We believe that we’re talented in some areas and not talented in others.
However, a lot of this understanding of talent is an illusion. It’s based on what we have been told and also our current behaviour. How can we overcome these barriers and become better learners?
Let’s find out.
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Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
Truffle oil is one of the greatest culinary scams of our time.
Sold as a luxurious gourmet ingredient, it is marketed to mimic the earthy decadence of real truffles. But here's the catch, there are no actual truffles in most truffle oils. What you're tasting isn't the essence of a rare foraged fungus, but a synthetic compound, usually 2,4-dityapentane.
This is manufactured in labs to simulate the aroma of truffles. Chefs and foodies are often misled into believing that they are experiencing the complexity of real truffles when in reality they are being served a chemical illusion.
Real truffles are subtle, they are nuanced, but truffle oil is blunt and it's loud. The fact that the label says truffle is borderline dishonest. Consumers pay a high price for this opulence.
But eventually, it's just an illusion, and this kind of illusion also exists in learning.
We grew up believing that we are talented in some areas and not so talented in others. And these ideas are a bit like truffle oil. It's an illusion that we buy into. So how do we know it's an illusion? In this article, we'll cover three points.
- The first is the source of this illusion.
- The second is the problem of not having simplified structure.
- And finally, why speeding up things actually works to our disadvantage.
1) Let's get started with the first point, which is the source of this illusion.
When my niece Marsha was about five years old, I looked down at a piece of paper that she was holding, and there was this scroll. Why is your handwriting so bad? I asked her. I can't do anything about it, she responded quickly. Everybody in our family writes badly.
How do you know that?
I asked her. Oh, she said, my mama told me. She told me that everybody in our family has bad handwriting. As you're listening to this story, you realize that something is wrong here. There is an illusion being created, and this is an illusion that has been perpetuated by the source.
So what is the source?
The source of all of our learning is a parent, a teacher, a friend, and then finally ourselves. We have four separate sources. Let's start out with the teacher.
We go to school, and we're five or six, and the teacher is probably 22 years old. She's just out from teacher school. She doesn't know much about anything, let alone teaching.
And she tells you that you're good at drawing, you're good at writing, you're good at this, you're good at that, and you start to believe it. As a five-year-old, as a six-year-old, you believe what adults tell you. Because you don't know any better.
Now the teacher, she might be much older, and she is still committing the same error.
She believes that some students are smarter and others not so much. She believes that some have skills and others have other skills. And in a very short time, we get saddled with this kind of information that we take for the rest of our lives.
We think that we're talented or not talented. We want to live up to the expectations of our teachers, so we do what they think is important. And then when we go home and we show our parents, they encourage us.
What happens is we start to go down pathways that are engineered by our teachers and then unwittingly fostered by parents. Now parents are also or also were 22 year olds. They barely knew what they were doing with their lives.
They probably had two or three kids. There's all this balancing act of just keeping a household together. They're paying bills, and then they have to get across a message to you.
And while they care for you and bring you up to the best of their abilities, they're still fudging through it like most parents do every single day. Your teachers, they're one source. Your parents are another source, but then you have friends.
And maybe some of those friends run faster than you or draw better than you, or at least that's what you believe to be true. And after a while, that becomes a reality, and you become the fourth source. You start to look in the mirror and go, I'm not talented enough.
And just at that moment, you become like my niece. She's five years old. She doesn't know Sunday from Monday, but she does know that everyone in her family has bad handwriting.
The source is the problem, but it never occurs to us, either as kids or as adults, that somehow we were misled.
We believe in what we see, how we do things and how much struggle is involved. And then we come to a conclusion that we are either talented or not talented. This takes us to the second part, which is about simplified structure.
2) The problem of not having simplified structure.
If you look at a chair catalog, you'll find hundreds, maybe thousands of options, different sizes, different colors. But there's one thing that is common for every single chair, and that is that you can sit on it.
It doesn't matter whether you're underweight or overweight, and overweight by quite a lot. You have that confidence that when you sit on the chair, it's not going to break. And the reason why it doesn't break is because it has structure.
It has an underlying structure that holds it up together.
The shapes, the sizes, the colors, they're all what we call vocabulary. They're a different way of expressing the same thing, but the underlying structure has to exist. Now, when you ask your parents or your teachers, or even your friends to explain structure, they don't do a very good job of it.
Let's say you have a manual camera, and you wanna take a picture.
And right up in the front is this whole bunch of numbers, 2.8, 5.6, what are they supposed to mean? If you ask a photographer, they will tell you that's the aperture, and immediately you're intimidated.
You don't know the structure, and you're already scared about something that you can't remember or can't figure out. There is shutter speed, and then there is ISO. There's ISO 100, 200, 500, 25,000, even 100,000.
And finally, shutter speed, which also has numbers, 2,000th of a second, 500th of a second. All of these are numbers and names, and there doesn't seem to be any structure. But that's not the way a trainer looks at it.
Someone who's teaching you photography will give it a fancy name like Exposure Triangle.
And then you're supposed to figure out how this triangle works. Now, if you go on YouTube, you don't have to spend more than five minutes before you start yawning. And the reason why you're so intimidated and so tired immediately is because there is no simplified structure.
And this is very important. You can have structure, but it can be very tedious. And when you have simplified structure, you realize, oh wait, somebody has taken this apart. Somebody has deconstructed it. Somebody has said, let me make this less boring and more exciting for the learner.
