Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing?

Today, information is available to virtually everyone on the planet and knowledge is abundant.

So how do you stay ahead and out-think the competition?

Bill makes two points I can’t stop nodding my head to.

ONE: The best leaders (and learners) have the widest field of vision.

Breadth is as important as depth if you are going to lead the field. Why? Because you need perspective to lead, and perspective comes from having a wide-angle lens attached to your brain. See more, see what’s coming.

TWO: The best source of new ideas in your field can be old ideas from unrelated fields.

Everyday habits in one area can become a revolution in another. Apple started as a combination of computers and typographic design (Steve Jobs studied calligraphy in his early years). Bill Buxton created the touch screen by thinking about crude telephones work. If an idea works in one place, it will probably work in another. Often in ways no one expects.

Right now, you can watch my deep dive video on exactly how how to source new ideas from unrelated fields, and how to do it over and over again, on command. Watch it here.

Soon, I will release a program that shows you, step-by-step, how to get the widest possible field of vision so you can lead and learn. Watch out for that.

Today, the question isn’t whether you will have to become multi-disciplinary or not. It’s what fields will you choose to be a part of your particular mix?

Robots do one thing well. Humans do everything well.

Do more human.

Ted Manasa

How do we compete?

By each combining our skills and knowledge into something greater than the sum of its parts. By putting our numerous talents together. By fusing our expertise.

Recently, Stanford University, one of the most elite educational institutions in the world, made some of its courses available to the world for free–and even provides a certificate of completion. Some courses reached 100,000 students. These students, who are getting the same top-level education as any of us could hope to get, are now our competitors. And MIT and Harvard are joining the movement.

Stanford Takes Online Schooling To The Next Academic Level

This movement is fantastic for humans as a species. But for each of us who want to thrive individually, we need to up our game.

We need to go from single-threaded to multi-threaded. We need to go from talented to multi-talented.

We need to stitch together the many filaments of knowledge and skills available to us into a sail.

Using narrowly focused information is no longer sufficient. Anyone can get that information. Weaving unrelated strands together to create something innovative or a bigger picture is the human skill that technology still can’t cheapen or duplicate. This is the skill you must have to stay ahead.

Paraphrasing Daniel Pink, author of the fascinating book A Whole New Mind: Automation, abundance of information, and outsourcing is moving the knowledge economy out of our offices and into machines and overseas. To stay ahead, we must transition into a higher-level economy focused on combining disparate information into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Stanford acknowledges education as we know it is on the cusp of a massive, global leveling via cheap and ubiquitous technology. And even though Stanford itself finds the change very uncomfortable, it also realizes it’s unavoidable. And is embracing it.

Are you ready for it?

Do more human.

Ted Manasa

But that’s not what makes this building remarkable. What makes it remarkable is that it was built in a typhoon and earthquake zone.

How do you prevent a skyscraper from toppling in 135 mph typhoon winds and the worst earthquakes likely to occur in a 2,500 year cycle?

You stick a ball in it.

Specifically, you stick a 730 ton steel ball in it on the 87^th floor to counter-balance the building’s 2-foot sway. The ball acts as a pendulum that swings in the opposite direction of the building’s structure. Without this colossal ball, Taipei 101 would cause more nausea than a Limp Bizkit concert.

Balance is an unavoidable universal principle. Without balance, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. The balance of nature over millions of years brought us here. The balance of atomic and subatomic forces made nature in the form we know possible. The balance of the chair you’re sitting in, the balance of your car as it steers around a corner, the balance of your body as it tips over the toes of your feet as you walk. All these balances make life as we know it possible.

What is balance? Balance is the “even distribution of weight that allows someone or something to remain upright and steady.”

In the physical world, the importance of balance is obvious. But what makes balance a universal principle is that it applies to so many other, non-physical, facets of our lives.

Think about how we talk about diet. We talk about a balanced diet.

Think about how we talk about achieving peak performance. We talk about a balance between mind, body, and spirit.

Think about how we talk about good intimate relationships. A balance of complimentary, and sometimes contradictory, qualities.

Work-life balance.

Salt and pepper balance.

White balance (from photography, not Affirmative Action).

