The Only Method of Learning Something New
Someone stole $ 90 million from the company I worked for. I’m not good at people. The company fell apart. There are some things I cannot learn. I tend to love people too much. So it’s hard for me to understand people, no matter how hard I try. So I find other people who can judge people, and I ask them to help me. Don’t force yourself to learn something if you don’t want to, or if it’s not an innate talent. What is the role of talent? Very small. But we must start with this. Talent is the seed of skill. How do you know if you are talented? If you loved this when you were ten. If you dream about it. If you like reading about it. Read on below to find out where you are talented. Trust me when I say everyone is talented in many things. Over the past 20 years, I have wanted to learn how to do some things really well. Writing, programming, business skills (leadership, sales, negotiation, decision making), comedy, games. So, I developed a ten-step teaching technique.
Love it
If you cannot start with “love,” then everyone who loves will beat everyone who “loves” or “hates”. This is the rule of the universe. The first people to cross the Arctic tundra from Siberia to Alaska at minus 60 degrees should have loved it. The rest remained in the East African savannah. On the very first day of writing the computer program “Hello, World” I dreamed of computers. I woke up at 4:00 am to go back to the “computer lab” and do even bigger programs. When I first started writing every day, I wrote all day. I couldn’t stop. And all I wanted to talk to people about was different authors. When I was 10, I wrote a gossip column about all of my 5th grade mates. I read all of Judy Bloom’s books. I read everything I could. I liked it. Most of my friends got bored with me and soon became very lonely. Also when I wrote.
Read this
Bobby Fischer was not that good at chess. He had talent, but no one thought of him. So at about 12-13 years old, he disappeared for a year. He did this later when he was 20 years old. But at 13, when he returned to the stage, he suddenly became the best chess player in the United States, won the United States championship, and became the youngest grandmaster in the world. How did he do it? For a year of wandering, he almost did not play. Instead, he did two things: a) He studied every game played in the previous century. In the 1800s. When he returned to the stage, he was known for playing all these outdated openings, but he had improvements in every one of them. No one can figure out how to defeat these improvements. In fact, the final game of the world championship many years later, in 1972, when he played Spassky, he used his arsenal of the 1800s to become the world champion. Spassky desperately needed a win to keep the match going. Fischer needed a draw to win the title. Spassky started with a very modern attacking opening (The Sicilian), but then, about 13 moves, all the observing commentators gasped. Fischer subtly changed the debut to an old-fashioned, very boring 1800s debut called The Game of Scots. After that, Spassky had no chance. b) He learned Russian enough to read Russian chess magazines. At that time, all the top 20 players in the world were Russian. The Americans really didn’t stand a chance. Thus, Fischer studied the games of the Russians while all the Americans sat around with open positions and styles that the Russians already knew how to win. Consequently, when Fischer competed in the US Championship in the early 60s, it was the first complete shutout, all wins, not a single draw. Studying history, studying the best players is the key to being the best player. Even if you started out with an average talent.
Try. But not too difficult.
If you want to be a writer, businessman, or programmer, you have to write a lot, start a lot of businesses, and program a lot of programs. Things are not going well. That is why quantity is more important than quality in the first place. The learning curve we all travel is not built on achievement. It is built in quantity only. If you see something 1000 times, you will see more than a person who sees the same thing only ten times. Do not forget an important rule: the secret of happiness is not “being great,” the secret is “growth.” If you just “try”, then you will come to your natural level for you. But growth will stop and you will not be happy.
Find a teacher (plus the tenfold rule)
If I try to learn Spanish on my own, it won’t work. But when I leave the house (and now I marry) someone from Argentina, I learn more Spanish. In chess, writing, programming, business, I always find someone better than me, and every week I set a time to ask them tons of questions, give them assignments, analyze my mistakes and tell me where I’m wrong. For anything you love, find a teacher and it will enable you to learn 10x faster. In fact, everything I’ve included on this list makes you learn 10 times faster. So if you do everything on this list, you will learn 10 tenths faster than anyone else. This is how you achieved perfection in something.
Study the history. Explore the present.
If you want to learn how to be a GREAT programmer (not only good enough to program an application, but good enough to be GREAT, learn machine language. Learn ones and zeros. Learn computer history, learn how to build an operating system. As well as Fortran , Cobol, Pascal, Lisp, C, C ++, including modern Python languages, etc. works that have stood the test of time. They have stood the test of time. Compared to millions of other books, for good reason. They are the best in the world. Then study the current criticisms of these books to see what you missed. This is just as important as the initial reading. If you want to study business read biographies of Rockefeller, Carnegie, the first stock exchange in Amsterdam, the junk bond boom, 90s, financial crisis Every depression Every business that thrived during every depression Read Zero to One by Peter T. email Watch Profit on CNBC Read about Steve Jobs About the fall of Kodak read go to The End of Power. Don’t read self-help business books. They are nothing. You are about to enter a great field, the field of innovation, that has created modern society. Don’t read the average books that came out in the past year. Develop your game and read about the people and inventions that changed the world as it is today. Read how Henry Ford had to start three car companies to make it work, and why “three” was an important number to him. Read about why the world’s largest restaurant chain was created thanks to the Ray Kroc franchise. Read how Coca-Cola makes nothing but the largest beverage company in the world. Write down what you learn from each reading.
