Have you ever wanted to do something, “but…?” You didn’t know how. You never went to college. You don’t have time to go back to school. You couldn’t afford it if you did.

Guess what? All of those excuses are gone.

The OpenCoruseWare Consortium was started by MIT and several other learning institutions around the world to offer world-class educational experiences free to anyone who wants them. There are 13,000 different course offerings on the Consortium’s Website.

What did you always want to learn? I bet you can, now. If you REALLY wanted to…

In a recent post I mentioned that I’d memorized a 230-page book in a little over an hour, and asked educators how that might change what they do if everyone could do that. While some discussion did open up on education, I got many more messages wanting to know HOW I could do that, since I said that it wasn’t an innate ability, but a learned skill.

So I thought I’d take a minute and talk about that right here, rather than write a bunch of responses.

MY SECRET WEAPON
The truth is, I use a mnemonic system. This isn’t simply a collection of “memory tricks.” It is a formally structured learning system.

I stumbled upon the idea of using mnemonics as a college student, when I found a book on it at my grandmother’s house. The book with its yellowed pages had been published before I was even born… but what I found inside was fascinating. I devoured the book over the course of two days.

That book WAS a collection of mnemonic tools you could use independently to help remember various things: numbers, names and faces, lists of facts, stuff you hear or read, to help count cards when playing poker, and a whole host of other things.

I’M A HUGE NERD
At the same time I was interested in creativity as a process, and I was working in a neurobiology lab on campus. Part of my responsibility was to go to the medical library, pull reference books and have articles copied for the professor who ran the lab. While I was there, waiting on the copies, I’d look through psychology and neurobiology journals and read anything I could find on memory, creativity and, by association, learning.

From there, I stumbled onto the fact that, up through the 1500s, mnemonics were critical to education (mostly because books were rare and expensive before Gutenberg invented his printing press, so students needed a way to keep the material in mind). But they didn’t use a handful of simple tricks. There were several different formalized mnemonic systems used by students and thinkers prior to and through the Enlightenment, which encompassed not only memorization, but applying things like logic and analysis to what was learned.

A LOST ART
They quit being used for a variety of different reasons, primarily political and religious scapegoating of some prominent mnemonists, but also because, with the rise of the industrial education, the purpose and aims of education changed, as did the people in charge of developing curricula, who valued “realism” and a single-minded puritanical work ethic over creativity, independent thought and curiosity.

I dove in hard to see if I could learn more about these mnemonists and their systems. There isn’t a whole lot of information out there on exactly how these systems were structured, but in reading about people like Giordano Bruno, Matteo Ricci and others, I used what I’d already learned about mnemonics, learning and creativity to fill in the blanks and start creating my own similar system.

It took about seven years of tinkering to create a stable, effective, sustainable system that I could use anytime, anywhere to learn just about anything.

Now, this is not to say that such a system is difficult to learn or use. In fact, just the opposite is true. You could start using the basic techniques in about 20 minutes, and be proficient in the use of a formal system in probably less than 30 days. I was using the system through all of those seven years, even as I was tweaking and refining the methods.

THE REAL BENEFIT
The most profound effect that using this system has had is the realization that the adage “Knowledge is Power” is quite simply wrong. When learning anything becomes instantaneous and almost effortless, you quickly see that knowledge is not power; it is merely potential. You could learn everything there is to know, and all you have is a head-full of facts. It does not become power until you act on it.

That’s why the most critical part of this system is not the mnemonics that make recall simple, it is the analytical, critical, creative and logical thinking that not only allow for comprehension and deeper understanding… but help you find new and engaging ways to USE that information to make a dent in the universe. The mnemonics simply get the “capture” of information out of the way fast so you can get on to the understanding and use.

The whole reason I memorized the book by Larry Winget that I referenced in that earlier post wasn’t simply to memorize a book. I’d reached a bit of a roadblock, and I thought maybe that book would give me the kick in the butt that I needed to move forward. It was the subsequent USE of what I memorized afterward that made the effort (such as it was) to memorize the book worthwhile.

So… THAT is how I memorize an entire book in a single sitting. Or did you want to know how YOU could memorize an entire book in a single sitting? I could write up a tutorial that can teach you a way to do it in about 30 minutes (yes, it’s really that easy), if anyone’s interested.

