I grew up in New York City
surrounded by the towering and inspiring
had an opportunity to see live music my
parents took me to live music concerts
and museums and Broadway and sports
events and by surrounding myself with
all that culture and brilliance
I developed a hunger for excellence and
an attraction to genius and mastery
anything short of that felt to me like
people were shortchanging themselves and
each other
thanks to these types of experiences I
ended up in two careers that both focus
on developing expertise and capturing it
and mapping expertise and by being
exposed to all this culture I shifted my
mindset from just being a spectator to
absorbing what I was seeing and hearing
when you’ve heard musicians like Andres
Segovia play live or Yo Yo Ma or Joe
Satriani
that inspires music students to work
harder for hours months years if you’ve
seen Bjorn Borg play John McEnroe in the
US Open tennis finals you know that’s a
match that may never be equaled again
and to get to that level of play you
have to work hard for many years and
start very young if you’ve seen
sculptures by Calder or Rodin or
Michelangelo or perhaps paintings by
Picasso or van Gogh that causes art
students to wonder what does it take to
get to that level of artistry and if
perhaps if you’ve just seen
documentaries by extraordinary people or
about extraordinary people like Jacques
Cousteau or Jane Goodall or Nikola Tesla
that often causes us to choose careers
based on that kind of inspiration I’ve
noticed that when we’re given the chance
to learn from masters of their craft we
tend to take advantage for wherever we
can and when that’s the norm rather than
the exception we develop a hunger for
excellence and an aversion to mediocrity
we start to aim higher I’ve also noticed
that the price is too high not to do
that if you’re given the chance to work
hard for something and you want certain
doorways to open for you you have to
strive higher and work harder if you
want to get certain jobs or get into
certain colleges or get funding for
businesses or grants or scholarships you
have to stand out well the media tends
to focus on overnight sensations and
successes it remains powerfully true
that most success stories emerge from
decades of hard work and high
achievement and while money is not the
best measure of success or growth fully
62% of American billionaires earned
their fortunes self-made their fortunes
through hard work genius and expertise
my childhood in New York brought me face
to face with vast financial differences
between the low-income areas of Uptown
New York and the higher income areas
like Midtown Wall Street and perhaps you
each in where you’ve grown up or where
you visited have seen similar contrasts
between mediocrity and greatness to
achieve great things we owe it to
ourselves and each other to step higher
and in doing so we gain a sense of
accomplishment and we can achieve more
together both for ourselves and for
others we owe it to ourselves to take
genius and mastery from rare to every
where there’s never been a more
important time for us to achieve this
never our world is in crisis we know
this
we need more creative solutions to solve
these problems and move forward together
we need to evolve as a society to get
past problems like environmental issues
poverty starvation and get us over and
through and past war violence and
genocide
we need more experts to aim higher to
develop their own genius
we need more geniuses to solve our
biggest issues and we need to model more
of that genius before it disappears
finally we need more masters to plant
the seeds of genius I’ll explain more in
think about this why do we need more of
all of these I’d like you to look inside
for this think about your own life
experiences perhaps you’ve known a
gifted expert and perhaps they retired
from their jobs or maybe they passed
away leaving behind a poor shadow
of their expertise and their brilliance
or perhaps you’ve known someone who is
particularly wonderful and gave you
great advice and now that they’re gone
you the advice you get from some others
isn’t as useful
we need more geniuses most people think
of geniuses as being very rare and they
may be thinking of geniuses as savants
or prodigies who truly are very rare but
I think every single human being around
here and Beyond can develop expertise
and every single person can take that
further into their own genius they could
find genius inside themselves and they
can take it further into mastery let’s
explore how these words might fit into a
learning theory called the four stages
of learning this is a model of learning
proposed by fellow MA in Martin
Broadwell and later developed by Noah
birch here’s how it works I’d like you
to think of something anything you’ve
learned doesn’t matter what it is got
one
okay with that in mind I want you to
realize that there’s chances are with
that particular thing that you know that
skill or knowledge area you’re gonna fit
somewhere into these four stages stage
one is unconscious incompetence and
unconscious incompetence means that
before you even approach learning the
skill you don’t even know how good or
bad you’re gonna be at it in stage 1 we
have ignorance a lack of skill a lack of
knowledge we don’t have any filters for
it we just don’t know
let’s call stage 1 newbie ok stage 2
conscious incompetence means you know
that you’re not so wonderful at it right
and and what this essentially means is
you have enough awareness of it to know
where you aren’t yet doing well you’ve
