She described it as being a state when she stops trying to control the instrument, but rather one where she allows the music to be expressed through her. It doesn’t happen every time that she plays, though when it does, as you might imagine, it feels amazing.

So I asked, “How do you do that?”

Of course I wasn’t just asking about her theories of zen/ chan – since I know that she probably doesn’t know herself about the mechanism. (Especially since she’s a pretty small girl, and had indulged quite a bit of that pitcher herself!) And even if she had words to describe the experience, it wouldn’t be much use to me as her representations are shaped by who she is. Instead, I wanted to know how she could access that state. Since that’s something that I can try out for myself…

And it turned out that she would play a very short piece of music. Repeatedly. Perhaps a 30-second piece – even just a few bars – and play that over and over for 20-30 minutes. Simple enough that her extensive deliberate practice allowed her to play it without too much effort.

Now this pattern sounded familiar to me! This was like the strategy that we used in my karate training in learning kata. In learning to juggle. In drilling tennis shots. In several forms of meditation. And even in the New Code Games of New Code NLP. Almost like turning an ‘ordinary’ activity into a meditation.

I wonder whether we could use that state for other things… like taking that state into other areas of life, allowing the unconscious to find ways to use it.

Just over a month ago, I had my first piano lesson. It was very hard. The teacher kept trying to teach me about “Middle C”, a term that had little meaning and even less perceived value to me. And she taught me to play music that was so inanely simplistic that I was bored before I’d finished playing the first bar. But the experience was fascinating. Especially when you know how good some pre-school students are!

After getting bored with drills intended to train me like they might train a 3-year-old, who will take an average of 1200 hours of formal practice to achieve Grade 5 (according to Sloboda’s Leverhulme Project), I decided to just learn how to play a piece of music. I chose to play one of my favourites, Gymnopedie. It looked easy enough.

It wasn’t easy. To start with, it was hard. Very hard. And it was hard in very specific ways.

And it has already highlighted two key aspects of learning for me: One conscious, one unconscious. I’ll get to those.

• It was not hard because of the timing of the notes. I knew how long to hold the individual notes because I know the piece very well. Despite this, the teacher harped on holding the individual notes for the ‘right’ length of time. Indeed, she still was at our last lesson yesterday
• It was not hard because of the biomechanics – with the exception of a four-note chord right at the end, it was pretty easy for my fingers to move to move.
• Even the note order wasn’t really that difficult. While being a rich piece of music, it isn’t too fast and doesn’t involve wide variations in the note locations.
• What was difficult for me was figuring out where to put my fingers! And for me that wasreally hard. My teacher would throw terms at me like “B” and “D” and “Fa” and “Do” – that might well have a meaning related to the keys for her other students, but for me they meant nothing. But when she physically showed me which key to press next, I was right to go for the next part. And, after a while, I started to put these parts together, so that now it almost sounds like a real piece of music.

A strange experience was discovering that I could play several relatively complex parts – with some of those weird black keys! Looking at the notes on the page, I couldn’t follow the notes, but if I just followed my fingers, I realized that I had ‘absorbed’ the sequence by watching and copying my teacher’s fingers. And what was most strange was that these were some of the easiest to play – where I made fewer mistakes, while concentrating less. When I was learning these, I had very much ‘surrendered’ to my teacher’s demonstration rather than trying to consciously understand what was going on: What we might call an “NLP Modelling” state.

Here are two things that I want to highlight from this:

1. What is your Learning Rate Determining Step? What has stopped you from learning quickly and easily is as unique as you are – being able to identify those obstacles and tackle them is a profound skill that is remarkably effectively ignored by most of us. When you are learning something, whether it is a status skill, a professional skill, or an intellectual pursuit, you can focus on finding the constraints, the bottlenecks in your learning, the “Learning Rate Determining Step” in the process. Once you’ve found it, find a way to overcome that LRDS (like putting notes on the keys) and align the way you’re doing things to overcome the LRDS.
2. You can absorb and learn unconsciously. We can absorb information presented to us quickly and easily if we can access an appropriate state. To do this, we can just let go of our need to feel like we know what we’re doing, and become like a child again – curious, open and willing to make mistakes.

I’m curious as to the extent that I can stop trying to learn consciously and deliberately so much, and focus more on that unconscious assimilation style… it sure is more fun!

(Of course, I’d love to have educators who focused more on removing the constraints to my learning rate than they did on how to design a powerpoint presentation… though let’s start with small steps.)

If you don’t know how to cook, you can follow a recipe. With a little bit of discipline, focus, and the right ingredients, you can find yourself producing great quality food quite easily.

