Certainly, there are other information streams available. Maybe you’re just not a reader. Maybe talks are your thing. Perhaps documentaries. Unfortunately, while talks and documentaries are great for igniting curiosity, neither approaches the information density of books.
Put it this way: I give a handful of speeches a month, typically in the one-hour range. If I’m talking flow, that hour gets you the information contained in a couple of blogs, twenty pages of Rise, and another twenty from Stealing Fire. Maybe a few stories that didn’t show up in the books added for spice. Altogether, it’s seventy pages of text for an hour of your time. Seems like an okay trade. But here’s the rub—you’re missing the details.
Again, take Rise. The listener gets twenty pages from the book, but only one, maybe two, details per page. But the book actually contains way more information. The reader’s detail count is four to eight facts a page, plus a much longer time period to process that information. It’s the medium dictating terms to the message. It’s also basic neurobiology.
Moreover, books pay performance dividends.4 Studies find that they improve long-term concentration, reduce stress, and stave off cognitive decline. Reading has also been shown to improve empathy, sleep, and intelligence. If you combine these benefits with the information density books provide, we start to see why everyone from tech titans like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk to cultural icons like Oprah Winfrey, Mark Cuban, and Warren Buffett credit their success to their incredible passion for books.5
Books were also the very first performance tip I ever learned, back when I was first learning about the impossible. It was taught to me by a wonderful magician named Joe Lefler, the proprietor of Pandora’s Box, the magic shop that ate my childhood.
Pandora’s Box was a long, narrow shop of wonders. The right wall was all windows, the left wall bright and shiny, a riot of magic contraptions: cards, coins, feathers, flowers, silks, swords, birdcages, top hats, mirrors of all shapes, and, of course, rope. But the back wall—the first thing anyone saw when walking into the shop? Stuffed with books. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling.
I was puzzled. Bobo’s Modern Coin Magic had a position of eye-catching prominence, but surely the bejeweled scimitar from “sword through card” was better for business.6 After all, as Joe was often pointing out, magic was a tough racket and he needed all the help he could get. I asked him about this one day, about why he didn’t move the books to someplace less prominent and fill that eye-catching space with something that might sell.
Joe shook his head, pointed at the back of the store, and said, “They stay where they are.”
“Why?”
“Books,” he said with a smile, “books are where they keep the secrets.”
10
Five Not-So-Easy Steps for Learning Almost Anything
A few years back, while downhill mountain biking in northern New Mexico, I was riding a chairlift and talking to a college student who asked an interesting question: When do I feel like I know enough about a subject to write about that subject for a major magazine or a newspaper?
What the guy really wanted to know was a little more complicated and had term-paper ramifications, but it got me thinking about what it took to be confident enough in what I’d learned before I was willing to have an opinion in public.
What follows is my answer. It’s a five-not-so-easy-step process for learning just about anything, and it’s where we need to turn our attention to next. Up to now, our focus has been on establishing the ready conditions for learning. Here, we dig into the process itself. More specifically, we’re digging into the process I went through before I was willing to go public with an opinion about a topic. I developed it over my thirty years as a journalist, where becoming a semi-expert in a subject was a prerequisite for being able to write about that subject. Since I worked for over a hundred different publications in that time period, covering everything from hard science and high tech to sports, politics, and culture, I had to become very good at a lot of difficult topics in fairly short time frames.
Also, as this was mostly back in the day when newspapers and magazines had budgets for fact-checkers and copy editors, the accuracy of my reporting was always put through an incredibly rigorous gauntlet, and getting things wrong was an easy way to get fired. Since I needed to eat, I needed to learn how to learn—anything and everything—accurately and quickly.
Or, as my old editor at GQ, Jim Nelson, once explained: “A million people a month read this publication, give or take. As we cover stories that fall outside of the purview of traditional news outlets, when we write about something, it’s very often the only opinion about a subject any of our readers will ever see. That’s a serious responsibility. It’s why we try very, very hard to never get things wrong.”
Here’s how I learned to get it right.
STEP ONE: THE FIVE BOOKS OF STUPID
I think the actual number probably differs for everybody, but when I approach a new subject my rule of thumb is to allow myself five books’ worth of stupid. That is, I pick five books on a subject and read them all without judging my learning along the way.
This point is worth reiterating: learning doesn’t make us feel smart. At least, not at first.
At first, learning makes us feel stupid. New concepts and new terminology can often add up to new frustrations. But don’t judge yourself for the stupidity you feel along the way. On the path to peak performance, quite often, your emotions don’t mean what you think they mean.
Consider the frustration that comes from being bad at something. The feeling is one of stalled progress and simmering anger. But it’s actually a sign that you’re moving in the right direction. In fact, that frustration level is increasing the presence in your system of norepinephrine, whose main function is to prime the brain for learning.1 You need to feel this frustration in order to produce this neurochemical, and you need this neurochemical in order for learning to take place. Rather than a sign that you’re moving in the wrong direction, frustration is a cue that you’re moving in the right direction. So, for these five books, your job is to keep turning pages and forgive yourself the confusion that will inevitably arise along the way.
