lesser known name. Phelps makes sense but who the hell is Shinzu Takei Young, Phelps learned to swim at the tender age of 7, Shinzu on the other hand learned to swim at the ripe age of 37, more interesting to me Shinzu learned to swim by learning practically the opposite of Phelps. Shinzu leads his drive arm forward almost 2 feet beneath the water, rather than grabbing near the surface and pulling.

Rather than focusing on kicking Shinzu appears to have eliminated it all together – no paddleboard work outs to be found, Shinzu often does freestyle stroke with closed fists or by pointing his index finger forward and keeping the arms entirely under water Phelps on the other hand looks like he is attached to an outboard motor it is a heroic output of horse power, Shinzu has been watched millions of times because he offers the flip side effortless propulsion. So who would you rather have as a teacher Phelps or Shinzu? Arthur Jones founder of Novelist ‘ How to gain muscle mass quickly ‘recommends the following and I paraphrase –‘ approach the biggest body builder at your gym ideally a ripped 250-300 pound professional and politely ask him for detailed advice then do exactly the opposite.

If the T-Rex size meat head recommends 10 sets do one set, if he recommends post work out protein consume 3 workout proteins so on and so forth. Jones tone and cheek parable was used to highlight one of the dangers of hero worship and that is top 1% often succeed despite how they train and not because of it.

Superior genetics which is a luxurious full time schedule to make up for a lot, this is not to say that Phelps isn’t technical – everything needs to be flawless to an 18goal medals of course. It’s the people that are a few rungs down that are the best to realistically have access to that we need to be wary of.

Then there is the second danger of hero worship, career specialists often cant externalise what they internalise, the second nature is very hard to teach and this is true across industries as Erik Cosselmon Executive Chef of Kokkari my favourite Greek Restaurant in San Francisco said to me when I did my novice questioning “the problem with me is that I have always been a cook, I don’t remember ever wanting to be something else. Daniel Burka a designer at Google and the co founder of tech start up called Milk echoes the sentiment ‘ I don’t think I would be particularly good at teaching the basics of CSC a language used for the formatting of web pages, now I do 12 things at once and they all make sense.

I can’t remember which one of those were confusing when I was just starting out , these top 1.0 % have spent a lifetime honing their craft they are invaluable in later stages but they are not ideal if you want to rocket of the ground floor.

The Shinzu Takei Young on the other hand are the rare anomalies who have gone from zero to global top 5% in record time despite mediocre raw materials are worth their weight in gold. I have spent the last 15 years finding the Shinzu’s of the world and trying to model them. Inhaling hormones what would go wrong, my interest in accelerated learning started at a bio chemical level.

In 1996 as a planned neuron science major at Princeton University I became experimenting with a panoply smart drugs otherwise known as nar-tropics I imported to the US under the FDA personal importation policy. Footnote – this is not something I recommend, one mistake and you are illegally trafficking drugs which is always frowned upon.

Back to the text after 4 weeks I had fine tuned a routine for Mandarin Chinese character quizzes – 15minutes prior to class I would administer two hits of Vaporised Desmopressin in each nostril Desmopressin is a synthetic version of Vasopressin a naturally occurring antidiuretic peptide hormone as a nasal spray it is often prescribed for children who bed wet past a certain age, not my problem I was more interested in its off label applications for long term memory, putting theory into practise it looked like this –

Step number 1 – Two hits of Desmopressin in each nostril

Step number 2 – flip through characters in a book called Chinese Prima character text almost as quickly as I could turn the pages.

Step number 3 – score 100% in a quiz 5-10minutes later – footnote if you would like the opposite effect go binge drinking perhaps excessive alcohol inhibits vasopressin release which explains the peeing every 10minutes followed by time travel I.E blacking out or forgetting everything.

Back to my quizzes this method was fantastically reliable but after a few minutes of testing hydrogen, And combination of dozens of other drugs surprise, surprise headaches set in and thought set in. Perhaps snorting antidiuretic hormones isn’t the best long term strategy and my dorm room bathroom had also started to resemble a meth lab which was repelling girls a very high priority at the time.

So I shifted my obsession from molecules to process, was it possible to develop a sequence or blue print that would allow me to learn anything faster – any subject, any sport, anything at all I suspected so. I glimpsed one piece of the puzzle 4 years earlier in 1992.

