Waiting for Tim Ferriss to Procreate
Note: For readers especially pressed for time, key takeaways and action steps for this post are provided at the end.
One of the most popular classes at the middle school my kids attend is called Learning How to Learn.
Most of their classes at the school focus on the familiar topics that have been the domain of K-12 schools for decades—math, ELA, and the other also-ran subjects. Learning How to Learn though explores the ins and outs of how to more effectively learn, down to the level of brain function when learning.
It is an amazing educational experience that makes so much sense—to the point you wonder why we didn’t have something similar when we were growing up. The only problem with the amazing Learning How to Learn class—and this is just a quibble, as I don’t mean to be an ungrateful parent—is that it doesn’t actually exist. Yes, I made it up. I’m joking.
The ‘joke’ is ‘funny’ because the class is so unlikely. You probably found it a bit miraculous that such a class would be offered. And if you have kids in school, you possibly even felt jealous. And then, in a reversal, I revealed, darkly, that there is no such good news. Funny. I am laughing at this reality in a way that sounds a lot like heave-crying.
And this is where the business of waiting for Tim Ferris to procreate enters the picture. Mr. Ferriss, for those who don’t know, is an author, blogger, podcaster, and investor who rose to fame because of a freakish, one-in-one-hundred-million ability to take any subject and devise radically better ways of learning that subject.
This ability led Tim Ferriss to a wide range of feats, including Chinese kickboxing champion, world record holder in tango, speaker of five languages, accomplished horseback archer, best-selling author, top podcaster, and highly successful tech investor—all of which he achieved through his ability conceive of better ways of learning what is needed to succeed in a given domain.
My most vivid appreciation for Ferriss’s gift—and there have been many—was listening to him explaining how, prior to the launch of his first book, he deconstructed the standard book marketing model and then crafted his own, outside-the-box method for how to go from unknown, non-writer to omnipresent author who is fixture on best seller lists for years.
Sadly, I heard his version about 10 years after the launch of my own book with traditional methods, which amounted to me deferring to the publishers and resulted in my remaining unknown and the book omnipresent in remainder bins, due to my time machine, once again, being in the shop getting repairs, so I was not able to travel back and apply my belated Ferriss insights (and short the housing market pre 2008).
In a world in which neither you nor I were ever instructed in how to be great at learning how to learn—whether acquiring new knowledge or mastering skills—Tim Ferriss has sold millions and millions of books and hosts one of the most popular podcasts largely because he is a learning savant who is also committed to teaching others his insights (because of success as an investor, his work is no longer a matter of some need to earn money).
The only problem is that Tim Ferriss, like many of the leading life improvement gurus, does not currently have kids and, as such, has not yet been forced to do his own time travel back to K-12 education system of his youth, and of his parents’ youth, and even his grandparents’ youth, which is easy to do, given the degree to which the educational system has eschewed innovation, preferring instead the preserved-in-amber approach to innovation.
Once he does have a kid, or kids, and they start making their way along the industrial-inspired ed assembly line, he will experience the sense that his head is about to pop off in frustration, after which he will spend a few weeks thinking, and then reinvent the whole system, so that our kids can all rapidly and efficiently acquire information and master skills on the way to graduating at nine.
The only question is what to do in the meantime. Possibly the best stop-gap is to comb through Ferriss’s voluminous writings and recordings, because there are already great lessons on learning to be found, including a perfect example of both the issue I am raising and an example of the sort of solutions that exist, which arose during an interview with astronaut Scott Kelly (twin brother of fellow astronaut, Senator Mark Kelly).
While we think of astronauts as the height of over-achieving excellence, Scott Kelly was in his youth the opposite. He describes his K-12 experience as spending 13 years staring out the nearest window, wondering when the school day would finally be over, and concludes that the entire experience was for him a colossal waste of time and his greatest regret: 13 years wasted.
It wasn’t until college that things changed. He was initially on the same path as K-12, tuned out and actually headed toward dropping out when he had a chance encounter with Tom Wolfe’s then best seller The Right Stuff. Kelly bought it on a whim and read it through in a single weekend. Suddenly, everything changed. Scott Kelly had a reason to try: he wanted to go to space.
Having a sense of purpose for his education, having a why for the efforts, helped him begin to focus. But it took his brother to provide a critical lesson on learning how to learn that made the dream actually possible. It happened during a phone call. The brothers were at separate colleges, and Scott called Mark to suggest traveling to visit friends at a third college for an all-weekend party.
Mark responded with curiosity. Didn’t Scott have a calculus exam coming up? Scott explained that the test wasn’t for a week, happening on the Friday after the weekend party. He would study on the Wednesday and Thursday nights before. It was at this point that Mark got heated, laying into his brother as one assumes only an identical twin can. What was Scott thinking?
Mark explained what Scott’s studying should look like if he wanted to achieve his unlikely dream. He should spend the whole weekend preparing for his test, going over ever page of the textbook repeatedly, doing every practice problem he could get get his hands on multiple times, preparing to the point that that he was truly sick of the material and which there would be no question left that he would ace the test.
Chastened, Scott Kelly skipped the weekend party, learned the material backwards and forwards, got the A, and then used the same learning model in other classes, all the way up through earning his bachelor’s in electrical engineering and then a master’s in aviation systems (AKA rocket science), the same Kelly who had tuned out for much of his first 13 years of schooling.
Did you already know about this approach? Are Scott Kelly and Leif Ueland the only two students who missed this lesson? I managed a good 19 years of schooling without anyone bothering to so succinctly convey this one lesson that real test preparation was about over preparing and effectively getting to the point you could teach the material yourself.
