Want to kick ass in the Information Age? Train in Mixed Mental Arts.
No matter how much your parents spent on your education, your school and your teachers failed to prepare you for the world that you now find yourself in.
This is not your teachers’ fault.
I graduated from high school in 1999. Back in the summer of ’99, the music business was making a fortune selling CDs. Newspaperman seemed like a legit career to aspire to. And the makers of Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta were making projections for their financial future that didn’t factor in the emergence of Wikipedia. My teachers did a great job of preparing me for the world of 1999. Their failure was in predicting the future which isn’t really something you can blame them for failing at. Humans are generally lousy at predicting the future. In his book Future Babble, journalist Dan Gardner summarizes the long human history of pundits predicting the future and getting it wrong.
And yet, some people do have a pretty good track record on predicting the future. Dan Gardner and Philip Tetlock call these people Superforecasters.
Having spent the last twelve and a half years in education, I’ve come to realize that the key to preparing students for an uncertain future is to prepare them for uncertainty. I’ve read a lot of books on what an Information Age education should look like. I’ll save you that time. It all comes down to a single sentence from the futurist Alvin Toffler:
It’s become a cliché to say that the only certainty in the 21st Century is uncertainty. However, few people actually then cultivate the skills that that uncertainty requires. To succeed in the 21st Century, you have to engage in metacognition.
Anyone can look up new knowledge. You can find courses online that will teach you computer programming or foreign languages or the latest insights in search engine optimization. Anyone can get information in front of their eyes. The challenge is turning what you’re looking at with your eyes into a way of thinking in your brain. It’s how effectively you turn words on a web page or in a video tutorial into better choices. How good are you at teaching yourself?
The answer is that you’re great at teaching yourself.
In working with students, you come to realize that everyone is great at teaching themselves something. It might be video games. It might be make up or fashion tips. It might be figuring out some hobby from the internet. But everyone is great at teaching themselves something. The problem isn’t that you don’t know how to learn; it’s that you have this idea that learning math is different from learning Call of Duty is different from learning Spanish literature. It’s not. It all comes down to breaking things down. The great trick is in reframing what you’re trying to learn as what you already know how to learn. And, in this, you can take a page from Salvador Dalí.
Dalí painted bizarre paintings like The Persistence of Memory that featured melting clocks and yet it seems he really did this without drugs.
How did Dalí do this? Well, he played with his own mind. He used to doze with a spoon held above a plate. When he fell asleep and dropped the spoon, it would clatter. With a start, he would wake up and quickly jot down whatever he was dreaming about. However, his most famous method was what Dalí called the paranoiac-critical method. He would work himself into a state of paranoia allowing him to think more irrationally and capture the activity of his subconscious mind. Salvador Dalí fucked with his own mind.
DO try this at home, kids.
It’s an odd thing but when we get a new gizmo be it a computer, a new phone, a set of power tools or a new kitchen appliance we can’t wait to play around with it. It’s like it’s our birthday. We open it up, get it out of the box and play around with it until we’ve figured it out. Well, you were born with the most powerful thinking machine on earth.
DO NOT take it out of the box. If you take your brain out of its skull, you will stop working.
However, you should play around with your brain. In fact, if you want to do awesome things in the Information Age, then you should keep playing around with it constantly. The key to succeeding in the Information Age comes down to your ability to manage yourself. How good are you at extracting your own potential? And that’s where Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method becomes vital. You have to repeatedly work yourself into some sort of state.
For years, Katie O’Brien and I have been teaching our students Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method without them even realizing it. They think we’re teaching them how to motivate themselves but it’s so much more than that. We are teaching them to reshape their perception of reality. For a student who feeeeeeeels that math is impossible or feeeeeeeels that they’re not a natural essay writer, that feeeeeeeeling seems like the truth. Students often feeeeeeeel that to say that a subject they hate is awesome would be dishonest. And yet, those are just feeeeeeeelings. The truth is that math or essay writing or the Spanish language or Call of Duty or a YouTube video of make up tips are just things that sit outside our brain. The challenge is getting them inside the brain. The success or failure of that data transfer depends on how you frame that material. And so, when students are struggling in school, we get them to reframe what they’re learning, “Oh my gosh! I loooooove math. Math is just the best. It’s a lot like learning Call of Duty. There are all these levels and all these different tools/weapons. The more of those I acquire and the better I get at using them the bigger and badder the missions/problems I can beat. Math is an awesome video game.” The faster students make this leap the faster they become wrapped up in the game of math. As they progress, they love it more and more and the more it starts to actually feel like a fun video game. And as they do this they begin to wonder what reality really is? How is that math which really seemed awful now seems like a game?