The main goal in reading these five books is to become familiar with terminology. We talked about this earlier, but it bears repeating as, truthfully, terminology can be much of the battle.
Most of what makes learning difficult is specialized language, and it usually takes about five books to begin to get a real feel for this language. What this also means is that for the first three books, a lot of what you’re reading you won’t understand completely. Don’t stop. Don’t go back to the beginning of the book and start over. Don’t bother to look up every word you don’t know. The secret is to not get (too) frustrated and to just keep going.
Biologically, a lot of learning comes down to pattern recognition, and most of that takes place on an unconscious level. As long as you keep reading, you’ll keep picking up tiny bits of information and your pattern recognition system will keep stitching these bits into bigger pieces. Those bigger pieces become your beachhead on the shores of new knowledge.
And establish that beachhead in a very particular way.
For starters, get out your notebook. Take a very specific kind of notes as you go.2 The goal is not to write down everything you think you need to know. There are only three main things to focus on.
First, as mentioned earlier, take notes about the historical narrative. This gives the brain an easy way to order new information and amplifies learning rates.
Second, as was also discussed, pay attention to terminology. If a technical word pops up three or four times, write it down, look it up, and every time you see the word again, read the definition. Keep this up until the meaning starts to lock into place.
Third, most critically, always take notes on stuff that gets you excited. If you come across a quote that speaks to your soul, into the notebook it goes. If you come to a fact that makes your jaw drop,
save it for later. If a question pops into your head, write it down. Stuff you find curious is stuff with a lot of energy. We’re already primed to remember anything that catches our attention. This makes the information much easier to recall later. The fact that it initially caught your attention, coupled to the process of jotting it down in your notebook, is often enough to lock it into long-term storage.
It’s also worth pointing out what I’m not advising: Don’t take general-purpose notes in your notebook. That’s not the point. The point is to establish a technical baseline and then to follow your curiosity through a subject, using things you find naturally interesting—and thus have an easier time remembering—as the structural foundation for future learning.
And don’t just pick any five books on the subject. There’s an order to the chaos.
Book One: Start with the most popular, best-selling book you can find on the topic. Fiction, nonfiction, doesn’t really matter. The goal is fun, fun, fun. This first book is less about real learning and more about gaining a little familiarity with the world you’re about to enter and a basic sense of its lingo.
Book Two: This is also a popular book, but usually a little more technical and a little more on point. This book is either closely related to or directly about the subject under investigation. Once again, the main goal here—and the reason to choose popular books—is to generate excitement. Motivation-wise, you need this excitement on the front end, as it’s what lays the foundation for real learning. Later on, as your knowledge base develops, the super-geeky details will become really tantalizing, but when starting out, just firing up your imagination is far more important.
Book Three: This is the first semi-technical book on the topic—something that is still readable and interesting but maybe not quite a page-turner. This book builds on all the ideas learned in books one and two, layering in more precise language and expert-level detail. It’s also where you start to get the shadowy outline of the big picture. Toward those ends, in this third book, try to find something that provides a look at that wider view—a macroscopic perspective on the subject. If you’ve been reading about trees, this might be the time to learn something about systems ecology. If you’ve been studying couples therapy, this might be when to read up on the history of social psychology.
Book Four: We’ve arrived. Book four is the first actual hard book you want to read on the subject—something that isn’t nearly as fun as the first three, but gives you a taste of the kind of problems that real experts in the domain are thinking about. Pay close attention to the field’s current borders. Get a sense for when, why, and with what foundational ideas contemporary thinking about a subject begins and ends. Also, figure out where the crazy lies: the stuff that experts feel is balderdash. You may not agree with these opinions, but you need to know they exist and, more important, why they exist.
Book Five: This is not always the hardest to read (that can often be book four), but it’s often the hardest to comprehend. That’s because the goal here is a book that is directly about the future of the topic, where it’s heading, and when it’s heading, a book that gives you a sense of the cutting edge.
After those five books, your brain typically has enough data to give you a feel for a field. The language is familiar and the macroscopic big picture has snapped into view. This is the point when real comprehension begins. When you can start asking meaningful, articulate questions about a subject, then you can feel confident that you’ve learned the basics.
What does this look like in the real world? Well, consider my first novel, The Angle Quickest for Flight.3 The book is about five people trying to break into the Vatican to steal back one of the core Kabbalistic texts, a book stolen from the Jews in the thirteenth century and then secreted in the Secret Archives. Think of it as The Da Vinci Code, just a few years before there was a Da Vinci Code. To write this book, I needed to know quite a bit about Vatican history and the Secret Archives. So what did I read to get up to speed?
