334: Learn New Skills, Overcome Fears, Become a Hero with Josh Kaufman
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 November 2018
⏱️ 43 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
After your first yoga class, your hamstrings will hurt like hell. After your first day snowboarding, your wrists will ache and your bum will be bruised. After your first week struggling to play Knockin’ on Heaven's Door, your fingertips will be raw.
Welcome to the awkward and irritating world of new skill acquisition. The journey from grossly incompetent to somewhat capable is simultaneously the most challenging and most rewarding part of learning.
In the yoga studio, I see it every day. People poke their head in the door, take stock of the room, the instructor, the students, and proceed home to watch Netflix and eat Häagen-Dazs because it's easier than confronting the learning curve that awaits them. The benefit of avoidance is obvious—Netflix won’t cause you pain, won’t embarrass you, and won’t ask anything more of you—but the losses are catastrophic. Every day you spend stagnant, consuming rather than creating, it eats away at your vibrant spirit until there’s nothing left.
On this week's podcast, you'll meet author Josh Kaufman, who is obsessed with that initial learning phase. He has figured out how to break through the barriers of inertia and uncover what someone really wants.
Listen & Learn:
- Why learning is so important to the human condition
- The importance of pre-commitment to a phase of learning
- Why the 10,000-hour rule applies mostly to elite athletes and musicians
- Why great teachers are so difficult to find—and rarely teach
- How to leverage published material to supplement great teaching
Links & Resources:
ABOUT THE GUEST
Josh Kaufman is the author of three bestselling books: The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything... Fast!, and How to Fight a Hydra: Face Your Fears, Pursue Your Ambitions, and Become the Hero You Are Destined to Be.
His TEDx talk on “The First 20 Hours” has been viewed more than 12 million times, putting it in the top 10 most viewed TEDx videos and top 100 most viewed TED Talks published to date.
Josh's research has been featured by the New York Times, BBC News, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Fortune, Forbes, Time, BusinessWeek, Wired, and dozens of other publications. Josh has been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, World Domination Summit, Pioneer Nation, MicroConf, Bacon Biz, Stanford University, Google, and IBM.
Nutritional Tip of the Week:
- Best Form of Sugar to Use
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Thanks to our sponsor:
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Visit: FOUR SIGMATIC and use coupon code "yogabody" for 15% off your order.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week's Yoga Talk Show is brought to you by Four Sigma. |
| 0:03.8 | Four Sigma is a nutritional supplement company that specializes in medicinal mushrooms |
| 0:10.4 | and they make these really cool packets that you can make into basically |
| 0:14.4 | mushroom coffee or mushroom tea. It's meant to replace your morning coffee or |
| 0:18.9 | your morning tea and the ones I particularly like are cortiseps and lions man. |
| 0:23.5 | We had the founder of Four Sigmaic on the show a couple of years ago, you might remember. |
| 0:27.5 | Really great company. They use fruiting bodies, not just mycelium. They use non-chemical extractions. |
| 0:33.1 | So you get lots of beta glucans, lots of terpenoids, |
| 0:36.2 | and you get all the healing properties of mushrooms |
| 0:38.2 | with all the gas and bloating |
| 0:39.6 | that you often get with mushroom products |
| 0:42.3 | that you'll find in the pharmacy or in your |
| 0:44.7 | nutritional store locally. As a sponsor of the show they've offered listeners a |
| 0:49.2 | 15% discount go to four-sigmatic. com forward slash yoga body that's four |
| 0:54.0 | sigmatic all spelled out four sigmatic dot com forward slash yoga body and use |
| 0:58.1 | coupon code yoga body when you check out and you'll save 15% again the ones I like are cortiseps and lions main but you'll save 15%. Again, the ones I like are Cordiseps and Lions Main, but you'll find a whole bunch of other cool products you might want to check out as well. |
| 1:07.0 | Thanks to FourSigmatic for supporting the show. |
| 1:10.0 | As we approach the end of the year, I find that a lot of people get very retrospective |
| 1:18.6 | and thoughtful about the things that they've done, the things they were hoping, the |
| 1:22.0 | wins and the losses from the |
| 1:24.2 | previous months, and also people eagerly await the new year and the excitement |
| 1:28.6 | that comes with a soon- be discovered future. |
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