“When you love what you do, you will find a way to be an expert at it. When you are an expert at what you do, you will serve others simply by doing it. When you serve others, the money will follow.” –Larry Winget, Shut Up, Stop Whining and Get a Life!

I read this book today. Good read, but this quote (it’s probably not verbatim… but it’s close enough for our purposes.) stuck out at me above all the rest, and it put into perpective a lot of things in my own life.

I’ve had a lot of successes… as a manager, a corporate trainer and a marketing consultant. But neither of those are my passion. My passion enabled me to be successful in all of these fields… but when the passion wanes, so does the drive and the desire.

So, what is my passion? I’m blessed to have a passion to learn new and varied things, constantly. Also to make uncommon connections, see hidden relationships and find ways to simplify, improve and scale things.

When I was training, I got to know those I was training so I was able to teach them new things in terms of those things they already knew and enjoyed. As a hotel manager, I’d move in and fix “broken” properties, implement new training methods and experiment with new or improved programs and procedures. As a marketer, I learned to quickly translate what the client wanted to say into what the customer needed to hear…what they wanted to believe.

Completely different industries… but it was all the same process.
I’ve decided to take that same process and apply it to many different areas of personal interest. I have lots of areas of interest, but I will likely focus on a handful at a time. Right now some things that are most important to me are education, parenting and health & fitness.

Health and Fitness I think will be pretty straight-forward. There are tons of different plans or programs out there. But everything boils down to three basic concepts: eat less, make healthier choices and get off your ass.

Parenting is a little more sticky. There are ten thousand different experts, and they all have conflicting views on what will and won’t permanently screw up your child physically, mentally and emotionally.

Education is the worst of all. If you read my last post, then you know I think fixing the system from within is a lost cause. But I’m fine with that, because I don’t care about the system. I care about my kids.

So my focus is going to be on making school as simple and painless as possible for them, while giving them the skills and tools they need to prepare themselves for the future they face.

I encourage you to come along for the ride. I guarantee it will be interesting at, at times, controversial. But if I do my job, never boring.

And I eagerly await your comments, suggestions and even rude remarks… either here or on facebook or twitter. Or by email if you’d rather rant at me in private. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know everything. I might even, on occasion, be wrong.

But if I’ve stopped to make you think, if I’ve shown you connections you might not have made on your own (and if you’ve helped me make some connections as well), then I will consider that day a success.

So… what sacred cow will be the first victim…?

I’ve made a decision that is probably going to ruffle some feathers. But, well, that’s too bad.

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” –Mark Twain

I’ve decided I’m not going to worry about what sort of grades my kids get in school. At all. Period.

I’ll wait a minute while you dash off that angry email.

. . .

Back already? Awesome, let’s proceed.

As I was saying… I’m not going to get stressed out about my kids’ grades. I’m not going to let them get all worked up, either, for two very important reasons.

Why Not?

First, many studies have shown that there is no correlation between shool performance and career success… at least, not the kind of correlation you’d expect.

“College wasn’t originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that’s what it has become. The data I’m seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn’t translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.” –Seth Godin

In fact, according to Tom Peters “Never hire anyone with a 4.0 grade point average.”

I’m not going to encourage him to goof off or shirk his responsibilities. And I’m not going to fill his head with bad ideas about education. He’s got to go to school, and he should always try to do his best. But there is no sense in killing himself in order to “be the best of the best.” Which brings me to the second reason.

A Wreck That Ought to be Totaled

The American school system is broken beyond repair. I don’t blame teachers (well, most teachers), or even parents really. I blame admistrators and politicians. They are too concerned with blame and credit to concern themselves with finding the root of the problem and figuring out how to fix it. And since the people who ARE the problem also happen to be in charge of FIXING the problem, the system is broken beyond repair.

So, it is up to ME as a parent to prepare my children to succeed in the world they are growing into. Because that world is completely different from the one The System is training them for.

Don’t Take My Word for It

And that isn’t just me talking. I’ve reached this decisison after years of reading people who know much more about it than I do… people who talk daily with (or are) corporate leaders and captains of industry. Folks like Tom Peters, Seth Godin, Richard Florida, Steve Jobs, Sir Ken Robinson, Cameron Herold. What they are telling anyone who will listen (which unfortunately isn’t the right people) is that students who come out of the system today simply do not posess the skills that companies need to survive today…much less those they will need ten to fifteen years from now. And that is frightening.