Book One: Thomas Gifford’s The Assassini, a thriller about the Church’s involvement in art theft during World War II. It was a fun ride that gave me a glimpse inside the Vatican. I learned some lingo and got a feeling for the world I was about to enter.4
Book Two: Malachi Martin’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church.5 Martin is a former Jesuit and Vatican history scholar and writes popular fiction and nonfiction on the subject. Again, a fairly easy read but very informative.
Book Three: Karen Armstrong’s A History of God.6 Armstrong is one of the more respected scholars in this field, and this book tells the four-thousand-year story of the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—giving me a macroscopic sense of the subject. Armstrong is also a talented writer, meaning those four thousand years go by a lot faster than you might assume.
Book Four: The Secret Archives of the Vatican by Maria Luisa Ambrosini and Mary Willis. This is the core text on the subject. Dense and detailed and directly on point.7
Book Five: Inside the Vatican by Thomas Reese.8 Not exactly a book that peers into the future. Rather, one that provides an enormously wide look at the past. The book is an exhaustive, scholarly study of the world’s most complex religious organization. Enough said.
Two final notes: First, this is an exercise meant to help you learn subjects, not skills. If you want to learn a skill, playing piano, for example, you can’t read your way to proficiency. In the next chapter, we’ll explore skill acquisition. For now, we’re starting with knowledge acquisition.
Second, in these ADHD days, when people don’t like reading, five books seems like a lot. It’s definitely not. Five books is less than one would read in the first half of any course in college. And don’t kid yourself when you’re done—you still won’t know all that much.
STEP TWO: BE THE IDIOT
Once you’re done reading those five books, your notebook should be filled with questions. Review them. Many of those questions will now have answers. The ones that remain? That’s the raw material to carry into the next step in this process: seek out experts to talk to about those questions.
Personally, as a reporter, I had an advantage in this step. It’s a hell of a lot easier to call up a Nobel Prize winner on behalf of the New York Times than it is if you’re trying to finish a term paper for college. But most people love to talk about what they do. So, if you can’t get that Nobel Prize winner on the line, text one of their graduate students. As long as you’ve done your homework and can ask genuine questions, most people will want to talk. In fact, most won’t want to shut up. The point is to leave your pride at the door and talk to people who are way smarter than you are. In my case, I always ask people to explain things to me as if I were four years old. I want to be the idiot in that conversation. How do I know I’ve talked to enough experts? When the experts routinely tell the idiot he’s asking good questions, then I’m sure I’m on the right track.
A couple of critical details: Interviewing is a skill. You need to make your subject feel comfortable and respected. Everyone’s time is valuable. Don’t prattle about yourself or your investigation at the front end of that conversation. Have a list of questions prepared ahead of time, assume you’ll get no more than a half-hour interview, and don’t waste a second. Never ask someone something that you can look up. Make sure you’ve investigated talks, books, and technical papers ahead of time. Most important, make sure your first few questions display both personal knowledge about whomever you’re interviewing and general domain knowledge about their subject. Don’t ask: What’s your feeling on the current consciousness debate? Ask: In that paper you wrote for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, you made a neurobiological argument for panpsychism. When did you first start thinking about the problem this way?
These kinds of questions are exactly how you make experts feel comfortable and respected. You’re letting them know you’ve taken the time to investigate their work in advance and that they can speak freely, in technical language, and you’ve got the chops to keep up.
Record the conversation and take copious notes along the way. Write down the stuff that catches your attention (same rules as for reading). Use the recording to double-check facts and so you can have a copy of anything you didn’t keep up with the first time through.
STEP THREE: EXPLORE THE GAPS
In our modern world, most experts tend to specialize. They end up with an incredible depth of knowledge about their chosen subject, but often with little idea about what’s going on right next door. So once you’ve made it to the end of step two and have begun asking intelligent questions, you’ll start to notice blank spots in the answers. Occasionally, these spots will turn out to be central questions in the field. In other words, you’ve followed your curiosity to the same place that most researchers follow their curiosity. This is great. It’s proof that you’re actually learning the material in question, but it’s not what you’re really after in this step.
What you’re after is what author Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch,” or the sense that the particular bit of information in the field you’re now studying is related to some other bit of data in another field you’ve also been studying. In the beginning, these gap-driven hunches might be hard to find. And you can’t really force it. But the reason you’ve been following your curiosity around the subject (and not following, say, the standard educational curricula) is to naturally seed these kinds of connections. In an interview with ReadWrite, Johnson explained it like this: “It is just this idea that if you diversify and have an eclectic range of interests, and you are constantly [gathering] interesting stories about things that you do not know that much about or are adjacent to your particular field of expertise, you are much more likely to come up with innovative ideas. . . . The trick is to look at something different and to borrow ideas. It is like saying ‘this worked for this field, if we put it here, what would it do in this new context?’”9
The Art of Impossible Page 11