Can you become fluent in a week?
We all seem to know that fluency takes time—lots and lots of it. It also takes a lot of effort and learning. We're told that to be fluent, we have to put in thousands of hours of work.
However, what if that premise were wrong?
What if you could be fluent at something in a matter of weeks, or better still, in a matter of minutes? It sounds almost scammy doesn't it? And yet, fluency is closer than you'd think. Here's a look at fluency in a manner you've probably not encountered before.
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Re-release: How To Become Fluent At Almost Any Skill In A Matter Of Weeks (And What Stops Us From Being Fluent)
Original: How To Become Fluent At Almost Any Skill In A Matter Of Weeks (And What Stops Us From Being Fluent)
(Note: This is an unedited transcript)
There's a free car charger near my house and often I go there.
And I'm around at least half an hour to forty five minutes at a time. I'm usually doing my diary, which is to keep an update of everything I do every day. But on this morning I was distracted because there were two people with lawnmowers.
It wasn't anyone's lawn, it was just public property. What were these two people doing practicing lawn mowing? They went back and forth, they seemed to be some instructions. There was a lot of fiddling with the Lawn moving. And finally they took a break. So I went up to them and asked them what they were doing.
The older guy turned to me and said, “We're a franchise and I'm teaching this other person how to move the Lawn.” At which I chuckled and asked, why would anybody need to learn how to move the Lawn? It seems pretty straightforward enough.
And he looked at me and with our blinking said, “Anybody can move lawn, but when you have a dozen lawns to mow in a day, you have to be very good at it. You have to be fluent.”
Fluency is the topic that we're going to cover today.
And I say that tongue and cheek because fluency is such a huge topic. But we'll cover three points. And you'll see that it's not as weird as you think it is. It's not as big as you think it is, not as difficult as you think it is.
The first, what would cause an average person to believe that you're fluent? The second, what instruction or instructions would you need to get to that level of fluency? And finally, what could you safely leave out and get almost the same results as someone who put in a lot more time? So let's get to the first point.
1) What would cause an average person to believe that you're fluent.
Let's say you wanted to make Indian food. What would it take to become fluent? If you were to ask a chef, you'd probably get an answer that was reasonably high. A chef might say, “To be fluent, you need to know at least 50 or 100 dishes.”
The answer is closer to 10. Because let's say you've been given the task to feed someone for a whole month and you've got to have enough variety in your food. Then how many times in a month would you make a dish? You know just ten dishes.
Well the answer is simple. You make a dish just three times a month. When we think of fluency, we think of this enormous number but just ten dishes and you could be considered fluent.
In fact, if you said, “Okay, I'm going to have a party and I'm going to call all my friends over,” and then there you were and you laid out all the spread on the table and there were just those ten dishes that you knew. Just nothing else, just those ten dishes.
Imagine a look on their faces.
They would think you're fluent. They would think you're outstanding and making Indian food. In reality, you know just 10. Even so, that's what the average person would need to know. And in many restaurants, the chef is like they'd make just variations of those 10 dishes.
And at this point, it's important to bring in a scale. If you look at a scale from left to right, what we'll see is the first stage which is hopeless. You're completely hopeless. You can't do anything. You don't know where anything is, you don't know any ingredients. You don't know anything at all. So hopeless is where we all start.
But then we get to average. And to me, average would be one or two dishes. I mean, there's lots of repetition. If you knew how to make just two dishes, you're going to make it 15 times a month. That's boring. That is frighteningly scary. But if you went to 30 or 40, then we see those parameters starting to stretch out a bit.
And once we get to about 10 dishes, you have moved from hopeless to average and from average to fluent.
You may not think you're fluent. This is where all the imposter syndrome comes in, but for the outside world, that's what's needed. They just need to see you as fluent, they need to treat you as fluent and automatically you start to see yourself after a while.
It takes a while, but you start to see yourself as not hopeless and not average, which means you have nowhere to go but fluent. With food, it's about 10 dishes. With dancing, it's about three or four moves. I don't play any instrument, but I've been told that knowing just three chords, you could play dozens of songs.