Why?

Because fifteen to twenty years ago, the country went through a painful shift that saw manufaturing jobs automated and/or sent overseas to skilled labor that can produce equal quality at a fraction of the cost.

Ten years ago, a similar shift happened in the customer service and tech support sector.

And now, there is a wealth of well educated writers, designers, programmers and engineers—mostly educated here at our best universities and colleges— in India and Indonesia capable of doing today’s most in-demand jobs as well or better than we can at a fraction of a cost.

You think multinational corporations will hesitate doing with those jobs what they did with productions and customer service?

What does that have to do with my kids’ education?

The United Stated reinvented education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In order to become an economic powerhouse, WE shifted from a classical education heavy on logic, rhetoric and history aimed at the social elite to an education focused on literacy and comprehension aimesd at the masses. The goal was to produce a moderately literate workforce who could (and would) follow written instruction. It worked and American industry drove us into the lead as a world power.

Now the system has been struggling for the last five years to transition into training students to succeed in an information economy, having completely missed the evolution through the service and ditigal economies. Problem is, we’re now two or three years into what’s being called the Creative Economy.

Business leaders tell us that the qualities they are looking for moving forward are creativity, collaboration and process thinking. The system is entrenched in Rules, independent achievement and results thinking. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the reality kids live in make most of those techniques not only antiquated, but completely irrelevant.

The way school works is this:

kids are fed the same information, taught that “this” is the right way to solve “this” problem, and then asked to regurgitate it for a test. Then there’s a bigger test at mid-term and another at the end of the year to make sure they know it. Of course, this doesn’t really work. Thats why there are reviews and study sessions before mid-terms and finals, to re-learn the material before the test.

This is done because it used to be important to be able to carry a lot of information around with you; it wasn’t likely to be instantly accessible. But today, kids know they can find any information they want in a matter of seconds, from their phone or computer. Of course, as every educator knows, that’s cheating. That’s the easy way out…

A Glimmer of Hope

There was in interesting experiment I heard about recently. A school was having trouble with meeting the required elements for fourth or fifth graders. So, in 2009, instead of creating the standard rubrick, they started the year off by calling the kids in to the library. “Look, the library is too loud, it’s just not good for reading or studying. We need your help to fix it.”

The teachers guided the students as they took ownership of the problem. In the old days, a lesson that covered how sound travelled would have been “This is how sound works. Here’s the fomula. Now, apply it to this arbitray problem. Okay, now let’s take a test.”

This time, it was “How does sound travel? Good question. You and your team find out for us and bring the whole group the answer tomorrow.” So the team digs through books and searches Google. The next day they explain to the group (including the formula)… they set up a demonstration. The group divides into teams with the new information, each focusing on a specific aspect of the problem.

At the end of the project, the students had learned all of the required elements. And they proposed dozens of solutions, many of which are actually going to be implemented to help soundproof the library.

Just A Second

Think about this method and the old school method. Now think about your job. Which sort of training would have been more beneficial to you? I’d wager 35% would say the old way, and 65% would say this way. For your kids, it will be more along the lines of 15% to 85%.

I wish I could say this experiment made me hopeful. Unfortunately it’s one experiment in one school. And there is a lot of tradition and expectation (and administrators and politicians) to overcome. The status quo is a powerful force with a lot of inertia. Even if something like this were to be widely implemented, by the time it happened, the world would likely have moved on again, and it will be have been too little, too late.

“The solutions are obvious… there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference (start here). Most of these ways, though, aren’t heavily marketed nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped two-hundred-year old institution with a wrestling team. Things like gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.

The only people who haven’t gotten the memo are anxious helicopter parents, mass marketing colleges and traditional employers. And all three are waking up and facing new circumstances.” –Seth Godin

My Responsibility

I simply can’t count on the system to prepare my child. Homeschooling isn’t a solution, because you still have to meet these same misguided standards. And I think the social development aspect is very important.

