Imagine you do a course with Psychotactics (e.g. the Article Writing Course). And you learn specific steps to write an article. Well, heck you’re copying the steps, right?
And that makes you a clone, right?
Wrong.
Well, not exactly wrong.
The chances of others perceiving you to be a clone are very high.
But you can never, ever be a clone.
You couldn’t be a clone, even if you copied everything…
Because layering comes into play.
What you’ve learned over the years somehow gets added into the mix.
Good stuff that you’ve learned. Bad stuff too.
And though you think you’re becoming a clone, you’re creating a variation.
Kids start off trying to be clones of their parents
A child copies the actions, accent of its parent. As humans we’re all wannabe-clones.
If the entire human race walked on one leg, you can be sure that our kids would learn to walk on one leg.
And yet, there’d be variations.
Which kind of takes me back to when I first started cooking.
At that point, I didn’t want to experiment at all. I’d want to be told exactly what to do, and how to do it, down to the last ingredient, and the last measure. At that point I’d be a clone–almost.
But as I grew in confidence, that cloning factor didn’t get reduced. It just layered itself on the top of other factors. And so, my ability to cook better and quicker meals continued to evolve.
And all the time, I thought I was just being a clone. But obviously, I was wrong.
Cloning is simply impossible
Because even when we’re trying to copy something in the greatest detail, we create some variation.
No matter how minute, the variation must exist.
Even an exact photocopy isn’t an exact photocopy down to the last detail.
A layer has entered the zone.
And layering is an amazing journey.
Do you like sushi?
Or do you hate it?
Or would you simply avoid it?
You see sushi is a common dish across the world today.
But there are people who don’t have fun around sushi.
To them, sushi is something scary, and different from steak and potatoes.
Steak and potatoes is what they love and understand.
But what’s all this sushi stuff got to do with understanding how people learn?
People learn with patterns
Talent has a direct co-relation to an understanding of patterns.
So while one person is able to learn through audio, the other person struggles.
One person is looking for ‘sushi learning’, and the other wants ‘steak and potatoes learning.’
And our world is all ‘steak and potatoes.’
Look at the Internet. Look at our schools. Look around us.
We have audio, some video, and loads of text.
What if I wanted to learn through ‘cartoons’ instead?
What if I learned ten times faster through mind-maps?
That kind of learning doesn’t exist.
So the learner runs into a mind-block.
That block prevents people from going ahead.
Suddenly, they’re told that they’re not talented.
Suddenly, they feel a bit frustrated.
Suddenly, they decide that ‘sushi’ isn’t for them at all.
But what if sushi weren’t presented as ‘sushi?‘
And presented as something else?
And they enjoyed the ‘sushi meal’, thinking it was something akin to ‘steak and potatoes?’
At that moment, their brain has recognised a taste it likes. A new pattern.
Now they’re more than likely to eat ‘sushi’, when at first they completely detested it.
The ‘sushi’ didn’t change. The method of presenting the sushi changed.
And suddenly there is an interest.
An interest that leads to desire.
Desire that leads to fancy.
Fancy that could very well lead to obsession.
But it all started with the change in the way the pattern was presented.
When the pattern changes, the behaviour changes.
And the blockages to learning, reduce. Or completely vanish into the yonder.
Which reminds me…
This post is all about words. Or ‘steak and potatoes’ learning.
Time to put in some video. And cartoons. And mind maps. And whatever I can get my hands on.
Time for some ‘sushi learning.’
P.S. I couldn’t have found a better picture to illustrate ‘sushi learning’ than that gadget above.
Sadly the product is no longer available. I guess it was too pricey at $89 for 256mb 🙂
Have you ever seen an seven-year old child playing the piano?
Then listen to the same eight-year old playing the piano.
And then that child struggles on to become a nine-year old playing the piano.
And then he moves on to ten.
And then suddenly at eleven, something magical happens
The clunky sound disappears from the playing.
Suddenly, there’s flow and rhythm.
And you sit up in awe, saying: “What a talented child.”
And you’d be wrong.
Because talent has little or nothing to do with it.
Ben Zander, celebrated conductor of orchestras, and trainer shows you exactly what’s happening from the age of seven, eight, to nine, then on to ten. And finally what happens when the child becomes eleven?
The teacher hasn’t changed.
The method of teaching hasn’t changed.
So what did change?
Why does the child begin to play like a dream?
It’s a factor of impulses, says Ben Zander.
When they first start playing, children put an impulse on every note.
When they continue playing, children then put an impulse on every second note.
And if they persist, they then put an impulse on every fourth note.
And by the time they’re ten (and four years into training), they put an impulse on every eight note.
And then it happens…
The eleven year old plays music that makes you sit back in awe.
But what’s really happening?
Layering. That’s what’s happening.
When we learn a language, we learn to recognise sound.
Then we learn a word. Or two.
Then we’re able to string a sentence.
Then we’re able to add grammar, and make the sentence grammatically correct.
Finally we have enough layering, to not exactly pay attention to every word.
Every impulse.
We speak languages.
We rarely turn to an eleven-year old and say: Oooh, you speak such fine English.
You must be soooo talented in English.
And yet, English is a difficult language to learn. But learn it we all do.