Material beats method – in 1992 I was 15 years old and I had landed in Japan for my first extended trip abroad, I would be an exchange Student at (place name) school for 1 year for those interested it is in Kichijoji on the first day of classes I reported to the faculty lounge in a required navy blue uniform looking like a west point cadet high collar the whole 9 yards. I nervously awaited my student chaperone who would be taking me to my home class with a group of 40 or so students I would be spending most of my time with. One of the faculty members notices me sitting in the corner ah (Japanese)he said with a way Kun is kind of like son but used to address male inferiors (Japanese’s) this is as he pointed out a mysterious piece of paper. I could barely manage Greetings so he hailed an English teacher to explain the document. The page was written entirely in characters that I couldn’t read, detailed my daily schedule as it turned out.

Then the English teacher translated physics, mathematics, world history, traditional Japanese and on it went, and then is when panic set in. I only had a few months of rudimentary Japanese prior to arrival and my teachers in the US had reassured me with don’t worry you will have plenty of Japanese Classes, now irretrievably in Tokyo I realised I was dealing with a major lost in translation screw up “Japanese Classes’ hadn’t meant Language classes.

For the entire year ahead I was to attend normal Japanese high school classes alongside 5000 Japanese students prepping for University exams so this is when I pooped my pampers. I proceeded to flounder horribly just as I failed Spanish in junior high. Sadly as a lot of people concluded it seemed I was simply bad at languages. 6 months into my exchange I was ready to go home.

Then lady luck smiled upon me, I stumbled upon a poster while looking for the book of 5 rings written by Miyamoto Musashi in (place)) this poster which I still have on my wall 20 years later contained all 1945 of the Kyoiku kanji the characters designated for basic literacy by the Japanese Ministry of Education .

Most newspapers and magazines limit themselves using the Kyoiku kanji so for all practical purposes this means if you know the meaning of the characters on this one poster you know Japanese including all the most important verbs – Japanese on one page so to me Holy Shit that was quite the discovery – language is infinitely expansive much like cooking and therefore horribly overwhelming if unfiltered this poster was a revelation – it brought to light the most important lesson language learning and that is what you study is more important than how you study .

Students are subordinate to materials much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes, if you select the wrong material, the wrong text book, the wrong group of words it doesn’t matter how much or how well you are studying, it doesn’t matter how good your teacher is one must find the highest frequency material – material beats method.

The authors of most Japanese learning books appear to think reading the Hashishi moon that is the Hashishi newspaper was the only literacy test that needs mastering, for a high school student and even now for that matter reading the Hashishi moon is as interesting as watching paint dry.

Fortunately as long as you hit the highest frequency material I learnt that content matters very, very little. My (unclear) turned out with Judo textbooks though the vocabulary think ingredients was highly specialised I eclipsed the grammatical ability 4 and 5 years students of Japanese after 2 months of studying Judo why? Because the grammar think cooking methods were universal, the principles transferred to everything else.

I came back to the US after Tokyo and scored higher in the Japanese SAT2 then a friend who was a native speaker, by high school graduation in 1995 I have developed two simple lenses through which I have used language learning methods and learning in general.

Number 1; is the method effective? Have you narrowed down your material the highest frequency? Second is the method sustainable? Have you chosen a schedule and subject matter that you can stick with or put up with until reaching fluency? Will you actually swallow the pill you prescribe yourself in other words?

Alas there is still one last missing piece efficiency if effectiveness is doing the right things efficiency is doing things right, Martin Luther King JR famously remarked ‘Just as to long delayed is just as denied ‘learning is similar speed determines its value even with the best materials if your time to fluency is 20 years your return on investment ROI is terrible. Though 1996 heralded itself with vasopressin and its cousins taking me to the bio chemical level for immediate payoff it wasn’t until 1999 that I returned to the hardest part – the most slippery element of the puzzle the method again – thinking of efficiency.

The catalyst came serendipitously one even on Weatherspoon Street in downtown Princeton. I was heads down working on my senior thesis a sexy paper entitled “Acquisition of Japanese Kanji, conventional practice and mnemonic supplementation and I developed a phone friendship with Doctor Bernie Feria then director of curriculum and development at the world headquarters of Bartlett international conveniently located only miles from Campus.

He invited me out to a jacket and tie dinner, I put on my fanciest corduroys and my ill fitting sports coat and a counterfeit polo shirt.