Well, what we perceive as “reality” is a projection of our minds that is so powerful and compelling that we can easily get lost in it. We can forget that what our minds perceive as reality is actually an elaborate neurological illusion.
The Matrix has been used as an analogy for many things. For me, Morpheus is describing culture. Culture binds you into thinking in the same way as the people around you and culture blinds you so completely that many things simply never occur to you. That’s the nature of cultural blindspots. You’re blind to them. They shape your thinking and your view of the world without you even realizing it. And if you want, you can stop here. You can take the blue pill and wake up back in your bed. Or you can take the red pill and see how deep this rabbit hole goes. But unlike Morpheus, I cannot promise you the truth because I don’t know it. I’m just as blind as you. I can promise you that in the Information Age, taking the blue pill is the losing strategy. You were born into a culture or cultures that were adapted to environments very different from that of the Information Age. So many of the people who are struggling today are trying to rigidly hold onto old ways of thinking. They are Snowflakes. They may be liberal Snowflakes or Conservative Snowflakes worrying about what’s on Starbucks’ Christmas Cups but their minds are frozen in old cultural intuitions.
The only reasonable strategy is to leave your old culture behind. It’s to melt and develop a mind like water.
Together with Bryan Callen, I’ve co-hosted a podcast that has now interviewed hundreds of the most brilliant scientists, authors and professors of everything from law to medicine to history to quantum physics. While each of them was brilliant in their own area, we were repeatedly frustrated to find that they often had never even heard of work in an another field. And nowhere was that more true than with Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations.
In the age of the internet, people often naively assume that because information can move so easily that it will. In fact, it doesn’t. It struggles to move across cultural barriers. To see this, you could look at the examples Rogers gives of 150 years passing between humanity figuring out that citrus cures scurvy and it actually being applied consistently. Or you could just look at what the internet has done for the understanding between red and blue states in America. Has the internet solved the failure to communicate between Democrats and Republicans? Nope. Ideas don’t diffuse across cultures just because the internet is there. Rogers’ research reveals that for ideas to move between cultures they have to be practical, accessible and compatible with the existing culture. However, even though Rogers understood that, he was imprisoned by the demands of academic culture. And so, he wrote his book in that dry academic style that is guaranteed to put most of humanity to sleep. The Diffusion of Innovations was published in 1967. It is now 50 years old. The Diffusion of Innovations is an innovation that has not diffused. And it is not alone. In fact, there are countless innovations from academia that have real world, practical value that haven’t diffused into the hands of the public. And that is something that Katie O’Brien and I know all too well.
When Katie O’Brien and I wrote The Straight-A Conspiracy, we brought together seven fields of psychology and neuroscience and packaged them in a form a disgruntled teenager could appreciate. We thought it was ridiculous for a culture to have these answers and not put them in the hands of the people who could use them. We struggled for a long time with the writing of our book and much of what we were struggling with was a very basic question. Were we nuts or was our culture nuts? In the end, we decided our culture is nuts. We took the red pill and wrote our book.
Now, we don’t hesitate. Whenever we meet a new student and their family, we begin by saying “Your culture is nuts.” How do we know that? Because all cultures are nuts. All existing cultures evolved for an earlier time. They evolved for agriculture or herding or hunter-gathering or the industrial age. There is no culture around today that is fully adapted to the needs of the Information Age. And so, we’re getting together a community of people to evolve that culture using social media. We call that thinking style Mixed Mental Arts. Why? Because look at how quickly Mixed Martial Arts has evolved.
In the end, it doesn’t matter who wins or loses an individual bout in Mixed Martial Arts. What matters is that through each bout the sport continues to evolve. That’s what we want for Mixed Mental Arts. We throw all the thinking styles together and we let them duke it out. Over time, better and better styles of thinking evolve that take the best of each.
Humanity has been in a long war of ideas. We’ve fought over national identities. We’ve fought over economic and political ideologies like communism, fascism, capitalism and democracy. We’ve fought within households. We’ve fought world wars. It’s time we turned the war of ideas into a sport. It’s time we built a no-holds barred Intellectual Thunderdome.
While Mixed Mental Arts will have cage matches, it is not a spectator sport. We are all combatants in the battle for hearts and minds on Facebook, at work, as voters and citizens and in our own families and friendships. We must defeat the bad ideas and celebrate and propagate the good ideas. And it will take wisdom to know the difference between them.
And, in that sense, it is worth noting that Mixed Mental Arts is not some great departure from the rest of history. Rather, like Mixed Martial Arts, it takes the most powerful approaches from all times and places and pieces them together to make something better than what we’ve ever seen before.
In doing so, we’re showing you how to do that most coveted of Information Age activities. We’re showing you how to innovate.
Whaaaaat?!? But all you’re doing is taking other people’s ideas and putting them together.
Yep.
