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DIY – VIP Audio

Hello, this is A.J. and welcome to this month’s VIP lesson. This month’s topic is DIY (do it yourself), it’s a little bit of a slang phrase, do it yourself. You’ll see DIY sometimes in books or it’ll be mentioned on websites or something like that. It just means do it yourself. Do it yourself is a mentality and a kind of culture that has developed, along with technology, especially communications technology and Internet technology, online technology.

As you might guess from the name, do it yourself, the main point of do it yourself culture is that it’s no longer necessary to depend upon authority figures or experts for everything, that in fact, we can do things ourselves. We can create things ourselves. For example, it’s no longer necessary, if you want to publish a book, to go to a big publishing company and send out copies of your book to all these people and beg them to please publish your book. You an do it yourself.

There are so many tools now with computer technology and online, that you can skip all of that, you don’t need to go to the big companies and experts, you can just write your book, sell it, publish it, market it and all of that yourself. You can do it yourself. This is the mentality and we’re finding it in film making, in music, in business, in education and that’s especially what I’m going to talk about today, in the field of learning. Do it yourself learning. Do it yourself school.

Now, as most of our VIP members already know and as you know, schools generally suck. Of course, when I say they suck its slang and means they’re bad, they’re terrible. Why does school suck? There are so many reasons that could be an entire lesson, many lessons and even an entire book in itself. I’ll skip some of the reason they suck and focus on a few different yet very practical ones.

1. First, schools are very, very, very inefficient. Meaning, not efficient.

What does that mean? It means, for the amount of time you spend in a school, you get a very small benefit back. You don’t learn skills and knowledge quickly. You don’t reach mastery quickly in a school. In fact, you almost never reach mastery at all, as a result of going to a school. Very inefficient, means you’re wasting lots and lots of time. A lot of the time in schools, in classrooms is purely wasted on activities which do not benefit you. Taking roll, chit-chats and activities that really never do anything and on and on, it’s inefficient.

Another problem with schools is that most schools are lecture-based. Meaning, the education system of the school is built on the central method of a teacher standing in front of a classroom talking, just lecturing, writing on the board, etc. Then the students are taking notes about a bunch of facts, knowledge or whatever, taking all these notes and then later having to memorize and then regurgitate, which actually comes from the word throw up. So it’s this idea that you regurgitate the knowledge. It’s like the teacher puts it into your mouth and then later for the test, you throw it back up. This is the image and the idea.

So it’s based on lecture, and lecture is a very poor way of learning anything, even facts. There’s been a lot of research about this and in terms of memory; lecture is a terrible way to learn something, because you tend to forget most of what you learned in a lecture, especially longterm. So lecture is very, very inefficient and ineffective.

I think one of the biggest weaknesses of schools are that they really don’t teach skills, in other words, things you actually do, and for most of us when we’re learning things, even when we’re learning a kind of knowledge we’re hoping to get that knowledge so that we can use it somehow. For example, if you’re studying English in school do you just want to learn the names

of a lot of grammar terms? Probably not. Your goal is to actually be able to use English, to understand real spoken English, to be able to use real spoken English, and of course, reading and writing as well.

So just getting knowledge is not enough, you need skill. You need to develop the skill of speaking English conversation. Schools are terrible at that, they don’t do skill training, they just teach knowledge, information, schools pretty much specialize in giving information, not skills.

Yet, what most of us want in life are skills. We want a way to take information that’s useful and then be able to use it practically, to do something with it. That requires skill and in school you almost never learn practical skills, and if you do, it’s very, very inefficiently.

I guess the final thing about schools is that they’re very expensive. Schools are expensive, even public schools, you think you’re going for free, the government, but they’re extremely expensive because you’re being taxed to pay for those schools and governments everywhere in the world create big bureaucracies. They’re super inefficient, so in fact, any school you go to, even a free school is not really free it’s extremely expensive. So for all these reasons and many more, schools really aren’t a great way to learn anything.

Let’s talk now about the do it yourself approach, do it yourself school for anything. One of the benefits of independent learning, learning independently, doing it yourself, creating your own little independent school curriculum and program for whatever you want to learn.

Well, independent learning first of all is faster. It’s faster because you can jump in and do it as much as you want. If you’re really excited, focused and feel this is really important to you then you aren’t limited by some school’s curriculum or schedule, you can go as fast as you want, as fast as you possibly can. So it’s faster, you’re not limited by other people in the class who might be slower than you in this area.

Or, the other side of that, maybe you need more time if it’s something new and you won’t fall behind because of other people who are faster than you, you can go at your own speed.

1. It’s cheaper to create your own do it yourself curriculum/school.

2. It’s more efficient and more effective.

It’s more efficient because if you’re smart about it and you will be, you will design your independent learning for the most results in the shortest time, so that the time you actually spend learning and studying and practicing, will get you a direct benefit much faster. You won’t be wasting lots of time in a classroom, taking notes, listening to lectures and doing a bunch of activities that don’t really help you, and all that other wasted stuff.