This is not what happens in schools, at your homes and with your friends.
People understand a concept and then they don't know how to explain it. So they don't have simplified structure. My other niece, Kiera, was going to a camp, and she wanted to know how to use a manual camera.
They were not allowed to use their phones, but they could take a camera. When I gave her my manual camera, she looked at all the numbers, and she said, what are all these about?
Now try explaining to a nine or 10 year old what aperture, shutter speed, and ISO means. So I told her, look at this numbers right in the front, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. If one person is standing in front of you, you go to one.
If four people are standing in front of you, four. And if eight people, and she says eight. So we sorted that first part out, and then we went to the second part, which is the ISO. And I told her, just keep that at a fixed amount. And she said, oh, I can do that. And finally, we didn't even look at the shutter speed and all those fancy numbers.
I just told her to turn the knob until she had enough light. So that was simplified structure. And when I explain this concept, it's better if I have a camera in my hand, and I'm showing you what I'm doing.
But even here over audio, you can understand approximately what's happening. So it's simplified structure. And when you have this simplified structure, people get it.
If the teacher explains something to you in a simplified manner, then immediately you know how to use it.
And better still, you become the teacher because you can explain it to someone else. Without simplified structure, we go back to our source, our teachers, our parents, our friends.
And then we say things like, we have to practice, practice, practice. We have to work really hard. You have to do a lot of this while learning, simply because there is no simplified structure in place.
You were given something that was complicated, something like the exposure triangle. And that is a bunch of exposure triangles that you're dealing with every single day of your life. Everything is made complicated because someone did not know how to explain it to you, or when they explained it to you, it was just complex.
You can see why learning is such a problem.
The source, which you're depending on, it's usually not reliable. The structure is often in place, but it's not simplified enough. And this is where the concept of working hard comes in. But the problem is that you can end up working too hard, and it is counterproductive.
This takes us to the third part, which is where we don't have to work harder, but we have to work smarter. But what is smarter? Let's find out.
3) Why speeding up things actually works to our disadvantage.
I once heard a neuroscientist talking about how we learn. But she wasn't talking about the brain. She was talking about our stomachs. She explained the sensation of feeling full. When we are so stuffed that we feel like rolling across the floor, we can't add another morsel.
Now this should apply to the brain as well.
We should stop at around the 30 or 40-minute mark, because that's all it can take, especially when it's dealing with new things. When it's dealing with elements that it hasn't encountered before, 30 minutes is a very, very long time.
If you are already familiar with whatever it is you're doing, then you could go for much longer. But in general, when you're learning, that's what the whole idea of learning is about, is that everything is new.
And if you go past the 30 or 40-minute mark, all you're doing is going back to what your parents told you to do, what your teachers, what your friends, and what you told yourself, that you have to work harder.
And you equate working harder with working longer.
But after a point, that work, whatever you're doing, it doesn't matter. Your brain is like your stomach. It's stuffed. And while you can understand this phenomenon, you still feel the need to somehow keep going.
When I started learning French, I started out with 25 new sentences, and then 25 existing sentences. I found that I could eventually have 25 new sentences, and then 75 existing sentences. And that took me no more than about 45 minutes.
But guess what?
I wanted to work harder. So some days, I do 600 sentences. Some days, 800. And I'd be proud announcing this to other friends who were also learning the language. But what did I remember?
Out of 25 sentences, I might remember 5. And even those would have grammatical errors in them. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't put in more time in the day.
This morning, when I woke up, I did my French for about 40 minutes. And when I went to the supermarket, I was listening to the sentences all over again. So there is an advantage in leaving something, putting in a space, and then coming back after a little while, then putting in an even longer space, and then coming back.
A professional will use this technique a lot of the time. A writer will do a first draft, walk away from it, get some feedback, then work on the second draft. And depending on the size of the chapter, depending on the size of the material being written, work on the third draft.
Now, you may say that the writer is not learning her craft.
She's not learning something new, but the subject matter is new, the words are new, the thoughts are different. And so, there is this slowness about it.
They're actually learning what they don't know, and that's why the process is slow. That's why the process needs the space in between. Unsurprisingly, this is how it works for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Not all at once, but with the space in between. And this brings us to the end of this article.
What is the one thing that is the most important?
In this article, we covered the source, which is our parents, teachers, friends, and ourselves. We then moved on to the fact that we didn't just need structure, but we needed simplified structure. We need a system that is so simple that we don't have to think about it.
And finally, we looked at the space between the learning, that instead of just cramming everything together, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we should have space. And that's how the learning process becomes smarter, not harder. Spending more time on something, that's usually counterproductive.
You get slower, you struggle more for no reason whatsoever. You think that you should work much harder, and this brings us to the most important point in this article, and that is the source is what you have to look at. You have to determine whether the source of the information was credible in the first place.
Was that 22-year-old teacher, 25-year-old parent, your friend who was six years old, are they reliable sources? Were they reliable sources? And all of the information that you're getting right now, is it a reliable source, especially when it comes to talent?
Because we see that people can draw, write, dance, cook. When they're 30 years old, 40 years, 50, the age doesn't matter, and it happens in a matter of weeks, sometimes days. The source is like the truffle oil.
It is an illusion, and we bind to that illusion, and we think it's real, and it's not real. Well, not most of the time. Some of the time, you do get good truffle oil.
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