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Skill Acquisition Q & A and Discussion

We started off with coding phoenix phoenix asked so what is the difference between inhibition and will power depletion? They seem almost the same and I'm a bit confused yeah so similar concepts in terms of the mechanism right? So we only have a certain amount of willpower to use every day the act of will power is inhibiting something that we would otherwise naturally do are automatically do and so inhibition is just the mechanism right? Stopping it will power depletion is the consequence of doing that too much right? So you you and try to have everything in force yourself to do something different you're going to get really tired really quickly and if that's your default strategy for trying to do what you want to do, you're going to burn out really, really fast and so inhibition is the mechanism will power depletion is the problem and this afternoon we're going to talk about what we're going to do instead of forcing ourselves to do everything which goes back to guiding structure of the...

changing the environment to support what you want to do great, fantastic shrew. Mr asked if you could give more examples of when we should be actively selecting to use pattern matching in conjunction with mental stimulation yes, so pattern matching is happening all the time it's not something that you need to focus on doing just by collecting information about your environment by paying attention you're doing pattern matching the mental simulation process also happens automatically every time you imagine something happening or acting in a certain way you're going through the mental simulation process there's not a whole lot of energy required to do that the trick of when you decide to do it is actually something we're going to talk about it greatly great length this afternoon eso so we'll get to that in a moment so stay tuned we have kia dive asked in reference to changing environment which leads to changing behavior they're asking so this means that failure at a particular task must be a good incentive to do better next time or at that that specific task could you elaborate on this thought a little bit now so if you try something that doesn't work that is really good information right? You've you've tried to do something it didn't work there's something about the circumstance or the way that you're trying it that isn't functional and so that's where you can start to use mental simulation okay, you have more patterns about what works and what doesn't and you could start to anticipate well, what if you do something a little bit differently? What if you you try a different approach and that's really the essence of experimentation right? Just try something if it works awesome if it doesn't you have more information to do it again next time you just keep trying things until works m b seven wants to know why you think people are threatened by process definitions my people are threatened by process and definitions I think um the initial reactions that people have when you start to talk about or think about things like process and systems two basic categories the first is it's complicated right it's there are a lot of moving parts you know, doing things like checklists and flow charts and all of those things aren't the most stimulating of things to look at most of the time right so it's complicated it's hard um and then the other is a lot of people think it's boring right? You know they're creating a checklist or using a checklist you know no there's there's no joy in that there's no you know happiness and that when it when really it really is the opposite it allows you to do so muchmore I just I think it's just two very basic misconceptions about what system and process actually allows you to do that sam cox asks regarding fast feedback loops would you agree that negative feedback correcting errors is more valuable than the more rewarding positive feedback? Yes usually because if it works the reward is present in the working right kind of do a little happy dance and all is right with the world um the fast feedback loops letting you know when you've made an air even a really subtle one um particularly if that air remember when we were talking about absence blindness if we don't get that error correction in the moment we're probably not going to pay attention to or even realize that something is wrong and so the fast feedback loops allow you to really recognize something that you otherwise might not pay attention to and one thing actually little kind of building on top of that we have a really difficult time with physical types of skills when when when we are moving our body in a particular way it's really common to think we're moving in a certain way and when you actually look at how your body is moving like in a mirror or a coach is helping you or whatever um you are not moving in the way that you think you are and so you know this this is everything from from sports to yoga to dance to weight lifting you know, lots of lots of things like one of the things that I, um haven't talked about but have been learning over the course of the year is weightlifting like doing classic bar bell stuff and lots of benefits of doing that but there's technique involved you have to do it in a specific way or you're probably going to hurt yourself and the way that I thought I was doing a dead lift and how I was actually doing it too totally totally different things right? So that's where having somebody outside yourself like a coach or using video so you can actually see what you're doing eyes really valuable on fantastic uh I think I got one more question, but first I just I asked in the chat rooms if anyone had any more questions from this morning and coding phoenix says only one thing to say josh actually made it clear to me why I kept step skipping the learning of languages the literal ones I cannot wait to start using the process to learn and acquire the skills quickly already putting stuff in a process but one one final question I think ben german