got a little knowledge a little
awareness and you probably don’t have
much skill yet ok and you take it
further
we’ll go beyond let’s call stage 2
clumsy okay so stage 3 conscious
competence this is where things get good
what this means is we’ve been doing it
long enough to know that we can do it
pretty well with instructions we can we
can perform well with instruction still
we have some knowledge we have some
awareness we have some skill but it’s
not yet automatic right ok we have some
awareness we have some knowledge it’s
not automatic let’s call the upper end
of stage 3 expert ok
I think expert means deep conscious
knowledge and competence ok we have in
the expert zone we have good workers we
have people who are really knowledgeable
and they’re common in academics in
academia yet they’re unlikely to be the
most creative people for solving our
problems ok their teaching is often
information heavy yet perhaps lacking in
some hands-on learning hope that makes
sense so stage 4 is unconscious
competence and this means that you are
beautiful at the skill you can do it
easily and naturally you’re the people
that other
look at and say they’re naturals and you
have this natural fluidity with it and
you no longer worry about the details
because you’ve actually learned how to
forget them
let’s call stage four automatic pilot or
genius genius is an high intellectual or
creative capacity or ability or
unconscious competence your naturals now
the thing is geniuses may have trouble
explaining details about their natural
skill yet they can demonstrate it easily
and naturally these people are often the
most creative at problem-solving why
because they are the most capable of
seeing opportunities for refinement and
improvement right but their teaching can
be not always can be full of gaps so is
everyone with me we have new be clumsy
expert and genius let’s also look at the
transitions between these four stages
because there’s a Eureka hidden in one
of these okay to move from one stage to
another stage we often have to make
certain critical and fascinating leaps
inside our minds to move from nume to
Columbus II we need introduction
awareness exposure and experience we
learn the relevant rules for what we’re
experiencing as we make that transition
to move from clumsy to expert we need
repetition exposure awareness and we
drill and we practice and we learn the
exceptions to the rules all right to
move from expert to genius this one’s
more interesting we need practice and we
need integration we integrate multiple
steps of the skill or knowledge into
kind of a Gestalt a single procedure or
process we just we gather these parts
and we group them together into larger
chunks a lot of us call that chunking up
alright let’s dive a little deeper on
this one a psychologist by the name of
George Miller discovered that we can all
store seven plus or minus two pieces of
information in any given chunk perhaps
you’ve heard this before as we learn we
grip these steps into chunks and we
chunk up and sometimes when we’re doing
that not always but sometimes we begin
to lose access to the details that are
part of the larger chunk it’s almost as
if the tails that made it into the
larger chunk that processed that
automatic pilot they become distractions
to the automatic pilot we don’t need
them anymore because we can just do the
thing beautifully right now capturing
knowledge from geniuses who’ve forgotten
details can be a little bit like pulling
teeth right so for example I’m
fascinated by the performance art of
contact juggling and that of spinning
acrylic balls in my hands alright that
may look easy but I promise you every
single one of those really wants to move
far away from all of the others okay so
I got to tell you a story people who
who’ve never experienced this don’t know
quite what it’s like I had the
opportunity as I was first learning this
skill to interview a genius someone who
was easily one of the top five or ten
people at this and and I was
interviewing him and asking him how he
how he was doing this first the other
people were asking him questions like
how do you first go about this what
first steps do you suggest that I take
to get better at this well geniuses
don’t think that way and his answers for
those people were unsatisfying and
unhelpful they weren’t getting it so I
asked a higher-level question I asked
how do you make all the balls move and
rotate together and he said I don’t make
the balls move the balls want to move I
just get out of their way okay so people
who don’t have training in learning how
to unpack genius might not have any way
of Tran
letting that that brilliant chunked up
genius answer into action into skill or
they wouldn’t take it seriously but I
gleaned immense meaning from that answer
and one hour later I was spinning
acrylic balls in pyramids in my hands
and I was clunky right expert came later
but you know I was able to do it without
you know injuring nearby parties so to
learn well from geniuses people need
skills for unpacking genius that really
aren’t taught in schools today and
that’s a little unfortunate
I think it’s perhaps best for us if we
move past the four stages of learning
theory into what I think of as stage 5
which I think of as mastery during our
first pass through the learning stages
we can only occupy one learning stage at
a time think about that only one at a
time so if we achieve genius in some
skill and then the act or the discovery
that we’ve lost details along the way
causes us to go back and relearn some of