So, my kids will go to school. They will be courteous and respectful and do the work expected of them. And I will teach them some tricks that will give them an unfair advantage over their peers:

• A mnemonic system that will let them read, see or hear something once and remember it (and how to use their classroom so every test is an open-book, open-note test).
• Simple speed-reading techniques so they can read 2-4 times faster.
• Writing tricks that will let them write A-grade essays in a single draft.

We’re going to game the system so instead of being a major stress point, it will simply be a minor distraction.

Our focus, instead, will be on helping my kids discover their passions & aptitudes and uncovering how to turn them into a way to make a living. Something schools are poorly suited to, and which is far more important than a grade on some test.

If you’ve read Why Agencies Don’t Advertise, you know why I think building a following is one of the most important things you can do for your business. Of course, a lot of people build a following by creating original content and sharing it far and wide. These people are your “recognized experts.”

But you don’t have to be a recognized expert to build a following. What is something that people need even MORE than expertise? There are a lot of people putting a LOT of content out there. What people need is someone to help them sort through it all…or better yet, someone to simply point them to the best info out there.

This is where you come in. Creating solid, original content week after week can be tough. But finding and sharing content is a simple matter. And if you make it easy for your followers to find and share with their friends and colleagues, then your following will build itself.

How do you do this? Well, the method I gave you for quickly finding and sharing tons of good content through twitter and facebook is one way. But even more powerful than sharing a dozen articles a day is having your own video channels where your followers can come for hours of information on your topic of choice. The easiest way is to turn YouTube into your very own media empire by maximizing the Playlist feature.

I have many interests. Business and marketing is just one. I’m also interested in the outdoors, music, education, humor and many other subjects.So, my YouTube channel contains playlists covering those subjects.

This takes about 15 minutes to get set up so your followers are brought directly to the playlist page, and this is as simple as watching a video and clicking “save to” and selecting the proper playlist to add it to.

If you sell guitars, you could easily have one playlist covering how to play guitar, another with music vids from some phenomenal guitarists…and whatever else you think your audience would enjoy.

Realtors…of course you could put up walk-throughs of homes (divided into different categories).But you could also create “channels” covering lawn & garden, home decor, cleaning & redecorating, and local attractions. You can also create your own videos and add them to your playlists to throw your own style and personality into the mix.

What you end up with is something like what I’ve begun up above with the “Lefthanded TV” link. What’s better, if people like what you’re offering they can subscribe, and when you update a “channel” (playlist) with new content, YouTube lets you send messages to your subscribers so you can let them know. It’s essentially like a mini-email list to help you have a conversation with your audience.

And if you do that well, getting them to head to your site and opt into your list is going to be much, much easier.

Okay, so a couple of weeks ago I made the decision to stop writing ad copy. A lot of people wanted to know what I would be doing, and exactly why I quit. The short answer to why I quit is this: two and a half years ago a client asked me a question, and I’ve never been able to get it out of my head.

I want to answer both questions by starting a conversation. A conversation about advertising, marketing, social media and how to fix a broken system.

And I want to start the conversation with this… call it a manifesto, or a rant, or a dissertation, or an eBook, or whatever you want… on the single biggest problem with marketing as it exists today… and some proven remedies. (I started to write a post about it, but by page 25, I figured it had gotten a little too long for that…so I spruced it up a little and made it a PDF instead)

This is the culmination of two and a half years of searching for the answer to that question: “Why don’t ad agencies advertise” (and the obvious follow-up: what DO they do instead?) The answer I finally came up with led me to quit offering ad copywriting services altogether.

I’m not selling anything here. You won’t find any pitches for any products or services. There’s one link in the entire piece, and it’s my email address in case I didn’t do a good enough job explaining myself and you have questions.

I want to know what you think about this. If you’re a business owner… if you’re still in the agency game… if you are a freelancer yourself… if you’re not any of the above, you just like watching (or are disappointed in) the super bowl ads every year.

Maybe I’m over-reacting. Maybe I’m just plain wrong. Maybe I’m onto something.

Just let me know where I need to send it, below. After you’ve read it, send me an email, comment on facebook or throw a tweet my way (details in the sidebar to the left) and let me know. I look forward to hearing from you.

Why Ad Agencies Don’t Advertise
(and Neither Should You)