Even the left-right balance of sound coming from your car stereo.

The principle of balance pervades. If something is out of balance, it won’t stay upright for long. If something in your life is out of balance, you won’t stay upright and steady for long. That’s useful, but obvious. So let’s go a little deeper.

If you want to control a debate, what should you do? Throw your opponent off balance by citing a fact that they can’t counter.

If you want to win a fight, what should you do? Throw your opponent off balance by feigning in one direction and then going in the other.

If you want to go faster on your mountain bike, shift your balance over your handle bars. But be warned: Anytime you shift your balance, you may gain speed and power, but you risk wiping out hard.

This lesson applies to everything that is dictated by balance.

For those of you brave enough, let’s go one level deeper… With too much balance, you may stay upright and steady, but you won’t go anywhere. Counterbalance balance with imbalance to get forward motion. Walking is, after all, just a series of moments of balance and imbalance. With each step, you pitch forward off balance until you catch yourself with your heel and regain stability. Walking is controlled falling in a particular direction. The direction you want to go in.

Balance keeps you upright. Imbalance keeps you moving.

This lesson also applies to everything that is dictated by balance.

The next time you’re walking along a curb or balancing your check book, think about balance. Understand it. Practice it. Know it. Doing so will help you master just about anything life can throw at you. That’s the Superfluid way.

Do more human. Beat the machines.

Ted Manasa

Everything was going according to plan until, three days into the mission, an oxygen tank burst and life support systems began to fail. It was then that Swigert uttered the famous words: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

Swigert, Lovell, and Haise were, of course, the crew of the historic Apollo 13 mission to the moon.

Today, the Apollo 13 story is best known—thanks in no small part to Ron Howard’s movie by the same name—as a story of brave men and fast thinking. It is a story of survival in the black of space with no hope for rescue. And it is a story of…

Physics.

And more important for us, it’s a story of a particular principle. A principle that was not only used to save the lives of three men destined for the moon, but that dictates the behavior of every single person on Earth.

This principle, this Universal Principle, is called inertia.

In 1687, Newton published his law of inertia. It states that a body continues going in the same direction, with the same speed, unless an outside force acts upon it. And the more massive and the faster the body is moving, the harder its direction and speed are to change.

This law is critical to space flight, and was especially critical during Apollo 13’s return flight because it was how the crew capsule picked up enough speed to come home, despite being very low on fuel. But the law’s usefulness goes well beyond space flight and physics. It explains the workings of the human mind.

Think about a decision you made a recently. Either a really good one or a really bad one. A decision that you made with absolute certainty despite all the people around you telling you to do the opposite.

Now think about a decision you made recently that you would not have made unless someone had nudged you towards it. A decision that you only made after being on the fence for some time and being unsure of what to do.

By now, you probably see the strong connection between physics and human psychology.

When you were absolutely sure about something you wanted or a decision you were going to make, you had a lot of mental inertia. Not enough a small village could convince you to stop. In other words, you had a lot of momentum. And the more momentum something has, the harder it is to stop. Just like a moving train.

When you were unsure about what you wanted or what you were going to do, you had little mental inertia. You had no fixed direction or great speed of purpose. That’s why it took very little energy to change your course. This is why confused people are easy to manipulate.

Your mind, and therefore the course of your life, is subject to the law of inertia. The more mental energy you have going in one direction, the harder you are to stop. The less mental energy you have going in any one direction, the easier you are to distract and divert.

And here’s some deep insight into human behavior you can derive from the study of inertia: If a body’s mass is great, and even if it is not moving at all, it will be difficult to change its direction or speed. Do you know anyone like this? Someone who has dug in their heels and is resolved to not make a decision or to act? This person is governed by the law of inertia, too.

What makes the principle of inertia universal is that the more you understand it and how it works, the more you understand how everything around you—and even the things inside you—work.

Look around and you will find the law of inertia. When you do, use it. It might take you to the moon.

Do more human. Beat the machines.

Ted Manasa

Please forward this installment to anyone you think could use a bit more confidence in their lives. It may help them in profound ways.

As always, let me know what you think or send me your questions or comments.