the basics some of the foundational
material of our field or the skill we
can then achieve expertise while we’re a
genius now that’s interesting that means
that while we are genius while we’re
demonstrating beautifully and naturally
we reteach ourselves the chunks the
smaller chunks we can then occupy both
competency stages expert and genius at
the same time that means that we can
explain well and demonstrate well at the
same time that’s not possible
during the first pass through the four
learning stages and I promise you folks
it’s much easier the second time much
faster okay
so forgetting details causes us to
relearn things we can then achieve
mastery only if we’ve become a genius
and then going back and done it again
so that’s how I view mastery all right
both of those at the same time mastery
is not possible during the first pass
through so we have to learn any field
twice if we’re gonna master something
the neat thing about it is master
and masters that we have a chance to
learn from really accelerate the journey
for students up through to genius all
right
usually so if we want as students to
become geniuses or masters at something
we really want to learn from masters of
their craft if we can if we can find
them so what can we do in our own lives
to make use of all this right first
right first an educator every educator
could commit to aim higher in their
career to go beyond expertise to find
their genius and then go back to school
on the basics to become masters if they
do that they’re going to be serving
their students for years and decades to
come
and don’t stop or slow down your
learning process until your peers and
your mentors agree you’ve reached
mastery and then use that for something
wonderful right that’s one secondly
every student should seek out masters of
their craft wherever possible for their
own education to speed up their own
journey why would we ever impoverish our
experience by going with less than
masters if we didn’t have to right
so it’s wonderful as students to push
for and look for masters of their craft
finally third I think we should begin to
model more of the geniuses and the
masters out there and capture more of
what they know I happen to call I have a
method of doing this called genius
mapping but whatever method we pick for
mapping some of that expertise the real
goal is to capture celebrate and and
stockpile human genius right so if we
all took any of these three steps we
would all make the world a better place
we would retain more and lose less of
the geniuses and masters out there of
the extraordinary gifts that the most
brilliant minds among us have created
and delivered to the world I think
that’s huge so let’s take genius and
mastery from rare to everywhere
thank you you
surrounded by the towering and inspiring
had an opportunity to see live music my
parents took me to live music concerts
and museums and Broadway and sports
events and by surrounding myself with
all that culture and brilliance
I developed a hunger for excellence and
an attraction to genius and mastery
anything short of that felt to me like
people were shortchanging themselves and
each other
thanks to these types of experiences I
ended up in two careers that both focus
on developing expertise and capturing it
and mapping expertise and by being
exposed to all this culture I shifted my
mindset from just being a spectator to
absorbing what I was seeing and hearing
when you’ve heard musicians like Andres
Segovia play live or Yo Yo Ma or Joe
Satriani
that inspires music students to work
harder for hours months years if you’ve
seen Bjorn Borg play John McEnroe in the
US Open tennis finals you know that’s a
match that may never be equaled again
and to get to that level of play you
have to work hard for many years and
start very young if you’ve seen
sculptures by Calder or Rodin or
Michelangelo or perhaps paintings by
Picasso or van Gogh that causes art
students to wonder what does it take to
get to that level of artistry and if
perhaps if you’ve just seen
documentaries by extraordinary people or
about extraordinary people like Jacques
Cousteau or Jane Goodall or Nikola Tesla
that often causes us to choose careers
based on that kind of inspiration I’ve
noticed that when we’re given the chance
to learn from masters of their craft we
tend to take advantage for wherever we
can and when that’s the norm rather than
the exception we develop a hunger for
excellence and an aversion to mediocrity
we start to aim higher I’ve also noticed
that the price is too high not to do
that if you’re given the chance to work
hard for something and you want certain
doorways to open for you you have to
strive higher and work harder if you
want to get certain jobs or get into
certain colleges or get funding for
businesses or grants or scholarships you
have to stand out well the media tends
to focus on overnight sensations and
successes it remains powerfully true
that most success stories emerge from
decades of hard work and high
achievement and while money is not the
best measure of success or growth fully
62% of American billionaires earned
their fortunes self-made their fortunes
through hard work genius and expertise
my childhood in New York brought me face
to face with vast financial differences
between the low-income areas of Uptown
New York and the higher income areas
like Midtown Wall Street and perhaps you
each in where you’ve grown up or where
you visited have seen similar contrasts
between mediocrity and greatness to
achieve great things we owe it to