skew says what do you do when you don't know what to do next? For instance, I didn't learn everything I needed to be successful in my college career and now I'm trying to figure out it figured out on my own and it's hard I know I want to be in the internet marketing web design space but knowing which direction is overwhelming so without getting into specifics on that, you know specific thing um what you know you talk about when, uh like uh midlife crisis when you're talking of the mid life crisis and people just kind of start like coming up with crazy ideas, what do you do when either a you can't decide which one to do or be you don't have any ideas? Yeah big big question there yeah and so um let's take the first part of that which is do you have something that you're trying to achieve or not right do you have a goal do you have a target that you're working towards if you do it's way way easier to find books to find courses to talk to people to try to figure out okay where am I right now let's define that inasmuch details I possibly can where would I like to be and then how can I plan to get from point a to point b is as efficiently as possible you khun start tio see what you're trying to do and what's holding you back so for example um when I was advising business owners that was usually what what the problem was right I have this business it's performing may be ok but it's not what I wanted to be I want to be here but I'm feeling stuck what do we need to do in order to get to get this particular and result? And then it was just basically going through the deconstruction right? Let's look at the five parts of your business let's see what you're doing awesome at it and what you're not doing awesome at or maybe in some cases not doing it all and let's start to figure out what are some skills that you can build what are some systems that you can install to focus on those parts of the business in a way that will improve it right? So if you have a goal awesome if you don't have any idea of what it is that you want to do like the quarterlife midlife crisis stuff um this is where focusing on skill acquisition and trying to think of all of the things that at some point in your life has really been fascinating to you for whatever reason doesn't matter could be professional reasons could be personal reasons when your brain gets kind of stuck in reorganizing mode like you have no idea what to do sometimes the best thing that you can do is embrace that exploratory impulse and try lots of different things and so you know, the process of exploring we're experimenting if you get a lot of information about different things, you may find that thing that really turns you on light you up? Um I am really a big advocate of learning a lot about all sorts of different topics because if you're never exposed to it if you never have any experience with it, how do you know whether you like it or not? How do you know whether it's valuable or not? So if you're stuck, find something that you've always thought it would be kind of cool to do and go off and do that and that'll help you get unstuck as quickly as possible I love it I love it I mean I think that's a big thing that we agree with your creative life which is why we let you watch courses for free so if there's on exactly do you want to check out you couldn't do it so that's the real answer if you get stuck just watch creative life for like a week then I think that's a wonderful answer just really glad that you yeah you know one thing that I'm curious about based on a conversation uh this morning about skill acquisition is have you thought about what you want to sit down and really focus on learning over the next couple weeks so don't consider this a strong public commitment that I that you are definitely going to do this thing but just what's on your mind what are the types of things that you think you're going tio consider paying attention to and learning over the next couple weeks I am going to uh, figure out and create a script noel and I talked about this about how I want to address my potential clients so yesterday I launched my new business kitco dot com and I got to users that wanted to register on it but I didn't exactly know how to speak with him over the phone like exactly which things I should tell them about it and make it simple easy to understand and just have a like a script so I'm going over gun creating that that's perfect and getting you know that dealing with particularly prospective customers so folks who are like hey, what you're doing this kind of cool not sure if it's right for me or not can you help me, terry, talk me through that dealing with prospect of customers is a skill and so if you're noticing how people are coming in, you can set up systems to make it easier so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they come in and you can build communication skills that will help you relate to them more quickly make them feel comfortable, give them the information, sell them in a way that that does not feel pushy um and and be very effective and it's all skills sales skills that's great rush yeah um and uh mordor where I have so many things to do yeah, I had to pick which from drug having would be one of them are learning to read more in shorter time. I'm sure their skills that are there books that are out there yeah liberal and both excellent speed reading is another one of those things that comes up over and over again we're actually going toe it's kind of a spoiler, but we're actually going to talk about exactly how to do that uh this this afternoon there's there's a very specific idea that's at the core of learning how to process information in a very short period of time so we'll teach you how to do that many here fear this afternoon. Very good the question, but I had for you, wass combining the part one and part two part one was about rapid skill acquisition part was aboard the human mind, so if you can share your own journey because there is mastery and clarity in what you speak, but I'm sure you started somewhere where you didn't know