After a while, you can start to figure out how the recipe works. You find that a little bit extra of one ingredient will vary the taste, texture or appearance. You might even start to experiment.

Some people can start to create. Not just to follow the recipe, but to come up with entirely new concoctions, based upon the test kitchen in your mind.

Yet I would be reluctant to rely upon the skills of someone who hadn’t yet mastered a single recipe. Maybe they would create something delicious and creative and new. Maybe you would get food poisoning.

Individuality and self expression are great things, and it is good to note that most great innovators didn’t come from “the establishment” in their domain. Whether they be Rodin or 50 Cent, Einstein or Gershwin, Branson or Brin, innovators learn enough to speak the language of their chosen domain, though not so much as they lose their accent.

Before we start changing the rules, let’s find out what they are.

Yet I noticed something strange: He couldn’t do it.

He thought he could. And he elegantly went through the motions. But seemingly unbeknown to him, his techniques were ineffective – as pretty as they looked, they would work only if his partner knew to fall at the right time in the right way. They were close, but the angles, timing and rotations were clearly wrong. And, since I didn’t know “the rules”, I just stood there watching as he verbally told me to fall down!

This was very confusing to him… as if everybody else had “played along”. Unfortunately, it being only my sixth session with this school, I didn’t know how to. Perhaps I am missing something and his understanding of the techniques superseded the need for their practical application. But it got me thinking.

Top NFL players play computer simulations to improve their skills. Reading Wired this morning, I was informed that “almost everybody” plays something like Madden NFL, and that not only has this enhanced the strategic thinking skills of players, but parts of the simulation has started creeping into the real game.

Now, I’d guess that this is like getting a tennis player or a golfer to do weight training. Just by playing the game, they might get stronger, but by doing specific strength training, you can build “strengths” in ways that wouldn’t normally happen just by “playing the game”, and these strengths can offer a serious advantage… in this case, by exposing players to a much greater number of realistic situations that reward (or demand) heightened strategic awareness, you build better strategic awareness. It’s effectively Deliberate Practice for a subset of the game…

And it’s important to be able to tell the difference!

You can get away with stuff in Madden’s that you can’t do in the real game. Those are the limits of the game. You can get away with things in training if your partner knows how they “should” behave that can undermine your performance when working with someone who doesn’t share those rules.

It’s great to use simulations and training techniques to accelerate our development. And when we can focus on a neglected component of the activity, we can enjoy some amazing improvements in our performance…but you have to remember to take those skills back to the real world. And there, as the best all know, you don’t just need to get the individual techniques “right”: You need to find a way to put it together and make it work for you.

He ends his presentation at TED earlier this year with these words from W.B. Yeats:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

As I watched Ken reading, I couldn’t help but think of Elton John’s Your Song, a song that the late John Lennon described as “the first new thing that’s happened since we happened”. Just in case you don’t remember the lyrics, here are the first two verses:

It’s a little bit funny this feeling inside
I’m not one of those who can easily hide
I don’t have much money but boy if I did
I’d buy a big house where we both could live

If I was a sculptor, but then again, no
Or a man who makes potions in a travelling show
I know it’s not much but it’s the best I can do
My gift is my song and this one’s for you

So was Your Song original? Or did Elton read a little Yeats to Bernie one night before bed after a few bottles of wine, and have Bernie wake up the next morning with a flash of “inspiration”?

Perhaps Elton and Bernie have acknowledged the inspiration of Yeats in the past or perhaps the connection is only tenuous. Or maybe they came to this idea independently. Even if the ‘idea’ was from Yeats or even someone else, it was Sir Elton John that brought such a sentiment to the world in a form that we could embrace, love and enjoy today.

Creativity is sometimes strikingly divergent from the status quo. Sometimes it is a refinement. Other times, creativity might be more like a renaissance – a rebirth of older ideas so that they can find new life for another generation. This leaves the challenge for us to cultivate those conditions and contexts where those around us can find a way to express their uniqueness. And where we can express our own uniqueness.

Here is Sir Ken Robinson’s presentation at TED from earlier this year. I hope you enjoy it.

If you were like me, you were probably taught that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that it takes one year – a bit over 365 days – for the Earth to complete one such cycle.

And you probably also learned that we didn’t always believe that.

You might have learned about Ptolemy, who believed that the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. It seems impossible to believe now, but that was the established wisdom for thousands of years. People were executed for disputing this scientific “fact”.

When Copernicus came up with his idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun, it didn’t make sense. The scientists of the day disputed his claims and showed through “science” that he was ‘wrong’, by demonstrating that his theories couldn’t explain what was happening any better than the established wisdom. In fact, Copernicus’ model offered worse predictions than Ptolemy’s model.