So what we're looking at is how the world perceives you as being fluent.
And you have to ask yourself, am I hopeless? Well, we have to get you from hopeless to average and then from average to fluent. But what's the difference between you and say the top of the line?
If you were to compare yourself with someone who was been a chef for 15 years, 20 years, I mean cooking in commercial kitchens or in hotel, he was making dozens or hundreds of dishes? That's the kind of thing that we do. We kind of create this comparison between us and them.
And that is Olympic standards. So if we would get back to that scale, we've got hopeless, we then have average, then we have fluent. And they kind of bunch up. They're like Mercury, Venus, Earth. And that's where we are at fluency. And then when we look at those chefs, well, they're like Jupiter or Pluto. They're very far away.
And it's not like this solar system that you've been used to where everything goes around in concentric circles and everything looks exactly the same in terms of distance. No, we have our mercury which is our hopeless and then we have Venus which is our average and then finally we have Earth and that's fluent and that's the place to be.
That's the kind of situation you want to be in because if you know just that much then a lot of people see you as fluent and you start to become fluent because they see you as fluent and because you have control over at least what it needs to get going. Most of us never want to, never need to reach Olympic standards. We just don't.
Because Olympic standards requires you to put in six, seven, eight hours in the kitchen, six, seven, eight hours in the pool, every day of your life. And that's Olympic standards. That's why they have a coach. That's why they have that training. That's why they have all of that rigor.
We don't want to do that.
We want to go out. We want to have coffee. We want to be with our friends. We want to spend time with our kids. We don't want to go to Olympic standards in most cases. So fluency will enable you to get to a lot of places very quickly. I draw cartoons, I do watercolors, I teach courses, I do podcasts, I can keep on with this list. I added photography to the list.
And yes, I can keep blowing my own trumpet. But the point here is that you can get to fluency in a lot of aspects in your life. Without having to get to all the mixed standards. The downside of Olympic standards is also that you have spent so much time in so much effort that you're only good at one thing.
You might be good at two, but at the fluency level, you could be good at a dozen things. So fluency is really that earth level. You start out with hopeless, you go to average, you become fluent, and you don't need a lot for fluency. And that's the beauty of it all.
The question then arises, how do we get to this fluency level? And for that, we have to get to the second part. And what is the second part about?
2) It's what instruction or instructions would you need to get to that level of fluency.
Yesterday I got a message on Instagram. There was this woman in Utah who is a photographer. She has the same camera as I do and she has bought a lot of profiles and presets which is the stuff that you get. Working with software in photography, in Lightroom. And she wanted to replicate the stuff that I'm doing. She bought a lot of the stuff and it wasn't working for her.
So she reached out to me and asked me, “How do I do this? Can you help me? Can you do a course?” And I said to her, “You don't need a course. You probably need half an hour or an hour in Zoom.” And that's it. And she was like, “Sign me up, get me there.” And to her what it sounded like, what it sounded like that I was saying was that I was going to give her a fixed set of instructions or an instruction, and she could manage by herself.
She could then produce pictures that had all of this depth, all of the blacks and the whites and the grays and all of this shadows and detail that that she was missing out with the other pictures and with all these templates that she had. Hence, when you look at getting to fluency, you don't need a book, you don't need a course.
Usually, you need an instruction or a set of instructions.
Now, when we go back to Indian food, there is an elaborate dish called Biryani. If you haven't eaten, please go out there and eat it. But there are different types of Biryani that are what is called a mutton Biryani and a chicken Biryani. There's also vegetable biryani. There are dozens of biryani.
The problem starts to manifest itself when you try to make one at home. You can get a powder and you can just take some rice and then check the powder as if you're making noodles and then mix it and kind of taste okay. But it doesn't taste anywhere close to what you'd get if it were in the hands of a good chef, in the hands of someone who knows how to make a biryani.
Which is why if you started to make a biryani this weekend, you probably fail. Or at least be dissatisfied because Biryani is a lot more complex than a lot of Indian dishes. But let's say I said to you, let's make a pepper rasam. And that's like a tomato soup, but it's not quite. It's got lots of spices and garlic and it's just flavor of some. It's just so fabulous.