enough about the human wayne used your own principles to gain the knowledge. What was the journey looking? Oh yeah, so I've been doing the personal mba for a very long time. This almost going see this year would probably be nine years in uh in march, and so, you know, the the whole project really started I wanted to learn a lot about business, but I didn't want to quit my job and go back to school and borrow a couple hundred thousand dollars, teo learn I just wanted to learn this stuff so I could use it, and so the process started for me by reading and researching in combination with actually working on businesses. I had started a couple small businesses on my own, so I knew what the smallest of the small looked like, um, and the networks at a big company, procter and gamble doing doing marketing and product development and got exposure to what one of the largest business systems in the world really looked like. And so what I decided to do is read as much as I could and research as much as I could and ended up reading thousands of books about all sorts of things about the five parts of every business which we talked about earlier, um, about psychology, about communication, about leadership, about management in about systems, and when you read that much, and research that much, and you're also working on the thing that you're researching, you start to notice the same ideas coming up over and over and over again, right and that's, a really clear indication that those were the things that are important, and so everything that we're talking about in this course in terms ofthe people in systems, as well as all the business principles that I explain in part one this is the distillation of that almost ten years of research, these are the things that you use most often, and so you know, you can you can start to see some of the things that we talked about in the human mind in in terms of guiding structure as a principal, for example, so changing the structure of your environment is the most powerful way to change your behavior, you can apply that to business right, so you can change the structure of your business to to create a different type of behavior with your customers or with your employees or with your staff, right, you can also change the structure of your environment to be more productive, which is what we're talking about this afternoon or to actually sit down and practices skill in a way that makes it better, right. So a single concept you can apply it in all of those different areas to accomplish a goal which is changing behavior, right? So a lot of the specific things we talked about in terms of skill acquisition were based on the principles that we talked about in the human mind. It's all the same stuff. It's just used a little different way that makes sense from the internets. Do we have any wonderful things of people deciding to learn or commit? Tio two new thinks we dio let's see, gina heart says, actually, is no joke. I just graduated, took many classes and creative lives somehow found my passion know exactly what direction I want to go towards crazy. So and earlier today, when we were talking specifically about, like, twenty hour skill acquisition, uh, there were people who were committing to various different types of things, which was really cool, and I expect to see you people back and, um reporting? Yes, yes. And you know what, it's? The fun part about particularly the skill acquisition stuff for me is the research was really a challenge of can can you put together a framework that will really allow you to learn anything, whatever, whatever it might be. And so the most fun thing for me, you know, having the method come out of the research is seeing how people choose to apply it toe learn cool stuff that I never would have thought off. So the two stories that I'll share there's actually on my website, which is josh kaufman dot net if what people want toe want to look at it? I did an interview with a guy who learned how to fly an airplane. His name is john hart. He went from knowing nothing about how to fly to his first solo flight in a small aircraft in sixteen point two hours uh having never set in the cockpit before and he did it, he did it safely. Thanks. Thankfully, he was under supervision of an instructor, but his target performance level that and working really well within his instructor was very simple is get into the pilot seat, be capable of flying an aircraft solo safely as quickly as possible. The books could wait. The manulis could wait. You know, some of the pilot, you know textbooks or like this, the point was not to go through the textbook. The point was to get into the pilot seat, actually go, and it only took him sixteen of just shy of sixteen and a half hours to do that. So that was really fun to hear, right? You know, these these methods? And we took the same basic structure, right? Deciding what you want, deconstructing it, breaking it down, getting rid of the emotional barriers, uh, and and putting in the time worked in a situation that I had never thought about before, you know, this this, uh, he he told me this story, I think my favorite one and I haven't received a status report on this yet. Um, I heard from a reader who is using this process to learn suma wrestling of all things has had always been curious, and I guess there are different weight classes of sumo, so, you know, dependent, you don't have to be a huge person to do this. Um, but he had always wanted to learn been curious, like, ok, I'm finally going to sit down, I'm going to learn soon we're wrestling, I think that's really awesome. So, uh, yeah, I'm really curious if if folks folks online, um are planning to use this to learn something cool. Police. Let us know, because I love love, love, hearing the story. So we did have a couple people jump in, and a falcon is going to learn at programming and french cool. Uh, we have cody phoenix who's learning something called the key. You know, key, though, okay, why you d'oh, which I don't know what that is. Well, I don't know what that is, either, but awesome.