ourselves and each other to step higher
and in doing so we gain a sense of
accomplishment and we can achieve more
together both for ourselves and for
others we owe it to ourselves to take
genius and mastery from rare to every
where there’s never been a more
important time for us to achieve this
never our world is in crisis we know
this
we need more creative solutions to solve
these problems and move forward together
we need to evolve as a society to get
past problems like environmental issues
poverty starvation and get us over and
through and past war violence and
genocide
we need more experts to aim higher to
develop their own genius
we need more geniuses to solve our
biggest issues and we need to model more
of that genius before it disappears
finally we need more masters to plant
the seeds of genius I’ll explain more in
think about this why do we need more of
all of these I’d like you to look inside
for this think about your own life
experiences perhaps you’ve known a
gifted expert and perhaps they retired
from their jobs or maybe they passed
away leaving behind a poor shadow
of their expertise and their brilliance
or perhaps you’ve known someone who is
particularly wonderful and gave you
great advice and now that they’re gone
you the advice you get from some others
isn’t as useful
we need more geniuses most people think
of geniuses as being very rare and they
may be thinking of geniuses as savants
or prodigies who truly are very rare but
I think every single human being around
here and Beyond can develop expertise
and every single person can take that
further into their own genius they could
find genius inside themselves and they
can take it further into mastery let’s
explore how these words might fit into a
learning theory called the four stages
of learning this is a model of learning
proposed by fellow MA in Martin
Broadwell and later developed by Noah
birch here’s how it works I’d like you
to think of something anything you’ve
learned doesn’t matter what it is got
one
okay with that in mind I want you to
realize that there’s chances are with
that particular thing that you know that
skill or knowledge area you’re gonna fit
somewhere into these four stages stage
one is unconscious incompetence and
unconscious incompetence means that
before you even approach learning the
skill you don’t even know how good or
bad you’re gonna be at it in stage 1 we
have ignorance a lack of skill a lack of
knowledge we don’t have any filters for
it we just don’t know
let’s call stage 1 newbie ok stage 2
conscious incompetence means you know
that you’re not so wonderful at it right
and and what this essentially means is
you have enough awareness of it to know
where you aren’t yet doing well you’ve
got a little knowledge a little
awareness and you probably don’t have
much skill yet ok and you take it
further
we’ll go beyond let’s call stage 2
clumsy okay so stage 3 conscious
competence this is where things get good
what this means is we’ve been doing it
long enough to know that we can do it
pretty well with instructions we can we
can perform well with instruction still
we have some knowledge we have some
awareness we have some skill but it’s
not yet automatic right ok we have some
awareness we have some knowledge it’s
not automatic let’s call the upper end
of stage 3 expert ok
I think expert means deep conscious
knowledge and competence ok we have in
the expert zone we have good workers we
have people who are really knowledgeable
and they’re common in academics in
academia yet they’re unlikely to be the
most creative people for solving our
problems ok their teaching is often
information heavy yet perhaps lacking in
some hands-on learning hope that makes
sense so stage 4 is unconscious
competence and this means that you are
beautiful at the skill you can do it
easily and naturally you’re the people
that other
look at and say they’re naturals and you
have this natural fluidity with it and
you no longer worry about the details
because you’ve actually learned how to
forget them
let’s call stage four automatic pilot or
genius genius is an high intellectual or
creative capacity or ability or
unconscious competence your naturals now
the thing is geniuses may have trouble
explaining details about their natural
skill yet they can demonstrate it easily
and naturally these people are often the
most creative at problem-solving why
because they are the most capable of
seeing opportunities for refinement and
improvement right but their teaching can
be not always can be full of gaps so is
everyone with me we have new be clumsy
expert and genius let’s also look at the
transitions between these four stages
because there’s a Eureka hidden in one
of these okay to move from one stage to
another stage we often have to make
certain critical and fascinating leaps
inside our minds to move from nume to
Columbus II we need introduction
awareness exposure and experience we
learn the relevant rules for what we’re
experiencing as we make that transition
to move from clumsy to expert we need
repetition exposure awareness and we
drill and we practice and we learn the
exceptions to the rules all right to
move from expert to genius this one’s
more interesting we need practice and we
need integration we integrate multiple
steps of the skill or knowledge into
kind of a Gestalt a single procedure or
process we just we gather these parts
and we group them together into larger
chunks a lot of us call that chunking up
alright let’s dive a little deeper on
this one a psychologist by the name of