Without knowing any better, I went with an MVP model I devised (minimal viable prep), though I suspect I didn’t event. It involved putting in a sort of mid-level sweet spot of effort—the level where there was a chance I could get an A, if all went just right, while there would also only be slim chance that I would do poorly. The result varied but was mostly in the middle.
This is just one lesson on learning from the Tim Ferriss archives that seems crazy not to lay out for kids. Another equally eyeopening lesson happens when Ferriss and Maria Popova, the genius force behind the genius newsletter The Marginalian (the called Brain Pickings) nerd out over how they take notes as the read books.
Ferriss and Popova discuss at length their exhaustive, oddly similar strategies. Like listening to Kelly on studying, the effect for me was akin to: oh, f-word, I never actually knew what I was doing in all those years of school! While I was mindlessly dragging a yellow highlighter across page, Ferriss and Popova devised methods for documenting their thoughts and insights that would simultaneously help commit their reading to memory, while also making it easy to access their thoughts for any writing they might do related to their reading.
I know you have to get going, so I will resist more examples of lessons that can be found in the Ferriss archives, but they include methods for learning foreign languages in radically abbreviated periods of time, methods for faster reading (speed reading was his first foray in accelerated learning, something he taught as a side hustle in college), and there is undoubtedly talk of memory palaces and other memorization tricks buried in his materials too.
Reader, friend, I am not suggesting that all of our kids should be schooled in the learning techniques of the world’s top performers. But I also don’t think it makes sense that we go through school without a solid understanding of the best strategies for learning. Students can always opt to not follow them, but isn’t learning about learning at least as valuable as the Pythagorean theorem?
This is the bottomline point that I hope is coming through loud and clear. This topic of learning how to learn is not yet covered in the vast majority of schools, and its absence keeps many kids, possibly yours, from achieving their potential, like the record-setting, inspiration-to-millions astronaut whose life was on a path of complete misfire.
Beyond understanding that this gap exists—that it is, as they say, a thing—I think we parents would do well to help our kids begin to assemble their toolkit of some sound, even innovative learning-how-to-learn insights.
My son is only 14, but I did tell him Scott Kelly’s learning story, actually played the audio of the interview, and my kid 100 percent gets it. He knows that the golden standard for test prep is achieving a backwards-and-forwards level of understanding, one that is achieved by preparing to the point that there is little question about the outcome of the test is a key strategy for excelling.
Since this bit of learning, he has at times followed the approach and achieved the unsurprising A for his efforts, while other times he, being, as noted, 14, has opted to cut corners and take his chances, earning results that have been predictably unpredictable. The great thing is that, whichever approach he takes, he is under no illusions about the likely outcomes.
I have of course been kidding about waiting for Tim Ferriss to procreate.* That decision is obviously up to him and his girlfriend. Sincerely. And he should feel no additional pressure to make the leap into parenthood based on any imploring from a random newsletter written by some rando yokel with a small, but unusually intelligent and attractive readership.
(Given the title of the post, the last thing I am looking to do is introduce outside pressure that could have a counter-productive impact on the situation, that I am all too familiar with—shout out to other anxiety-prone male readers. A future version of this post will include a referral link for sildenafil here.)
In lieu of the imminent publication of Tim Ferriss’s Guide to Accelerating Learning for Today’s K-12 Students, we can seek learning-how-to-learn nuggets out on our own, combing through Ferriss archives, searching on YouTube for especially helpful videos, or reading relevant books (including Cal Newport’s early books, before he wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and actually Ferris’s 4-Hour Chef includes a detailed breakdown of his method for accelerated learning).
Or we can set this up as a project for our kids. Task them with creating their own guides, which they can do by simply creating a new Google doc, title it My Learning Best Practices, start assembling the best lessons they are able to find on tools, tactics, and practices for better learning, and keep adding to the document as they advance through school. (Should anyone’ kid get really into the project and want share their gleanings, reach out to me and they can sell the PDF of their doc on my site.)
The inescapable fact is, fellow parents, guardians, otherwise interested adults, the creaky old K-12 monolith has left this essential topic out of the curriculum for far too long. We need to do what we can to address the gap now. We might be raising a kid whose future as an astronaut hangs in the balance. Or a future as a writer—of a much-needed, student-friendly, innovative book about learning how to learn.
*For the uninitiated, Tim Ferriss has in recent years been referencing his growing interest in the idea of becoming a parent, a thought that all his devoted fans whose lives have been improved by his teachings wholeheartedly hope he follows through on, knowing, as we do, that he has the right stuff for being an outstanding father.
Take-aways, caveats, details, fine print
Our kids should be taught how to learn as a standard part of their educations.
This gap is a painful oversight that results in school being inefficient or an absolute waste of time for far too many students.
Even kids who are doing relatively well in school can benefit from learning how to learn (the reality being that their good performance may simply be the degree to which their school is not requiring more from them, which won’t always be the case).
The example of astronaut Scott Kelly’s years spent not learning and the difference a single learning lesson had on his life is a powerful illustration of the issue and how it can begin to be addressed.
The sad fact is that, while most in K-12 never even learn the basics, never even have Learning How To Learn 101, the topic of learning can be taken to advanced, innovative heights far beyond what most of us are familiar with, as Tim Ferriss has repeatedly demonstrated.
As parents, the first step in helping our kids is for us to understand that this is a real issue with real consequences; the second step is to help our kids to start assembling their toolbox of learning-to-learn insights, from the 101 level all the way to the advanced.
These insights can be gleaned from YouTube videos, blogs and podcasts (starting with Tim Ferriss’s work), and some books, including the work of Cal Newport, and our kids can assemble their insights into their own Learning to Learn Google document, ideally with our help and input.