Podcast: Play in new window | Download
What phase of learning do you regularly skip that you end up ignorant? Never amounting to much…
… in spite of all the courses you’ve taken, all the books you’ve read, all the videos you’ve watched? I am not even talking about the books and courses that you bought but never went through… Just the ones where you thought you learned something…
We live in a world of instant. Instagram, Instacart, Facebook live… blah blah blah.
We try to reduce everything to instant. Easy peasy. Fast. So we can go nowhere fast. So we can spend more time doing nothing.
Books and courses like the 10 minute workday, the 4-hour workweek, sell in millions of copies.
Software that claims to be one-click…
We outsource to workers from developing countries for pennies on the dollar…
I am participating in an automation course, so I don’t have to do all the work, so some script does it for me.
It’s a mindset, it’s an attitude. And it is killing you.
Why?
Because while we want to live forever, our lives are empty and meaningless…
We try to reduce the business of life to instant… but have nothing to replace it with.
So back to learning… because that is one of the things we try to make instant… so we can go from nothing to something at one swell swoop… a single bound, in a jump. Not learning so we’d know, but learning for what it may buy us…
But life, Life, isn’t friendly to our attitude.
Three things happen:
- 1. we think we learned… and become smug, conceited, and full of it. This is the most frequent occurrence among people who pretend to learn from me.
- 2. when we try to apply what we thought we learned, we find out that we didn’t learn it at all.
- 3. we blame… ourselves, the source of the knowledge…
Some people quickly turn around and teach what they never really learned… we call them gooroos… or coaches. Those who can’t do it teach it. All words. No substance.
I have muscletested many many many teachers and coaches, and one thing is in common: they can’t actually do what they teach…
So what happened. Was there a step that we skipped? Or are we really just losers, or dense, or stupid?
There is a measure in my starting point measurements that can shed light to the truth about this.
The measure, #24. the percentage of input that gets through to you. Uptake, throughput… I don’t have a good word for it.
I have measured a few people with high number there: mine is 30%, I found two people with as high as 50% throughput… I am slow on the uptake. It takes me time and repetition to be able to get to 100% comprehension, to fully grok it.
Albert Einstein’s throughput/uptake was also 30%. Fast doesn’t mean better. Some of the most successful people I have looked at have 20-30% ‘uptake’… so they go deep, much deeper than the fast uptake dudes and dudettes, and produce more profound results.
But most people’s throughput number is 10% or under 10%.
I remember when I first started to participate in Landmark Education… it was still Werner Erhard and Associates then. I took copious notes at the seminars, some sentences I wrote down verbatim, and when I got home, around 11 pm, I ‘transcribed’ my notes to a digital file… I could still remember about 50% of what was said, the rest was already gone… forgot.
Then I volunteered, every session, to call people who could not come to the session, and ‘delivered’ the seminar, on the phone… the parts I remembered. 5-6 calls a week. Repetition, training my mouth and my brain to say the words.
I did this, consistently, from 1987 to 2000, in addition to being on the phoning team registering people in the Forum, and seminars. So I got myself plenty of opportunities to practice the language.
Everything is language… language with words, language with the body (structural language), immediate language (emotions, like anger)
So with my 30% uptake I had to work hard outside of the seminars, and repeat, deepen, repeat, deepen, until I normally got to about 70%…
Fast uptake people stop at ‘getting it’, and then lose much of it…
Why don’t we shoot for 100%? Source (muscletesting says) it’s not attainable. Hm.
But what do you have to do if your ‘uptake’ number is low?
The issue with what works, repetition, getting to 70% is that it sounds tedious.
If you eat without fully tasting, smelling, interacting with your food, then you probably will interact with knowledge the same way. I tend to eat really fast myself… and therefore I tend to listen approximately, learn approximately, and my income is a testament that my knowledge of business is not deep enough: with the rare abilities I have I should be making 10 times more money than I am making.
It is all due to the behavior that stems from arrogance, i would say… Except when it comes to what is closest to my heart… the deep diving into the human machine…
You don’t have to give your all to everything.
You need to look what is important to what you are up to.
For example, I need to decide if it is really important to me to have more people exposed to the deep deep knowledge I have gleaned through Source. When I look: it hasn’t been that important, or I would have done the same thing with my marketing courses as I did with the Landmark Education seminars: repeat and repeat until I get to 70%.
I stopped with all of them at 30%… my uptake number, and that is what you do… with your most likely under 10% uptake. Stop with what you got in one reading, one listening, and you think that that is enough.
It isn’t.
- I know successful people who have a 10% uptake… and they disseminate it in programs. Their knowledge is shallow, and for the most part, when I observe them, they specialize in shooting fish in a barrel…
- And I know successful people who have 30% uptake, and read every book, go through a course, practice everything 10 times.
And that is how their knowledge is deep… substantial, and sufficient to get things done, and produce results. This is the kind of teacher I want to learn from.
Can you change your uptake level?
Somewhat, by sleeping enough, by living right, eating the right foods the right way, getting enough physical activity, removing the plaque from your brain, and if possible activate the whole brain with the hammer exercises, instead of just trying to work with one single hemisphere.
I got very little sleep last night. My landlord told me yesterday that he intended to sell the house… and uncharacteristically, I got all worried. I don’t have a car. I don’t have a driver’s license. I am a hoarder. I have too much stuff that I don’t want, don’t need… and I am old and fragile.
So I could not sleep.
Today I am kinda stupid… and my uptake dropped to 10%.
So if I had to learn something now, impaired as i am, I would have to go over the same thing 10 times…
3 reasons why is your uptake so low?
- Partially because you don’t actually control your attention… that is another number in your starting point measurements: to what degree you control your attention. Your attention is somewhat there… but it’s wondering. My number is 30%… The people with higher throughput rates have a higher attention number as well.
- Partially because of your brain capacity… what you were born with.
- Partially because of your attitude: your attitude can rob you of your willingness to pay attention.
That attitude is what I call ITCH… it is a sentence or two that you made up when you were little. It says how the world should be, how you should be, and how other people should be.
- If your attitude is “I should be already there, I should already know it” then you won’t be able to keep your attention glued to what is you are trying to learn, because the attitude always plays in the background: you should not have to learn anything, you should not have to do what you are doing, you should be able to be somewhere else.
- Or if your attitude is “I can never get what I want” then of course you won’t invest the energy and attention to actually learn anything.
- If your attitude is “I’ll do it my way… because I know better” then you’ll resist what is being taught, and you won’t learn anything. Same if your attitude is “I shouldn’t have to do what I need to do to get what I want”, or “Don’t tell me what to do!”
In the ITCH course I taught half a decade ago, and in the Playground that ran for two years, we identified your ITCH, the sentence, the attitude you use to be miserable and self-righteous…
In the live workshop I am giving on Saturday September 26, I’ll attempt to teach you moves in communication to disengage your stuck attitude that robs you of being able to learn anything… and therefore live less of a life thank you would be capable of… without that pesky attitude.
Get your ITCH course
