A Monthly Seminar Series, Hosted by Stewart Brand. + About this Series | Subscribe to the Podcast
The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars were started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking; to help nudge civilization toward our goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.
As the times accelerate and we face ever more kaleidoscopic careers, a crucial meta-skill is the ability to learn new skills extremely rapidly, extremely well. That practice has no better exemplar and proponent than Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid-Fat Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. Not surprisingly, he has made himself adept at compelling presentations, this one prepared especially for the Long Now audience.
This talk was given at Marines' Memorial Theater in San Francisco, California on Wednesday September 14, 02011
Video is available to Members. Membership starts at $8/month.
To acquire "the meta-skill of acquiring skills," Ferriss recommends approaching any subject with some contrarian analysis: "What if I try the opposite of best practices?" Some conventional wisdom---"children learn languages faster than adults" (no they don't)---can be discarded. Some conventional techniques can be accelerated radically. For instance, don't study Italian in class for a year before your big Italy trip; just book your flight a week early and spend that week cramming the language where it's spoken. You can be fluent in any language with mastery of just 1,200 words.
That's what Ferriss calls the "minimum effective dose" for learning a language. The equivalent with any skill or goal is worth identifying. A regular 5 minutes of kettlebell swinging can tone the body rapidly; 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking makes your slow-carb diet effective; just 20,000 "early evangelists" for your book in its first 2 weeks guarantees it becomes a best seller.
With any skill, "solve for extremes and anomalies." Look at who's best and how they do it, but especially look for those who are surprisingly good---the wispy girl who can deadlift 405 pounds---because they're doing it with technique rather than genes, and technique is learnable.
How do you manage the self-discipline to bear down on learning a skill? Ferriss suggests you begin by treating your new regime as a trial (vowing permanence can be discouraging)--- give it 2 weeks or 5 serious sessions. By that point early rewards from the discipline will keep you going. You have to measure to detect the rewards ("What gets measured gets managed"--Peter Drucker), and score-keeping lets you make your progress a competitive game with others---which becomes its own motivation. Make public bets about your specific goals, where you'll pay painfully if you fail. "Loss aversion" is a surprisingly powerful incentive.
You can get profound effects in an amazingly short time, Ferriss concluded. "Doing the unthinkable is easier than you think."
PS: A collection of all of these summaries of the SALT talks is available on the Kindle for $3. Foreword by Brian Eno.
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• 1 year, 8 months ago
I was at the talk last Wednesday - it was fantastic! It did seem sort of... off, only considering the audience. The Long Now Foundation is all about long-term thinking, so how really does the meta-skill of learning fit in that framework?
I mean I can come up with a couple ideas, but it wasn't really explicitly expressed in the talk. I think there is a message in there, though, for people creating value in a long-term context: I wrote an article about it here:
http://flowxrg.com/2011/09/19/tim-ferriss-the-long-now-and-how-the-meta-skill-of-learning-will-help-us-save-the-world/
• 1 year, 7 months ago
Ferriss' fast learning appears to result in fast forgetting, and this diminishes its value, to me at least. This quickly acquired skill seems to me the "appearance of wisdom" rather than the real thing.
• 1 year, 6 months ago
It may be hard to say this. I agree with ALL of you above.
What I watched on the video was 45 min of pure BS