Universal Principle #3: Confidence

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1. What Confidence Is

2. Why Is Confidence So Important?

3. Like Visa: It’s Everywhere You Want to Be

4. Confidence is a Skill

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1. What Confidence Is

Confidence is an unusual Universal Principle. It’s a feeling in addition to being an idea. Feelings are temporary, ephemeral. They’re hard to pin down, and everyone has a slightly different interpretation of them. So why is a feeling showing up here as a Universal Principle?

Because it turns up anywhere success is found. You’ll find it in all the great self-improvement texts, like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich and and in the speeches of great leaders, like Steve Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement talk. You’ll find it in the work of artists and the performance of athletes. You’ll find it in scripture as the sister of “faith” and “belief.”

Most of us know confidence to be that feeling you have when you are sure you can handle the challenge before you. It’s a trust you have in yourself and your abilities. It’s that quiet knowledge that you won’t lose. It’s the state of mind you put yourself in before you take on something hard to do.

For this article, I’m not talking about the kind of confidence that isn’t much more than bravado. While you can psych yourself up by putting on a big show and boasting all around, doing so isn’t enough to get you the result you want. Here, we’ll focus on the deep kind of confidence that comes from within.

2. Why Is Confidence So Important?

Confidence is the well of energy you draw upon when you tackle the obstacles that stand between you and your highest goals. It’s what combats the little voice in your head telling you can’t do something. Without confidence and faith, you’re apt to quit when the going gets tough.

But that’s only the most obvious reason confidence is important.

The less obvious reason is that without enough confidence you can enter what chess and Tai-chi champion Josh Waitzkin calls “the downward spiral” in his book The Art of Learning.

Progress is a battle between fear and confidence. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other. (Don’t confuse confidence with courage, by the way. But that’s a different newsletter.) As fear overtakes confidence, you hesitate. You’re afraid you might make a mistake, so you doubt your actions and you waver. Hesitation causes you to make even more mistakes because things are happening faster than you are prepared to react. Mistakes cause you to flip over the handle bars of your mountain bike while descending rocky slopes. They cause you to get kicked in the head by a black belt. They cause you to catch an edge on the ice on your snowboard and suffer a concussion. And when you make mistakes, your confidence wanes. Which causes you to hesitate. Which causes you to make mistakes. Which…

You get the picture. This is the downward spiral.

How do you get out of the downward spiral? By stopping and reseting your mind. Taking yourself out of the battle and regrouping yourself.  This helps you reduce your fear and regain the confidence you need to continue. (For a great education on dealing with the downward spiral, read Waitzkin’s book mentioned above.)

Now, take a look at how the downward spiral works. No where does a decrease of skill or experience or ability or knowledge come into play. It’s all about damaged confidence. Which is manufactured by the brain (or the body, depending on the research you read) on a moment-to-moment basis. Once confidence is restored, performance returns.

Think about that for a second.

If your skill and experience and ability and knowledge haven’t changed after a mistake, why should you continue stumbling (or flipping over the handle bars, as it were) because of a feeling that will change in the next 15 minutes anyway?

You shouldn’t.

3. Like Visa: It’s Everywhere You Want to Be

Now that you have the background for why confidence is important, let me show you why it’s universal. And why you should amass confidence every chance you get.

Think about the most confident person you know. When you describe that person, you describe her as being a confident person. Not as being “confident at this thing, but not that thing.” That person may derive their confidence from the things they do particularly well, but that confidence seeps into most everything else that they do and who they are. That confidence is a critical part of what helps them be good; since they know they will succeed, fear doesn’t stop them and any failure is considered an investment.

Even without any expertise in a new venture, confident people make other people confident in their ability to come through. Business people switch to politics riding that fact all the time. Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin empire, which includes airlines, telecommunications, and music distribution is the poster child of this truth.

Everywhere you find great success, you find confidence.

Solve this riddle: Which came first? Confidence or great success?

Gold star for you if you said confidence. Small successes can happen without a lot of confidence, and there is nothing wrong with that. But the big achievements only come when you are committed beyond the reach of fear. That takes oodles of confidence.

Why shouldn’t you use confidence to reach your goals?