The point is: If we’d given up speaking in our first year, or second year, or third year, we’d lose the ability to learn the language. The layering has to happen. Otherwise, we stop learning.
People consider talent to be innate.
But a core part of talent is mere layering.
One over the other, over the other.
And suddenly a child plays the piano with mastery.
We speak languages fluently.
And an ex-cartoonist (that’s me) starts talking about marketing and brain stuff.
We fail to become talented because we fail to layer.
We’re stuck at the basic impulses, instead of progressing onwards.
We’re just seven year olds hacking away at the piano.
That’s all we are!
Note:Look at this video (yes again). Because by the time you get to 2:30, you’ll see how Ben Zander explains the concept so eloquently. Yup, 2 minutes and thirty seconds should show you all you need to see. But watch the full video if you wish to, as well (I’ve watched it no less than eight times already) As you can see, I’m layering too 🙂
In the early 1970s, men’s tennis was dominated by Americans.
In your wildest imagination you would not believe that a Swede would change all that.
The name of this Swede was Bjorn Borg.
In less than 10 years, Borg made an entire country ‘talented.’
Some of the most impressive tennis players like Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg and dozens of other players sprouted from the Swedish woodwork.
About the same time, a woman called Martina Navratilova surfaced from Czechoslavakia. She too, started winning everything in sight.
And then, magically, the Czechs became talented.
The very same phenomenon surfaced in India
Before the year 1985, the Indian cricket team was considered to be a second-class cricket team.
Then from nowhere, they rose to win the World Cup against all odds. And from then on, you’d be slightly mad if you had a one-day tournament, and didn’t have the Indian team as an active participant.
What causes an entire country to suddenly be talented in a sport?
Surely it can’t be inspiration. If it were inspiration, then any one from any country could simply be inspired to do the same.
You see there’s quite another factor at work.
It’s called pride.
Or a lack of wimpiness
Because so-called talent requires hard work. There’s not a single ‘talented’ musician who doesn’t put in many, many hours of hard work. There’s not a single speaker, dancer, writer, athlete, teacher who simply ambles in, and oozes talent.
Talent is the culmination of so many factors, that it almost seems magical.
And unique.
And that’s because we see the expression of talent in a matter of minutes. We see a person draw a cartoon in a few seconds; write an article in an hour; play a difficult piece of music in a matter of minutes. And they seem to be so talented.
Yet the reason we aren’t talented, is because we’re wimpy.
Most people give themselves the permission to be untalented.
And we don’t have to look to the Bjorn Borgs or Martina Navratilovas to find so-called talent.
If you look around you, you’ll find some families seem to be overly talented.
They seem to be involved in the arts, writing, music and somehow seem to be so very creative.
But stop and think about it for a second.
What stops your kids from being as talented?
What stops you from being more talented?
It’s the stupid, nonsensical belief that people were born with talent.
That one country is more talented than another.
That one family is more talented than yours.
Don’t tell that to the Swedes Here’s what Bjorkman, himself a world No.4 has to say: “We were so good that we spoiled everyone at home. There was no way we could keep winning Davis Cups, have No. 1s and Grand Slam singles champions.
We played the Davis Cup semifinals last year and were not even nominated for the top five teams in Sweden. I think people do forget some of the achievements we still create in tennis because they compare everything to the past.”
And here’s what Bjorn Borg himself has to say:
“We are struggling with the junior tennis in Sweden, but we’re working very hard to improve that. They’re also struggling in Australia”.
“But I think this goes in a circle. Sweden produced players for many, many, many years, unbelievable players. It’s impossible to continue to
do that forever”.
“But I’m sure Swedish tennis and Swedish juniors, we will be back. But it’s going to take quite a few years.”
Can you spot the wimpy-talk in the language?
Talent doesn’t arise from wimpy talk.
It arises from action. And patterns. And layering. And emotions.
“I think” is not a powerful emotion. It’s a doubt. I think is wimpy.
Recognise that in your own life. Cut out the wimpy talk and get moving towards creating real talent.
Because talent starts with emotion. If you don’t believe you can do it, you never will.
There are many ways to define talent. Most of them are wrong.
Here’s how one dictionary defines talent:
1.
a special natural ability or aptitude: a talent for drawing.
2.
a capacity for achievement or success; ability: young men of talent.
3.
a talented person: The cast includes many of the theater’s major talents.
4.
a group of persons with special ability: an exhibition of watercolors by the local talent.
Natural ability? Don’t make me laugh. A capacity for achievement? Are you saying one person has a better capacity than the other? On what basis? Special ability? Special, why special. Does this mean no one else can do this specific task? Or have this talent?
The problem with the definition, is that no matter where you look, you find ‘talent’ or ‘creativity’ to be defined in a way that’s horribly inaccuarate. Because the real definition of talent (and I’m typing this at the top of my head—because I’m so um, ‘talented’) runs something like this:
Talent is the combination of many emotions, memories, patterns and repetitions, implemented at high speed
You see what’s happening in this definition. We’re talking about emotions, and memories and stuff that doesn’t automatically assume that one person is ‘more gifted’ than another. That one brain doesn’t necessarily have less powerful hardware than another brain. But before we go into the depths of ‘hardware and software’ of the brain, let’s look at the concepts of emotions, patterns, memories and repetition. And what high speed has to do with all of these factors.