Anyone who has it thinks wow. I need to have more of this pepperism. But here's the thing. Both of the dishes are quite tasty, nutritious, and yet one is really simple to make. And how do I know? Because a friend of mine had some of the stuff that I made, and she said, well, I would like to make it myself.
What I did was I just put all the ingredients together, put them in a little plastic bag, and gave it the instructions.
She replicated it without any problem. Hence, if you were to take 10 dishes like this that were tasty, flavor, some healthy, everything, if you take all the boxes of good food, good Indian food, well, you can make 10 dishes with very few instructions.
The problem that we have is the same problem that photographer in Utah had, which is that She's bordering between hopeless and average. Not in photography, she's a good photographer, but when she's trying to produce post-produce these photographs, she can't get to that level of fluency. And so we just need those interactions.
And the problem is we don't have such an understanding of what's needed and what's not. Which is why we have to find a teacher who has the ability to reduce the number of instructions and we don't. So we have to put in an endless number of hours searching and learning and trying to get to that level of fluency.
And what we're really missing is just one instruction.
Because usually one instruction gets you further down the track and then another instruction further down and what are you doing is you're moving very quickly with that instruction. Now just to be clear, sometimes we may just try to find our way and we might end up in a place which is someplace where no one has thought of before.
Some kind of solution and no one has dreamt up before. But most of the time we end up at dead ends. But we also know what it feels like when we get precise instruction. A map versus a GPS is a perfect example of instructions. A map tells us everything. It shows us the whole city.
It shows us page after page or if you have this one of those big maps that take up the back seat of a car. Well, it shows you everything, but a GPS doesn't do that. You think that a GPS is just showing you how to go from A to B. No, no. The real magic in a GPS is that it doesn't show you 99% of the map.
It only shows you what is needed.
The instruction is so small that you can cross an entire continent, just by going left or right when you're taking a land route with a GPS. And that's what you call elegance. However, people deride that level of elegance. They call it simplicity. But it's not simple, it is elegant. If you can't draw a perspective and five seconds later you can draw it, you don't have simplicity, you have elegance, you have precise instruction.
This lets you do what other takes weeks or months or sometimes never achieve. The problem is based on instructions or rather instructions. One instruction at a time and a precise instruction will enable you to get very far in a very short amount of time. You can get 30 separate instructions one at a time and then be whatever you choose to do.
Or sometimes with prospective drawing for instance, you need only one instruction. and you can draw perspectives of all kinds of buildings, villages, a whole lot of stuff. And if you go on YouTube or you look on Amazon, you'll find books with 200 pages or a YouTube with all of these lines and cross lines and stuff. And they're all teaching you to draw perspective. Yes, at a olympic level.
But you just have to be fluent.
You don't have to be hopeless. You don't have to be average. You just have to be fluent. If you can draw a village, well, that's good enough. If you can draw the whole Manhattan skyscrapers in perspective, that's good enough. Why do you have to be at Olympic levels?
This is not a quest for saying, “Oh, just don't do the best you can. No.” What I'm saying is that we all want to have a life. We all want to be really good at stuff. We don't want to be hopeless when we don't want to be average. We want to be really fluent at stuff and this is the way to do it, where you don't go right to the Olympic levels unless you want to.
But then you have to put in the six eight hours a day. You have to get a coach. You have to have all of the stuff that Olympic athletes have. And then you can get there. But if you want to be fluent in six or eight or even more aspects of life, then this is the way to go to get precise instructions. And of course this takes us to a third part, which is the flip side of instruction.
3) What instruction not to get or what to avoid.
I know my way around the supermarket. So if you ask me, go and get some milk, some bread, some vegetables, or a precise kind of vegetable, I know where to find it, but only in my supermarket. If I come to your supermarket, I'm gonna waste any normal amount of time.
That's because supermarkets have similar layouts because they try to get you down a certain aisle and try to do certain things. But I am still going to be lost and you're gonna be lost if you come to my supermarket. This is not some very sophisticated task.