It was a glorious feast and Bernie was a gracious host, he knew his languages and the red wine flowed which I couldn’t afford at the time by the way. We shared war stories from linguistic trenches, lessons learns, comedic mistakes and cultural fax par. Bernie shared his adventures and I told him about the time I asked my Japanese host mother to rape me at 8am the next morning. Just (Japanese) to rape was not (Japanese) to wake up. He roared and it went on and on and by the time desert came around Bernie poised and said “you know it is a shame you are not graduating earlier as we have this project starting soon and you would be perfect for”

The project was helping them redesign there introductory to Japanese Curriculum which doubled as an opportunity to revisit their English Curriculum which then accounted for 70% of the roughly 5 million lessons a year and 320 language centres around the globe.

Imagine wondering into your local guitar shop and approaching the high school intern behind the counter;

“Hey Kid how would you like to tune the erm London Philharmonic Orchestra, they have a live gig in Central Park next week and it will be broadcast to over 50 countries you in?”

I felt like that kid, so much too perhaps my parents (word not clear) at least briefly I left Princeton in the middle of my senior year, just months before graduation to pursue this love of language. I worked for Bartlett then itching to test new ideas immediately travelled to Taiwan where many of the piece started to fall into place for DISSS which I will explain shortly.

Then I did something odd, I applied the same DISSS process to learning kick boxing and then less than 2 months later won the Chinese National Kickboxing championships at 165 pounds – lets fast forward to 2005 I spent 6 years testing different approaches to natural languages, here is what my acquisition language time looked like in order using standardise testing in all but Chinese. Japanese 1 year, Mandarin Chinese 6 months, German 3 months, Spanish 8 weeks, now you must recall at age 15 I had failed to learn enough Spanish to hold a basic conversation, now people were applauding me for being good at languages or congratulate me on “being gifted”.

It was pretty hysterical to me I just had a better instruction manual it had nothing to do with my raw attributes in 2005 I travelled the world as a digital nomad in an experience that I later chronicled in the in four hour work week, I focused on language to conquer the loneliness it ranged from Irish Gaelic to Norwegian, to German, to Spanish to including (name) dialect in Argentina – anything that I came into contact with, the refine which continued to 2010 and the present. I vetted the process on Turkish, Greek and other languages in short of one to two week periods the dis-process I used was effective for acquiring the clarities that is facts and figures knowledge for instance memorising serial numbers or remember where your car is parked.

It also worked incredibly well for what is known as procedural or action knowledge for instance practising judo, riding a bike, driving a car – it even worked for hybrids such as writing Chinese characters. None of this is said to impress you, it is said to impress upon you however that there is a repeatable process that hundreds of readers that is of my blog and my books have used to replicate my results.

It is possible to become world class and to the top 5percent of performers in the world in almost any subject within 6-12 months or even in some cases 6-12 weeks there is a recipe and the real recipe in this book and that is DISSS, and the recipe for learning any skill is encapsulated in this acronym.

How to remember it? The 1980s cultural contribution to modern English DISS to diss someone, just remember diss with an extra S that is DISSS. If you are a gamer and know PS3 that is Playstation3 just think of DS3.

So here is the sequence D stands for Deconstruction and in that step you answer the question what are the minimal learnable units? The Lego blocks I should be starting with. The first S is Selection, which 20% of the block should I focus on for 80% or more of the outcome I want.

You may have noticed that we ignored the I but just use it to remember the word, the second S is sequencing – in what order should I learn the blocks? And then the last S is Stakes, how do I set up Stakes? How do I set up Stakes to create real consequences and guarantee that I follow the programme? CAFE – there are several secondary principles that are very helpful, I use all 3 constantly others are not required.

Here CAFE is the acronym so you can think of it as a secondary framework for accelerated learning further the first C – the only C I suppose stands for compression. Can I encapsulate the most important 20% into an easily graspable one pager? F – Frequency – how frequently should I practise – can I cram and what should my schedule look like, what growing pains can I predict. What is the minimum effective dose otherwise known as the MED for the volume, and the E stands for encoding- How do I anchor the new material that I already know for rapid recall Acronym like CAFE and DISSS are examples of encoding.

Deconstruction is best thought of as exploration, this is where we throw a lot on the wall to see what sticks, where we flip things upside down and look at what the outliers are doing differently and also what they are doing at all. First and foremost is where we answer the question ‘ how do I break this Amorphous so called skill into small manageable pieces?’ just as with literal deconstruction taking a building apart for instance or demolishing something breaking it apart whatever it might be dissecting something you need the tools to do the job.

