November 15, 2016
Interview with Timothy Ferris, author of the book Tools Of Titans
Mike Carruthers: Conventional wisdom is that to become excellent at something takes skill and years and years of practice. Well, maybe not.
Timothy Ferris: What you find is there are many, many people who can become world class, meaning top 5% in the world in a given skill, in much shorter periods of time. In some cases 6-12 months
Timothy Ferris, author of the soon to be released book Tools Of Titans, says it’s how you learn something that makes all the difference.
And what you find is many of the world’s fastest learners just ask themselves, “What if I did the opposite?” I did this in Argentina when I was studying Argentine tango; I learned the female role before I learned the male role. I wanted to learn the follow oddly enough.
Most male tango dancers don’t learn the female steps as part of their training, but Timothy did.
And it was that change that allowed me to instead of taking years and years to get to a competitive level I went to the world championships in 6 months and it was primarily because I did a lot of things out of order. That’s also how you can cut in half the amount of time necessary to get good at golf – would be doing certain drills in improper order.
Another key ingredient to getting good at something very quickly is to take a logical and disciplined approach.
As opposed to simply saying, “I want to get good at Spanish. I want to learn the guitar.” And then haphazardly go to 2 lessons every 3 weeks. They really need to treat it like, I think, almost like physical training as if they were training for their 1st 5K.