You can cut it all out when you do it yourself, so that every minute you’re learning, studying and practicing is beneficial to you. That’s why it’s much more efficient. You get a bigger benefit for a smaller amount of time spent. It’s also more effective, meaning that you actually get better skills, learn information faster, you keep it longer in your mind and you learn how to use it. It’s better, more efficient and faster. And I think another thing about it is it’s much more fun, because you tailor it, you’re creating it yourself, you’re doing it yourself, you can make it more enjoyable.

You can focus on a way of learning that is enjoyable and fun for you.

Let’s talk about how to do this now since you have the basic idea. I think you’re sold on, that it’s a good thing to do, that doing it yourself is a much better way to learn anything. So, how do you do it? How do you design your own system? I think this is what limits lots of people, because

they may like the idea of do it yourself, but they don’t really know how to get started. Let’s imagine you want to learn how to kite surf, which is one of my hobbies, so maybe that’s what you want to do.

How could you do that yourself? You could go to a kite surfing class and take notes, but there’s a better way to do it. Or maybe you want to learn video production, film making… you can go to a film school for four years and spend tons of money, lots and lots of money or you could create your own do it yourself film school. Perhaps you want to learn business. Again, you could go to business school and spend four years in undergrad and then two more years to get an MBA and spend lots of money and time, and it’s extremely inefficient and at the end of all that still not have great business skills.

Or, you could do it yourself in a much shorter time and get much better business skills. Of course, every particular individual skill has it’s own requirements, so you’ll have to customize or tailor your approach, depending on what you’re learning. If it’s something physical then obviously that will require more physical practice. If it’s something mental than maybe take a different approach. It’s different too if its something that requires you to interact with other people or if you can just do it by yourself.

You’re smart enough to figure out how to customize it, so let’s talk about my own basic system, which I call ‘the hobo poet do it yourself approach’. Hobo Poet is the name of my personal blog and it’s gives me the idea of independence, doing something myself. There are three parts to this system, to learn anything yourself and design your own school, your own curriculum and approach to learning any skill, mastering anything.

1. Projects

This is the most important one and it’s the first thing you should do. It’s kind of the opposite of what you might think, from reading books or from school. Opposite approach, projects, that means you do not passively learn, not read or listen to lectures, none of that. You do. You immediately jump into the skill and start doing it a lot, immediately. This never ends. You continue doing this as long as you want to keep learning. Do-do-do first.

Of course, in the beginning you will stink. Meaning, you’ll be terrible. Stink is a little slang which means to be bad, to be terrible at something. So in my own example now, I’m learning filmmaking and I’m jumping in immediately and have started a bunch of film and video projects.

We’ll make them into courses, so eventually you’ll see them and in the beginning I suck, I’m not very good. I’m a beginner so I don’t have the skills. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I jump in and immediately start trying to make videos, edit them and improve the lighting and the sound, and do all these things, because then I’m really getting in and getting the experience.

This is powerful, because until you have experience, abstract knowledge for example from a book, is basically useless or minimally useful. If you read something, let’s say I read something about filmmaking in a book, if I’ve never done it before and have no experience at all then it’s hard for me to understand what the book is even talking about or why it’s important. It’s very hard for me to understand, what’s important for me now and what maybe isn’t important for me now.

Sometimes books disagree on things. Which one do I think is correct? Which one do I want to try? If I had no experience than there’s no context for my knowledge. This is what happens in schools; you’re getting all this information, but you’ve never actually done it, so it’s just information to you. You have no way of judging it or using it. So, we’ll flip it and instead you just jump in immediately and yes you’ll be bad.

If you’re trying to learn business, you jump in and you start a little business. Don’t start a huge business and take out a million dollar loan when you’re a beginner you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s a bad idea. But, you could start a tiny little part-time thing on the side and then you immediately start jumping in and doing it. Now you have experience. Now you understand what the problems are. You start to see what the weak parts are and what skills you need.

Then you know what knowledge to go look for.

1. Massive input

This is part two, not step two, because you never stop doing projects. You continue doing projects. You finish one and then go to the next one and the next one and the next one, so you’re always doing projects for your skill or your area that you’re learning. Then, after doing that, maybe doing that for a few weeks, you then add massive input. This is where you start getting knowledge, practical knowledge.

Where do you get it? Books, of course, reading every book on the topic of your skill or area.

Again, I’m learning filmmaking, so I’m reading books about directing and lighting and sound and video, photography and even acting. So I’m reading all these books and because I’m doing projects already I can connect the two. I can say that would be useful. Oh, that’s the problem I had before in my project, now I understand how to fix it. So the knowledge from the books becomes much more useable for me, because I’m already having experiences.

Where else besides books? Tutorials online now, there are so many. Video tutorials you will find if you search YouTube. There’s a place called Lynda and many more. You can watch tutorials in any area. There are people who make little courses about whatever it is you want to learn.

Some are free. Some you pay for, but they’re all reasonable and cheaper than going to university or school and usually quite good.