But with contributions from Galileo and Kepler united under Newton, our world experienced a paradigm shift (in the original/ Thomas Kuhn sense of the term). And suddenly our textbooks were rewritten. And so “The Sun revolves around the Earth. The Sun has always revolved around the Earth.” became, “The Earth revolves around the Sun. The Earth has always revolved around the Sun.”

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we of course know that we know the truth.

And yet, do we? Perhaps one abusing ‘Relativity’ might posit that it all depends upon where you are stationed – that from the perspective of the Earth, the Sun does revolve around it and vice versa. And maybe they are both wrong.

Such is the nature of “science”: The perpetual quest to prove oneself wrong.

The special challenge falls on those individuals who lead periods of revolution. Scientific, cultural, social, linguistic. Whether they are the revolutionary leaders of climate change or economics or politics or even intelligence.

You see it in someone like Howard Gardner in positing Multiple Intelligences back in 1983. Or Edward de Bono’s “Lateral Thinking”. Or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. From ‘ridiculous’ to ’self-evident’ in but a short few years.

If we are going to support and facilitate the development of more of these game-changing Great Minds – people with “capital C” Creativity – what sort of systems, policies, procedures, experiences and opportunities might we want to create?

In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

Ultimately, most of what we learn is false. It’s our best guess, but at best it’s almost certainly wrong or flawed. We want to get to those moments of joy and pure experience when we can create genius.

I wonder what would happen if  we would just choose to put our desire to control to the side, and accept the ambiguity, the obstacles and the knowledge that even our best work will probably be wrong. And just keep blowing raspberries.

(originally from TheGeniusProject.com)

Whining doesn’t get us very far itself but it can be a phase that we need to go through until you figure out what you want and start working on how. While you’re whining, you’re not focusing on what you want; when you can get clear, set some targets and at least start moving – even if only with baby steps. And once you’re moving towards where you want to be, the world is a very different place.

Like a rocking chair: Fun for a while without getting you anywhere.

The trick is to break ourselves out of the cycle of whining and complaining. We’ve got lots of good reasons to whine too – life isn’t fair. Yet whining doesn’t make things better. Whining gives us a sense of connection with ourselves and with others when we whine to others – a feeling of self pity is at least a feeling of connection.

Sooner or later, the solution is to stop it. And when you do, remember that there’s a great intention behind that behaviour – that you want things to be better and you want to connect with others. Rather than chastising yourself for having whined in the first place, what would happen if you focused on the positive intent of the behaviour and started connecting positively and working towards what you want?

And seasons change whether we want them to or not.

The question is always how you cope with those changes. Do you lament the end of the sunshine as autumn begins, or do you embrace the beauty of the changing colours of the leaves on the trees?

Since arriving back in Shanghai, my lifestyle has changed a lot. Whereas previously, I was working closely with one company delivering trainings, now I am running my own events. Instead of focusing my energy on just delivering the best that I could deliver, now I am handling most everything myself, learning about all the little stuff that I used to have a team to handle for me.

(So if you’re in Asia and after some great NLP training, you know who to call!)

The last time that I found myself in this season was when I registered my first business in July 1998. It was scary and exciting and wondrous. And it’s been pretty amazing so far this time around.

Stuff happens that doesn’t bring us pleasure. How do you handle that stuff? Do you fight against it? Do you long for the longer summer with the leaves on the trees? Or do you embrace the present and get on with making the most of it?

Be outstanding!

Delivering a presentation that is smooth, insightful and ends right on time can be a big ask. Lots of intelligent people mess it up. One of the speakers who really seems to get it right is Malcolm Gladwell. If you have ever watched him speak (like here on TED), you may notice how he speaks eloquently, even effortlessly, and ends with precise punctuality.

When asked about it once, Gladwell replied, “I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them.”

It’s great to connect with your audience as if you were just having a casual chat with them. And sometimes that’s precisely what you will want to do. Other times, like maybe when you want to really nail it, you might be interested to discover what happens when you go beyond the bullet points and rehearse, refine and distill the most important information that you are there to share. Focus on the most important stuff; skip the rest. Polish, polish, polish. And you might just find yourself on a level where you have that polish that casual speaking just doesn’t allow.

While memorizing isn’t “the answer”, if you want to deliver a professional-standard speech, you might consider treating your next presentation as a performance.

Bringing deliberate practice into speaking is challenging – hence so many speakers stagnate – though by refining your work, looking for ways to raise your standards, you give yourself a chance of lifting your bar.

That what seems to work for the guy who wrote The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and, more recently, What the Dog Saw.