I was sitting at my favourite cafe in Takapuna with Renuka’s niece, Marsha.
Marsha was only three and half years old at the time, and happily drinking her um, ‘coffee’, when she looked upwards (as most kids do), and noticed a black object on the glass.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Fungus,” I said.
“Fungus,” she repeated about three-four times.
Then promptly she forgot. And asked again.
Of course I told her it was called fungus. And she nodded happily.
When she went back home to her mother, she ran through the door and said “Mama, I saw a bungus.”
Of course confusion reigned till I stepped in to clarify that it was a fungus.
And Marsha was delighted to correct herself and say the word correctly.
Most adults don’t act like Marsha
They’re defensive. Incredibly defensive.
They’re attacking. And it gets a bit scary how they fight back at times.
They don’t want to make a mistake.
They don’t want to appear in a bad light.
They are insecure. Because if they weren’t insecure, they would have no problem making mistakes. Or letting the world know about mistakes.
Most of us want to appear perfect.
We don’t want to make mistakes.
We don’t want others to learn that we’ve made a mistake.
In effect, we’re dolts.
Even a three and half year old knows better.
In fact the reason why kids have an enormous learning capacity is because they follow a very clear pattern of: 1) Learn
2) Talk
3) Implement
4) Make mistake.
5) Go back to start.
Most kids are smart because they’re professional mistake makers. They live in a world of ‘conscious incompetence’. Most adults are dolts.
They learn less not because they don’t have the time. Or because they have no talent.
They learn less because they can’t be like Marsha.
This isn’t a learner sign: It’s a ‘I’m going to make a mistake’ sign
Think of anything you’ve ever learned.
Anything.
Ever learned.
And the only way you’ll have learned it is by making a mistake.
Look at the act of learning the alphabet.
Speaking; walking; running; talking; dancing, and just about anything.
And you’ll never be able to point out even one instance in your entire life that was learned without making a mistake.
This idea of willfully making a mistake scares the heck out of most people.
It literally means that you have to make mistakes—and that if you don’t make mistakes you can’t learn. If you can’t learn, you can’t acquire a new talent. If you can’t acquire a new talent, you remain exactly where you are.
Are you scared?
You should be.
Because the younger you are, the less you’re afraid of making mistakes. The older you get, the more you tell your brain it’s bad to make a mistake. The older you get, the more you feel you have to learn something quickly, and correctly the first time.
Yet that’s not the way the brain learns at all.
The only way the brain learns is through actively making mistakes. The brain’s most powerful tool is to make the mistake, recognise the mistake, and then try to remember the mistake. This is so that it doesn’t make the mistake again, or doesn’t create mistakes of an equal intensity.
This process needs time and effort.
The smaller, and simpler the task, the quicker the brain is able to eliminate mistakes. The more complex the task, the more time and effort is required to make the mistake, recognise it, remember it and finally correct it.
And yet the correction factor is almost never 100%.
So let’s say you’re learning a new dance step for instance. The brain has to first goof up. Once it has goofed up, it has to recognise the goof up, or it won’t improve. Once recognition sets in, all your neurons have to fire in the right sequence to memorise this mistake.
The more you muck up the dance step, the more your brain has to work out what’s wrong. And with every mistake, it eliminates only a percentage of the error. It’s only when it eliminates 100% of the error, does it then get that dance step right.
What’s interesting is that you’re never learning one step at a time.
You’re learning several steps. And the brain has to go over this whole sequence of making the mistake, recognising it, memorising it and then fixing it.
And it has to do this entire sequence for every single mistake.
Luckily our brains have enormous computing power.
And they’re able to process these mistakes and make corrections in a matter of milliseconds—if we are willing to make the mistake, that is.
The biggest reason we don’t get talented is for a simple reason.
It’s because we can’t bear to make a mistake.
And as you can now tell, that’s the biggest mistake of all!
Note: During this lesson I had to go through this exact process, because I was trying to learn how to insert an ’em-dash’. On my PC, I have to press Alt + 0151 on my keyboard to get an ’em-dash.’ On a Mac, it’s different. I have to press Shift+ Alt + – to get the same result. I learned how to create the ’em-dash’, and then promptly goofed it up. I had to go back several times to learn it. And now I think I have it. Or do I? 🙂
Read the lyrics of the song (till you can stand it), and then scroll to the bottom. 🙂
Back to you. It always comes around. Back to you. I tried to forget you. I tried to stay away. But its too late.