In fact, that’s all innovation is.
Innovation comes down to following a slow hunch that something doesn’t quite add up and putting together what already existed. We call it idea sex. And humans do it all the time.
You know what would make this sundae even more delicious?!? If we added bacon.
I’ve got this idea for a movie. It’s James Bond meets Mean Girls.
Imagine a device that was like an iPod but with all the benefits of a cellphone. We could call it an iPhone.
The long history of human progress is idea sex. Many of those ideas didn’t work out. Burger King’s bacon sundae was taken off the market. Many never even make it to market. But some end up being turned into world-changing products. Our job with Mixed Mental Arts is to help you update your cultural software. You uploaded cultural software as kid. Now, we can help you improve it.
In doing so, we’re imitating the way Silicon Valley updates computer software. We’re using agile development. We put stuff out there and use the feedback of people to improve it.
We now have culled together a beta version of the ideas we think every human needs in order to make sense of this globalized Information Age. Is it perfect? Of course not. It never will be. That’s the nature of software development. Version 8.0 teaches you lessons that help you make version 8.1. You just keep improving. However, it’s worth noting something about this list. It steals from every academic discipline, religion and culture imaginable. And that is the biggest place where your schooling and your culture fails to prepare you for the Information Age. It has indoctrinated you with the idea that success is about narrow specialization. You were taught that the key to success is getting good at one thing and doing that for the rest of your life. You were prepared for the last century not this one. You were raised to be a snowflake. So was I. We all were. We’re all snowflakes but some of us are just in denial about it.
The world is a mess right now. And frankly so are all the people in it. We’re all busted up. But the Japanese took what was busted up and filled in the cracks with gold. They named this kintsugi.
The Japanese embraced this technique not out of choice but out of necessity. They needed to make whole pieces from broken shards. And so, it is the same with all of us. We have been handed the broken pieces of cultures from our parents and our environments. And now, we must make something whole that serves the needs of an age for which none of us have been prepared. We are all just making this up as we go along. In fact, that’s what humans have always been doing. Even Indiana Jones…
If Indiana Jones doesn’t know what he’s doing and humans are so lousy at predicting the future, why do we waste our time trying to pretend like any of us knows what they’re doing? Because we’re trying to fool other people even if we don’t ever manage to fool ourselves.
There are 130 million books. There are over 60 million scientific articles. And every day 2.5 billion gigabytes of new data is generated. And we’re living in an environment that no previous human has had to live in. And this reverses what it means to be stupid. It used to be that people were judged as stupid because they didn’t know things. Now, we should judge as stupid people who act like they know everything. Know-it-alls are the true idiots in the 21st Century. It’s a cheap parlor trick to be able to spout off statistics. Google can do that. Human intelligence is about making sense of that mass of data. It’s about finding useful patterns. Anyone can flail their arms around in the ring. It takes a Mixed Martial Artist to find the hole in someone’s fighting game and deliver a targeted blow. The same is true with practically solving the problems of the world.
Lots of doctors try and cure diseases. The great physician is the one who can sort through the mass of symptoms, identify the root cause and fix it. The same is true in education or any other profession. It doesn’t matter what you do for a living. Success depends not on hacking at the branches of the problem but identifying the root of the problem and attacking that. It’s about making humans everywhere more effective. And if you take the red pill and come down this rabbit hole with us, that’s what we’re going to figure out together. We don’t want followers who think what we think. We want a team of rivals where an intellectually diverse community challenges everyone’s thoughts, especially ours, to be better than ever before. We want to shatter the echo chambers and use the broken pieces to make kintsugi. Like Spanish or math or writing an essay, you can think of trying to succeed in the Information Age as an unpleasant burden. You can keep being a Snowflake who tries to act like they have it all figure out or you can become a Snowflake in Recovery. You can join Snowflakes Anonymous and begin the process of melting your mind and becoming a Mixed Mental Artist. And if that interests you, then…
…you can join us on Facebook here and…
…you can join us on Twitter here and…
…you can join us on Reddit here.
Whether you join the Mixed Mental Arts community or not though, you can’t afford to hold onto your old cultural software. Your only choice is whether you keep getting kicked in the butt or whether you kick butt back. The age of specialization is over. All those Professors who know their tiny slice of the world and all the people whose job depends on being narrowly good at one thing are incredibly vulnerable to being disrupted by some new innovation. They live in the dangerous complacency of thinking their job is safe. When they are disrupted out of a job as so many of them will be it will be doubly hard. And that’s where Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method comes to the fore. Assume all jobs will be disrupted. What do you do? You develop a way of thinking so robust that you can learn, unlearn and relearn whatever is required to jump into any new role. You train constantly for whatever someone might throw at you. You train in Mixed Mental Arts.