Do simple projects first
Tony Robbins told me how he was scared to death in his first serious teaching job. He had to train a bunch of Marines to improve their marksmanship. “I’ve never fired a pistol in my life,” he said. He studied quite a lot with the pros, but then he came up with a technique that gave the best results of all throwing classes up to that time. He brought the target closer. He set it up just five feet away. Everyone was shooting a bull’s-eye. Then he gradually pushed it away until it reached the standard distance. They were still shooting bulls-eyes. Richard Branson founded the magazine before starting the airline. Bill Gates wrote BASIC before his team wrote Windows. E.L. James (and yes, I’m including her) wrote the Twilight fanfiction before she wrote 50 Shades of Gray. Ernest Hemingway never thought he could write a novel. Therefore, he wrote dozens of stories. Programmers write “Hello, World” programs before they create their search engines. Many chess grandmasters recommend learning the chess endgame first (when there are few pieces left on the board) before exploring other parts of the game. It instills confidence in you, teaches you the subtleties, gives you a sense of growth and improvement – all steps towards success.
Examine what you’ve done
The other day I threw everything out. Everything. Threw out all my books (donated). I threw away all my clothes. Threw out the old computers. I threw away the plates that I never used. I threw away the sheets, because of which I would never invite guests. I threw away furniture (four bookcases), TV, old papers and all that. I wanted to clean up. And I did. I found a novel that I wrote in 1991. 24 years ago. It was terrible. For the first time in these 24 years, I reread it. I researched what I did wrong (the character is unrelated. The plot is too obvious. Deus ex machina is everywhere).
Someone told me a story about Amy Schumer, one of my favorite comedians. She films all of her performances. She then returns to her room and examines the performance every second. “I should have stopped here for another quarter of a second,” she might say. She wants to be the best at comedy. She studies her every performance. When I play chess, if I lose, I launch the game into the computer. I look at every move, what the computer thinks is best, I think about what I thought when I made a bad move, and so on. The business I recently invested in has fallen apart. It hurted me. But I had to look at it and see what was wrong. Where did I go wrong? At each level, I went back and wrote what happened, where I could better help and what I was missing. If you’re not obsessed with your mistakes, then you don’t love the field enough to get better. You ask lousy questions, “Why am I bad?” Instead of good questions: “What did I do wrong and how can I fix it?” When you consistently ask good questions about your job, you become better than the people who freeze over lousy questions. Example: I hate looking at myself after appearing on television. I’ve never done this. So I will never get better at this.
You are the average of five people around you
Look at every literary, artistic, and business scene. People rarely get better as individuals. They get better as a group. The Beats: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and a dozen others. Programmers: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ted Leonsis, Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak and a dozen others have left the Homebrewing Club. 50s art scene: Jasper Johns, De Kooning, Pollack, etc. all lived in ONE STREET in the heart of New York. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, Palantir and to some extent Facebook and a dozen other companies have left the so-called PayPal mafia. All these people could tinker themselves. But humans are tribal mammals. We need to work with groups to get better. Find the best group, spend as much time with them as possible, and as a “stage” you will become HISTORY. You challenge each other, compete with each other, love each other’s work, envy each other, and end up taking turns superior to each other.
Do it a lot
What you do every day matters much more than what you do from time to time. I had a friend who wanted to learn how to paint. But she thought she should be in Paris with all the conditions. She never made it to Paris. Now she sits in a booth under fluorescent lights, filling out paperwork all day. Write every day, communicate every day, play every day, live healthy every day. Measure your life by the number of actions. When you die: are you already 2 writing sessions? Or are you 50,0000?
Find your wicked plan
Finally, the disciple walks past the master. The first hedge fund manager I worked with hates me. I started my own foundation and his foundation went bankrupt. Ultimately, my evil plan was to be better than him. But how? After all of the above, you will find your unique voice. And when you speak with that voice, the world hears something that it has never heard before. Your old teachers and friends may not want to hear this voice. But if you continue to connect with people who love and respect you, they will encourage this new voice. There is a saying: “There are no new ideas.” But there is. Here, all the ideas of the past are combined with a new, beautiful you. You are a butterfly. Now it’s your turn to teach, instruct, create, innovate, change the world. Do something that no one has ever seen before and may never see again.
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