If you’re thinking because I don’t have decades of experience or particularly stellar skill at anything, think back a few paragraphs and recall: Confidence is a feeling.

That means that, just like any other feeling, you can have it at any moment you choose, for any reason. All you have to do is imagine a good enough reason to feel it and you will feel it. Think of something in your life that makes you nostalgic and you will fell nostalgic. Think of something terrifying and you will feel scared. Think of something joyous and you will feel likewise.

Remember, without confidence in yourself, you can’t get what you want, and no one will take a chance on you without it. You’ll need to it reach the promised land. Confidence is like a Visa card: It’s everywhere you want to be.

4. Confidence is a Skill

Actors conjure feeling all the time by digging into their memories of past emotional experiences. Actors become good at it because they recognize that producing feelings when they need to is a craft and a skill. It’s what they study and practice. It’s how they win Tonys and Emmys.

Is that to say that creating confidence is an act? No. In the same way that good acting only happens when you’re not faking it, true confidence only comes when you’re not faking it. Just like bad acting is obvious, fake confidence is obvious. They’re empty and they won’t serve you or anyone else. To manifest confidence, you have to draw from a place of genuine emotion or create the circumstances for it. If you don’t, you’ll be outed as a fraud before long. If you do, you’ll move mountains. Recognize that having confidence is a skill that you can hone and master and fuel it with real feelings of certainty. You have them inside you in gobs, trust me.

Here’s how manufacturing confidence at a moment’s notice recently helped me.

In Costa Rica, I went canyoneering. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when you hike through the wet canyons of a rain forest and rappel off of giant waterfalls, all the while looking for hungry dinosaurs because you swear you’re in a Jurassic Park movie.

If you know me, you know I’m not fond of heights. I don’t appreciate 30-story balconies or even laying roof tiles on the second story of my parents’ house. But in Costa Rica, like the insects and lizards, everything is big. The waterfall I needed to rappel down was 150ft tall—which is bloody high up if you ask me. And I’d never rappelled in my life.

As I approached the edge of the cliff-edge, I knew that if I let butterflies creep into my stomach and doubt into my mind I would enter a pernicious downward spiral. My brain would find all kinds of reasons that I shouldn’t hang over the on a single rope. My body would lock up and and I would get stuck at the top, just like another member of my group did.

So I manufactured some confidence. Using the Superfluid Thinking techniques Self-Deception and Rehearsal, I made myself feel like I had the confidence of someone who had rappelled numerous times off of even taller waterfalls. I rehearsed, in my head, the motion of holding the rope, leaning back into my harness, and pushing off the canyon wall with my feet. I made those thoughts as real for myself as I could by imagining the texture of my gloves, the sound of the waterfall, and my weight on the rope. You don’t need to have rappelled a single time in your life to imagine those things. By thinking about rappelling enough times, I deceived myself into feeling familiar with it. Familiarity gave me the confidence I needed to step off the ledge and over the abyss.

No butterflies in my stomach, no hesitation.

Sound dubious? You’ve actually done this kind of thing your whole life, just maybe not as deliberately. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Without anxiousness or negative thoughts, I got to enjoy the descent in a way I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. I could pay attention to the water running under my feet, shimmering foliage climbing up the canyon walls, and birds flying overhead. I couldn’t have done that if I was busy trying not to look down and saying to myself “oh my god, why am I doing this” every step of the way.

When the guy who got stuck finally made it down, I asked him how he did it. He said, “I just talked myself into it.” He didn’t get any new lessons or equipment before he climbed over the ledge. He just drowned out the voice of fear with the voice of confidence and stopped his downward spiral. That’s it.

We all know what that internal dialogue sounds like. You can do this. You got this. It’s no big deal. You know you’ll feel great if you do it. The reason you recognize that dialogue is because you’ve been using Rehearsal and Self-deception to do daring deeds since you were a kid. Your friends screamed the same words at you from the bleachers when it was your turn to bat against the big scary pitcher. In adulthood, they scream those words at you when you’re about to have you’re first child. So you know how this works.

Just do it on purpose whenever you need to from now on.

The guy who got stuck at the top of the waterfall had the ride of his life because he changed his feeling.