So do some research, find tutorials and start watching videos about your skills, especially if it’s something physical, where you can see how to do it, or if it’s something visual or even something connected to audio then you can listen to it. So read tons of books and watch tons of tutorials about your topic.

Another thing you can do is model. After you get a lot of input from books, tutorials and you’re in the middle of projects and constantly learning as you do them, that’s a good time to find models, role models. In other words, people who already have this skill at a high level, that you like.

We’ll use the filmmaking example again. So, if you’re learning filmmaking what would you do?

You might choose certain directors. Oh, I like these professional directors, people who have made good movies you really like.

What would you do? In the case of filmmaking, you would watch all their movies. Let’s say you like all Clint Eastwood movies, as a director. So you watch all or a lot of the movies he has directed. Then you watch them repeatedly and you start to learn some of the techniques, because you’re doing projects you’ll understand it better. Because you’re now also adding in books, videos and tutorials, you start to understand. So you can watch a movie, in this example, in a much different way and you can actually learn from it.

If it’s a physical skill, maybe you can find an athlete who has the skill you want at a high level, watch their technique and see how they do what you want to do. So you can study them, role models.

Again, the Internet provides great access to this, lots of videos and audios. You can read books by your role models, all of these things, what are there belief systems, how they think; you can get that from books or interviews? Then, what do they actually do? Study their techniques.

So you’re always in the middle of projects, the more the better. Get really busy doing what you want to do and don’t be too proud to be bad. You’re going to be bad in the beginning, you’re a beginner, but you will learn so much by doing instead of waiting until you’re good. If you wait until you’re good then you might wait until forever. So do a lot and then jump in with massive input, input, input from books, videos, role models, etc.

I recommend you wait and add the third part after a few months. It depends on what you’re learning. If it’s something easy you might add it sooner. If it’s more difficult you might wait longer.

1. To apprentice

You continue doing the first two parts. You never stop doing projects. You never stop reading and watching and modeling, but then you also add an apprenticeship. This was the old way of learning, for many thousands of years. An apprenticeship is a partnership between a skilled mentor, a mastery and an apprentice, a learner but it’s different than a school. In a school you lecture, where there’s a teacher lecturing to the students. It’s teacher student, and there’s lecturing and taking notes.

Apprenticeships, the apprentice model or system was based on doing. It was like on the job training. For example, Michelangelo, the very famous artist. How did he learn sculpture and painting? He apprenticed with a master painter and sculptor himself. He worked under the master for a long time and he learned from the master, not in a classroom taking notes, but actually doing projects. The master had art projects.

He was doing paintings and Michelangelo would help him. He helped the master mix paints. He would help the master paint parts of projects. He would help the master create some of the sculptures. Over time the master would guide him in actually doing projects, but now he had the additional benefit of a master, a mentor who was guiding him along. The mentor didn’t do it for him, he just guided him. He gave him each step and a little advice, gave some feedback and that can be very helpful.

It’s not so helpful in the very beginning. When you’re a total beginner and know nothing, that’s not very useful and in fact, it’s stressful to have someone tell you all the things you’re doing wrong. You already know you’re doing stuff wrong, which is why I recommend waiting a little while, until you have at least a few skills and some experience and input, where you understand more, and then you add an apprenticeship.

How do you do this in the modern world? There are many different possibilities. The main thing is it has to be on the job training or doing training, not lecture. One thing you can do is an apprenticeship. You can even search for apprenticeships in your area, the thing you want to learn, see if you can find one. For example, if you want to be an English teacher like me, then you might search online for apprenticeships, English teaching apprenticeships where you would learn under another master English teacher, someone who was good, had great skills who could guide you along.

You would also teach and sometimes they would give you advice. For example, I may do a film apprenticeship next year. I’m researching it now and I’m looking to find a program where I can work with a director. The thing is, I’ll be working but I’ll be paying them they won’t be paying me, so I’m working for free. In fact, I’m paying to work, but what I’m getting in return is an incredible amount of learning.

Internships is another way to do this. A lot of companies and groups have internships, it’s basically unpaid work, but again there’s a time period for three to six months or even a year where you go work and it’s on the job learning. So internships are possible, research your area of interest.

Finally, you can volunteer, which is another way. You can connect with non-profit groups or even companies sometimes and become a volunteer. You would basically go there and work for free, and learn from the people who are already doing what you want to do.

Robert Kiyosaki calls this ‘work to learn instead of working to earn.’ First you work to learn and later when you get good you do work and earn money.

So apprenticeships, internships and volunteering, the third part of the do it yourself learning system. That’s it. Those are the three parts. Your job is to identify something this month that you are already trying to learn or you want to learn and to start using this system for that skill for that area. What are you going to do? Start projects immediately. Whatever it is start doing it.

Massive input, reading, watching videos, getting everything you can, watching models and getting massive amounts of input all the time. Then after a few months look into research and start an apprenticeship or internship, this way you will learn and master that skill much faster, more cheaply and more effectively than wasting your times in school.

I will see you next time, have a great day.

Bye-bye.