George Miller discovered that we can all
store seven plus or minus two pieces of
information in any given chunk perhaps
you’ve heard this before as we learn we
grip these steps into chunks and we
chunk up and sometimes when we’re doing
that not always but sometimes we begin
to lose access to the details that are
part of the larger chunk it’s almost as
if the tails that made it into the
larger chunk that processed that
automatic pilot they become distractions
to the automatic pilot we don’t need
them anymore because we can just do the
thing beautifully right now capturing
knowledge from geniuses who’ve forgotten
details can be a little bit like pulling
teeth right so for example I’m
fascinated by the performance art of
contact juggling and that of spinning
acrylic balls in my hands alright that
may look easy but I promise you every
single one of those really wants to move
far away from all of the others okay so
I got to tell you a story people who
who’ve never experienced this don’t know
quite what it’s like I had the
opportunity as I was first learning this
skill to interview a genius someone who
was easily one of the top five or ten
people at this and and I was
interviewing him and asking him how he
how he was doing this first the other
people were asking him questions like
how do you first go about this what
first steps do you suggest that I take
to get better at this well geniuses
don’t think that way and his answers for
those people were unsatisfying and
unhelpful they weren’t getting it so I
asked a higher-level question I asked
how do you make all the balls move and
rotate together and he said I don’t make
the balls move the balls want to move I
just get out of their way okay so people
who don’t have training in learning how
to unpack genius might not have any way
of Tran
letting that that brilliant chunked up
genius answer into action into skill or
they wouldn’t take it seriously but I
gleaned immense meaning from that answer
and one hour later I was spinning
acrylic balls in pyramids in my hands
and I was clunky right expert came later
but you know I was able to do it without
you know injuring nearby parties so to
learn well from geniuses people need
skills for unpacking genius that really
aren’t taught in schools today and
that’s a little unfortunate
I think it’s perhaps best for us if we
move past the four stages of learning
theory into what I think of as stage 5
which I think of as mastery during our
first pass through the learning stages
we can only occupy one learning stage at
a time think about that only one at a
time so if we achieve genius in some
skill and then the act or the discovery
that we’ve lost details along the way
causes us to go back and relearn some of
the basics some of the foundational
material of our field or the skill we
can then achieve expertise while we’re a
genius now that’s interesting that means
that while we are genius while we’re
demonstrating beautifully and naturally
we reteach ourselves the chunks the
smaller chunks we can then occupy both
competency stages expert and genius at
the same time that means that we can
explain well and demonstrate well at the
same time that’s not possible
during the first pass through the four
learning stages and I promise you folks
it’s much easier the second time much
faster okay
so forgetting details causes us to
relearn things we can then achieve
mastery only if we’ve become a genius
and then going back and done it again
so that’s how I view mastery all right
both of those at the same time mastery
is not possible during the first pass
through so we have to learn any field
twice if we’re gonna master something
the neat thing about it is master
and masters that we have a chance to
learn from really accelerate the journey
for students up through to genius all
right
usually so if we want as students to
become geniuses or masters at something
we really want to learn from masters of
their craft if we can if we can find
them so what can we do in our own lives
to make use of all this right first
right first an educator every educator
could commit to aim higher in their
career to go beyond expertise to find
their genius and then go back to school
on the basics to become masters if they
do that they’re going to be serving
their students for years and decades to
come
and don’t stop or slow down your
learning process until your peers and
your mentors agree you’ve reached
mastery and then use that for something
wonderful right that’s one secondly
every student should seek out masters of
their craft wherever possible for their
own education to speed up their own
journey why would we ever impoverish our
experience by going with less than
masters if we didn’t have to right
so it’s wonderful as students to push
for and look for masters of their craft
finally third I think we should begin to
model more of the geniuses and the
masters out there and capture more of
what they know I happen to call I have a
method of doing this called genius
mapping but whatever method we pick for
mapping some of that expertise the real
goal is to capture celebrate and and
stockpile human genius right so if we
all took any of these three steps we
would all make the world a better place
we would retain more and lose less of
the geniuses and masters out there of
the extraordinary gifts that the most
brilliant minds among us have created
and delivered to the world I think
that’s huge so let’s take genius and
mastery from rare to everywhere
thank you you
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