We're just going to a supermarket and we're just buying two or three things. But one person can do it in 30 seconds, and the other one is going to take five minutes or ten minutes, or even not be able to get to where they want to go without help.
And what's happening here is we have to filter out a lot of the extraneous information.
We have all these brands, all these aisles, all of these settings, and we have to get rid of all of that stuff to get to exactly the stuff that we need. And this is the nightmare that we face every single day. We have to go through an entire course.
We have to go through a book of 200 pages. And we don't know that at the end we will get fluency. We don't know whether the first chapter is going to bring us fluency or the second or the third or the fourth. And the reality should be that every chapter possibly every page should get us to a level of fluency.
We shouldn't have to read a book. We definitely don't need to go to an entire course. Unless it is one instruction at a time. And you know it's an instruction, not because you've just got some information and you've got even more information than you had before, but rather that you can put that into practice.
That's how you know that the instruction was very precise.
As a student, you have to do this filtration all the time. You're given this enormous amount of information. And that's because teachers don't do that. They don't filter out what's important. Or they don't know how to do it. And so you're stuck anyway. It doesn't matter. And you think it's you.
You think you're not talented. But it's just the instruction. Everybody's talented at using GPS. Everybody's talented at making magnitudes. People go around saying, “Oh, that's simple. No, it's elegant.” It is real elegance where you have only one instruction at a time.
The iPhone, when it first came out, was a wondrous thing. You could give the iPhone to anybody. And it only gave you one instruction at a time to start up the iPhone to get that activated, just one instruction. And this brings us towards the end of this podcast, where we realize that fluency isn't about learning. It's very much the opposite.
It's about knowing what to ignore.
Most parents, most teachers, they don't know how to perform this magic trick. They don't know how to ignore stuff. So they give you the entire lecture, the entire sermon, everything that they know. And that is why we have to practice, practice, practice, practice because that's what's happening really in practice.
We have filtering through stuff. We're trying to find what we get us to the end point quickly, but we don't know the answer and they don't know the answer and so we just flay around trying to get to that point. What we need is GPS. It tells us where to go, one instruction at a time, but it also hides 99% of that instruction, 99% of the map. And that is how you get fluent.
That is how you go from hopeless to average, which is not a big jump. And then from average to fluent and everybody says, “Wow, you are so talented.” And you just smile. And that brings us the end of this podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. This is one of my favorite topics about talent.
And I don't mind the people that say that you have to have in-born talent.
I don't mind the people that say, you know, somehow it has to be a given skill. What we set out to do is to prove that. We teach people how to draw cartoons, not just cartoons, but when you look at it, they look like professionals. And it doesn't take them months or years. It takes them weeks.
You can see that when we release the PDF of the cartoon in course, same thing applies to the article writing course, same thing applies to anything, the sales page course, anything else. What's happening there are these three aspects. And of course I'll summarize now.
The first thing that's happening is almost like smoking mirrors. It is what would cause the average person to believe that you're fluent, and you would say, oh well, I only know 10 dishes. It's important to note that when you think you're fluent and when others think you're fluent, first, not only are you fluent, but you are also propelling yourself forward. If you can do 10, 11 or 12 is not so hard, and then getting to 20, isn't that much of a leap?
You understand how everything works, you understand how spice is work, and now you're making Indian food, or Italian food, or Chinese food, or you're painting, doing podcasts, doing a whole bunch of things and people take, oh, that's magical. No, it's not magical. It is just a factor of getting to fluency, which takes you from hopeless to average, and now you're fluent.
The second thing is what instruction or instructions would you need to get to that point? And of course you have to find the right teacher. The reason why we're struggling is not because we're hopeless, but because teachers and I don't mean school teachers. I mean in general parents, friends, books, they're hopeless. They give us way too many instructions. They're not like a GPS.
Which is the third point and that is a GPS's greatest skill if you want to call it. The GPS is talented at hiding everything but the instruction that you need. And that is what we need. What could we safely leave out and still get almost the same or even a better result and do so in a fraction of the time. And that is what gets you to fluency and that brings us to the end of this podcast.
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Accelerated Learning: How To Incredibly Speed Up Your Skill Acquisition
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