The grin on his face told me that it was worth it.

And that’s what having confidence is all about.

Do more human. Beat the machines.

Ted Manasa

One place you hear them often is at the office. Actually, the office teems with analogies. Here are a few examples that will probably “ring a bell.”

“On the same page.”

“Throw under the bus.”

“Above-board.”

“Go to bat.”

“Drink the Kool-aid.”

“Rock the boat.”

“Open the kimono.”

“Smoke test.”

I will bet that you know what most of these analogies mean in the context of the office—even though none are related literally to the office.

Let’s talk about why.

Analogies do two primary things at once:

1. They create a link in your mind that helps you understand and remember the message being conveyed. Actually: “Human memory relies mostly on association and objects frequently seen together to become linked in our mind; when we try to retrieve information, one thing reminds us of another, which reminds us of yet another, and so on.” (The Salk Institute http://bit.ly/5e0XxJ) The strongest links are normally formed with the help of an image.
2. They transmit a lot of meaning using only a few words.

For example: In business, “going to bat” for someone means standing up for and supporting that person. It means attempting to win something for that person, like an accolade or a promotion or a raise. Obviously, it’s literal meaning comes from the game of baseball and refers to batting for a home run.

The analogy is memorable because the image of a baseball player stepping up to the plate is universally known. And it’s an image that’s associated with a strong action—hitting a ball—which makes it even more memorable. Can you hear the crack of the bat and the cheer of the crowd in your head right now?

The analogy is ubiquitous because it’s a very compact and fast way to communicate the entire concept of… well, going to bat.

So let’s prove out the power of analogy—and why it’s so often used in the office—by doing a little experiment.

If you aren’t in the technology industry, you probably aren’t familiar with a “smoke test.” But I’ll bet that after I explain where the phrase comes from and how it applies to office life, you’ll never forget it.

Moreover, I’ll bet that you’ll use it someday because of that reason.

Ready?

When plumbers in 1875 needed to find out if a plumbing system they just installed was watertight, without damaging the building if it wasn’t, they would blow harmless smoke through the system. Wherever smoke came out, there was a leak.

Only when the leaks were sealed, and the smoke stopped seeping out, would they send water through. Water, of course, could be much more damaging than smoke. The idea was to do a first level of testing with something innocuous before doing a full test with something potentially ruinous. Plumbers still perform this test today.

Can you see the image of an overalled plumber blowing smoke into a copper pipe at the side of a building?

In technology, a smoke test refers to a quick, first level test that checks for basic operability; in other words, any major leaks. It’s done before extensive, time consuming and expensive testing is performed.

Now that you have the explanation of the analogy and the image of its origin in your head, you’ll remember it forever. This is good because you might want to talk about and do a smoke test in your line of work someday. Go ahead and think about it for a minute. In what scenario in your industry might you want to do a “smoke test?”

Analogies proliferate in business because they are efficient and effective, fast and unforgettable. But I’d be lying to you if I told you that those were the only reasons they are so often used.

The other reason is that analogies provide plenty of room for interpretation…

But that’s a whole other newsletter for another time!The next time you’re at the office, listen for the above and other analogies. You mght be surprised by how often they are used. And now you know why.

Do more human. Beat the machines.

Ted Manasa

Rhythm is so pervasive, so integral to everything thing that we do that we are usually unaware of it except for when we are excelling. Where success shows up, rhythm is always around. And that why you must read this installment.

This one is dear to me because I use it to help me with everything that I do. I hope you find it as useful as I do.

Universal Principle #2: Rhythm

Rhythm is a “strong, regular, repeated pattern of movement or sound.”

You are probably most aware of how rhythm applies to music. Music is built on almost nothing but strong, regular, repeated patterns. This is especially true of the thumping, head-bobbing music of the modern world: four regular beats per measure, 16 measures per musical phrase, and a song structure of verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-chorus that is filled to the brim with melodies that stick in your head for days. Great songs have great rhythms. Think Creedence Clearwater Revival, Michael Jackson, and Lady Gaga.

