How To Master Anything. Part 2`

So, its been awhile since my last post.  To be honest I was spending a lot of time watching the candidates tournament to determine a challenger to World Chess Champion Vishy Anand.  Magnus Carlsen won the event.  We will talk about that later but first...

When last we left you we had reviewed ideas about how to be excellent.  How to learn new things and achieve at a high level.  If you need a refresher you can read about it here.  If you recall, the main problem is that while you can master anything, conventional, wisdom tells us that it takes a long time.  10,000 hours or approximately ten years.  Now I'm guessing that you're sitting there thinking:

 "Well, Bill this is nice and all but I don't have ten years to master something.  Hell, I'm lucky if I get an hour or two to my self most nights and maybe a free day on the weekend.  I guess if I didn't start when I was twelve, I'm just out of luck."

What if I told you that you could master something to a high level, not in ten years, not in 10,000 hours but in six months?  Would that interest you?

New York Times best selling author Tim Ferriss's latest book "The Four Hour Chef" teaches you the secrets to rapid learning.  Tim has mastered languages in months, competed at a world championship level in Tango dancing shortly after taking it up, started multiple businesses and written best selling books at breakneck speed. If you go to his blog, he will teach you how to learn to speed read in under an hour, how to enhance your memory and even, how to lose weight, all at the speed of light.  What's the trick?

DiSSS.

Deconstruct: Break a task down to the smallest building blocks that you can work with.

Select:  Chose the 20% of critical information that gets you 80% of the results

Sequence: Learn the material in an order that generates early success. Build momentum by setting yourself up for early success that leads into the more challenging material.

Stakes: As much as we like to focus on rewards, the stick is often more powerful than the carrot.  Create a cost for failure.  An example could be, If you fail to reach your goal, then you have to donate money to a cause that you don't support.

You know what?  I think that its time to let Tim explain this to us himself:

.