Over you. I’m never over. Over you. Something about you. Its just the way you move. The way you move me.
I’m so good at forgetting. And I quit ever game I play. But forgive me, love. I cant turn and walk away. Back to you. It always comes around. Back to you. I walk with your shadow. I’m sleeping in my bed. With your silhouette.
Should have smiled in that picture. If it’s the last that I’ll see of you. It’s the least that you. Could not do. Leave the light on. I’ll never give up on you. Leave the light on. For me too.
Back to me. I know that it comes. Back to me. Doesn’t it scare you? Your will is not as strong. As it used to be.
This is our love song of failure.
Every time we fail, a similar song plays in our brain.
And we go back to the behaviour that causes us to fail. It always comes around. Back to you.
But it could also be a song of success.
The same lyrics that bring you down, take you to overcoming the silly hurdles.
It depends what you’re in love with.
Failure or success.
Making excuses or making things happen!
Do we come into this world as conservative thinkers?
Or are we born with a radical bent?
Not surprisingly, we aren’t born with a blank slate.
We come into this world with Version 1.0 embedded in our brains.
So if you look at the most isolated to the most populated places on the planet, you’ll find we’re born with the same core Version 1.0 software.
And yet the software gets a sort of ‘virus’.
Some of us turn extremely conservative. We detest radical thoughts.
And some of us turn extremely radical. We in turn detest conservative thinking and actions.
But showing contempt for the other side is crazy. Because everything on the planet, including talent, is a matter of structure. Structure is conservative.
Talent is also a matter of art. Art is radical free-thinking.
Creativity and Talent do not exist in thin air. They need structure.
Structure is boring without creativity. It would make our lives drab and doom us to boredom.
Creativity without structure would lead to complete chaos.
Both must exist side by side.
Our iPhones, our cars, our houses, our computers: everything is based on someone’s ability to transcend their radical or conservative virus, and use both sides to create something new.
We can live with a virus that forces us to be ultra-conservative or ultra-radical.
Or we can understand that they’re like yin and yang.
That one cannot actually exist without the other.
The day you learn how to use the conservative as well as the radical part of your brain, that’s the day you’ll learn faster than ever before.
But can you do it?
Can you actually step over to the other side?
Try it. You’ll be amazed at what you find there!
(Watch this video by Jonathan Haidt as well: You may need to be online to watch it)
Imagine you listen to a song that you haven’t heard for twenty years.
And you know the tune, but the lyrics seem all jumbled in your brain.
So you play the song once.
Then once again.
By the third time, you’ll remember every word of the lyrics you knew twenty years ago.
So what happened there?
The same thing that happened to me when I went to play badminton.
I hadn’t played for well over twenty years.
The first day back was pure torture.
Both on the court, and off the court.
I was gasping for breath. My head was throbbing. I barely stumbled back to my car. And slept for the rest of the day just catching up on my energy.
Three days later I went back to play.
And something weird happened.
While I was struggling to get the shuttlecock across the net the first day, I was able to get it across a whole lot better the second time. And then I went a third time. And a fourth time. And by the fifth trip to courts, I was able to play eight games. Unlike the first time where I was struggling to reach the shuttlecock, I had no problem at all–sometimes I even had time.
So what’s so interesting about this story?
Here’s what’s interesting.
The five visits to the court weren’t back to back visits.
They were over three weeks.
And in those three weeks, I hadn’t done anything spectacular to bring about this massive change in my body.
I wasn’t exercising more. Wasn’t training more. This incredible change was happening in my brain.
Like some song from long ago, it was remembering the ‘lyrics.’
And letting me improve my game in massive incremental steps.
So that within five visits to the court my brain was remembering moves, and had the capacity to handle energy from twenty years ago. The lights were all switching on.
Your body too responds to long-lost memories
In fact, it’s not even fair to call them long-lost.
They’re more like long-buried. And re-discovered.
Which means that if you’ve been told you can do something exceedingly well, your brain reaches into the long-lost memory. And compares data. And then it does something short of exceedingly well. And then with little practice, it improves in leaps and bounds.
But the brain works the other way too
It can bring up failure-data. And the body then refuses to co-operate. And just like you remember the words of the song, you start to remember the words of failure.
Which makes it imperative to understand how layering and memories are linked.
And how we can get rid of stupid memories with the concept of layering.
And suddenly become far more talented than we thought possible.
Next post: How layering is almost more powerful than memory itself 🙂