But rhythm lives in more places than just in music. In fact, it lives everywhere, including inside your body—breathing, heart rate, sleep patterns—and inside your mind—the frequency of your thoughts, the time in between, and what thoughts tend to follow others. And just like in music, finding a strong, regular pattern is key to achieving your best performance in anything you do.

Why?

Because when you find the pattern, you can predict the future.

And the person who can predict the future excels. This is why rhythm is always a marker of great performance.

Predicting the future is about knowing what’s going to happen next. If you know what’s going to happen next, you can decide, in advance, what the best move to make is, and execute it at the perfect time and get the biggest possible return. This holds true for everything you will ever do in life. Here are a few examples.

In music, your incendiary notes have to come at just the right time for you to stay in the pocket and maintain the song’s groove. To do this, you must anticipate when all of your bandmates will hit their notes and how they will do so.

In tennis, your strong, perfectly angled backhand has to come at just the right time for you to put the ball where your opponent won’t be. To do this, you must anticipate when the ball will come to you and where it will be.

In chess, your clever move has to be made at just the right time to ensure that your opponent can’t defend against it. To do this, you must anticipate what your opponent is about to do and why she will do it.

In finance, your investment has to be made at the just right time for you to reap the largest reward. To do this, you must anticipate when the price will be at its lowest and how high it will go.

In each of these cases, success depends on how accurately and consistently one can predict the future. Patterns are the key to that.

See how rhythm works?

Being good at rhythm, understanding it and knowing how to apply it, gives you two distinct benefits:

1) Knowing what the best thing to do is ahead of time gives you the initiative, the advantage, and confidence. Few things give you more confidence than knowing exactly what you will do in a particular situation and what the outcome of your action will be.

2) You can focus your energy on the more complicated, harder to predict situations. The better a rhythm you find, the less work your brain does to handle the normal things that are going on around you, freeing you up to think consciously about more complex things. For example, you fall into a rhythm while driving to work, allowing your brain to look out for and react to unexpected changes on the road. In tennis, the better a rhythm you find volleying the ball back and forth, the freer your mind is to think about when you’re going to hit the drop shot—or when you’re opponent is going to.

These two benefits are what make finding rhythm such a powerful thing to do.

But like most Universal Principles, rhythm rarely comes to you when you start doing something for the first time. When you do something new, you are occupied by minutia and tend not to look at the activity from a higher level. This is why people generally takes years, or even decades, to find a rhythm in what they do. And it usually occurs to them accidentally.

But you don’t have to wait for rhythm to come to you. You already understand it from whatever it is you already do well. In whatever you do well, rhythm is there. Identify it. Then, use what you know about it and look for it in everything else that you do.

Hunt for it. Use it. See it all around you.

If you’re still unclear about how this works, here are a few more examples of where rhythm shows up to help you understand it and to grease your Superfluid brain.

If you’re a runner, you know that your best runs happen when you find your rhythm quickly. Your breathing and foot-falls lock into a pace and your legs carry you without you being aware of what you’re doing. The rhythm of running can be so strong that you feel like you can run forever. Sometimes, you feel like you’re still running even after you’ve stopped.

If you’re a martial artist, you know that your best matches are when you not only find your rhythm, but control that of your opponent’s. Fast or slow, fragmented or smooth, aggressive or passive. Rhythm is the back and forth exchange between opponents; it’s the moments between strikes; it’s the switching between working for a dominant position versus flurrying for the knockout.

If you’re an architect, you know that the most memorable buildings are defined by strong, regular patterns. A sense of rhythm. The columns of the Supreme Court; the wide, flat verandas of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water; the flying buttresses of Notre Dame. Even the oddest buildings, like the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California, or the Beijing National Stadium in China have strong patterns that your brain can find and use to understand the entire structure; to predict the design of the parts of the building that you haven’t seen yet.

Life has a rhythm. Get up, prep the kids, go to work, crunch away, pick up the kids, eat dinner, take a bath, and sleep. A good day is when you correctly anticipate when each of those things is going to happen and you make the best decision for each of those situations.

Rhythm is everywhere. It’s fundamental. Recognize it in yourself, recognize it in everything that you do, and recognize it in the people whose performance you aspire to duplicate.

Do more human. Beat the machines.

Ted Manasa