In our case one of the best tactics is interviewing – here is a real world example of how I have used interviewing to learn just about any skill and I include the exact questions that I asked and still ask. A while back this was probably a few years ago I was sharing drinks with start up Naval Ravikant – you may have met the guy co founder of Angel List.co you can check them out. We were discussing the deconstruction of various skills when he had a random suggestion if you ever want to deconstruct basketball I have the DVD for you – better basketball and that is how a lot got started.

Now ever since 7th grade when a PE teacher told me I dribbled like a caveman, which I did I had written basketball off so I said thanks but no thanks and that was my answer to Nivvie , but low and behold 3 years later I found myself watching a Lakers game with my friend Kevin Rose and his wife Daria a Laker fanatic – there dog even had a Lakers jersey on and it was then that I had an epiphany even if I have 0 interest in playing basketball, perhaps learning the fundamental over a weekend would allow me to love watching it.

That is when I asked Nivvie to point me to the master Rick Torbit the founder of Better Basketball – Rich has coached entire teams to shoot better than 40% for 3 consecutive seasons – to put that in perspective in the last decade only one NBA team the Phoenix Suns came close to 40% from the 3 point line.

To dissect his unusual success and his process I started by emailing a bunch of interview questions the answers to which I will share with you in a moment but let’s start with the general process. First create a list of people to interview it seems self evident I suppose if you are going to go with high level athletics for instance 1 use Wikipedia to find out who is the best or second best that is often ideal in the world 5-10 years ago or 2-4 Olympics ago since those currently in the limelight are less likely to respond.

Number 2 – search Google for “insert city, insert sport, insert Olympian, or world champion” hypothetically I might search for San Francisco Bob Sledge Olympian which gets me to a team doctor perfect for a first lead. Next step make first contact and provide context ‘Dude do me a favour’ is not a compelling pitch as much as I receive it myself, the proposed interview should somehow benefit your contact the path of least resistance is to freelance writer for a blog, newsletter or local newspaper and do a piece on this person and his or her methods or to quote him and her on a topic as an expert for instance expert predication for winter Olympics or something like that.

Once you are in the door ask your expert all the questions you like are you terrible at writing? No problem make it a Q & A format and print the relevant questions and answers on the other hand if they coach and do hourly consultations you can also just pay for a telephone or Skype session.

Last step ask your questions, when I was looking into ultra endurance for the body I sent different combinations of the following types of questions to people like the legendary Scott Gerick who won the Western States 100 in ? 100 mile races a record 7 times – who is good at ultra running despite being poorly built for it. Who is good at this and who shouldn’t be?

Who are the most controversial or unorthodox runners or trainers? Why? What do you think of them?

Who are the most impressive lesser known teachers? What makes you different? Who trained you? Have you trained others to do this? Have you replicated your results? What are the biggest mistakes and myths that you see in ultra running training? What are the biggest wastes of time? This is a really important one.

What are your favourite instructional books or resources on that subject? If people had to teach themselves what would you suggest they use? If you were to train me for 4 weeks for a fill in the blank competition and had million dollars on the line what would the training look like?

What if I trained for 8 weeks – in the case of basketball I started by sending Rick 4 questions related to shooting. Number 1 – First what are the biggest mistakes novice’s makes when shooting or practising shooting? What are the biggest misuses of time? That should sound familiar. Number 2 – Even at the pro level what mistakes are most common what are your key principles for better and more consistent shooting?. What are they for foul shot? Free throws that is versus 3 pointers. What does the progression of exercises look like? that is the fourth and the final .

I received his email responses in and two days later hit 9 out of 10 free throws for the first time in my life, then on Christmas eve I went bowling and many of the same principles applied – remember we talked about transfer scored 124 my first time over 100 and well above my usual 50/70 points embarrassing yes.

Upon returning home I immediately went outside and sunk the first 2 3 pointers of my life. For Lakers games with the Roses I now see a ballet of kinaesthetic beauty that was completely invisible before – that is a hell of a lot of fun.

@Tim Ferriss, you are right. Why not buy the book? $10 is nothing. And while the book is out there, getting the transcript is pointless. It might even come across as being cheap. I will get a copy.