What can the Nobel Prize winning physicist’s story teach you? OR What did Frank Kern learn the hard way?
First, before I get into the story itself, let’s ponder the meaning of teaching so we are on the same page, shall we?
As someone who attempts to teach, let me tell you what it’s like for me: I find a thousand different ways to say, demonstrate, frame what I want to teach. I invent thousand and one stories, I find books that hint on what I want to teach, I sing it, I make it a comedy, make it a tragedy, I make you read, I make practice activating your eye muscles and the related brain areas…
And if I do it long enough with enough enthusiasm, I may get a few people to learn what I teach… but most of the time it is a real uphill battle.
So what I mean to convey: teaching doesn’t equal learning.
For the ones not learning it is all the teacher’s fault… But the poor teacher…
Actually the poor teacher can get really rich because of it.
Here is a great example: Frank Kern has been teaching for about 19 years without anyone really EVER learning what he is teaching.
At first he was raking it in, because the methods he taught didn’t get fully learned by his customers.
They cried bloody murder, and the FCC listened to the accusers, and changed the game for everyone, and took everything away from Kern.
Then he came back, told the story on stage, and started to teach more, but this time saying: he cannot promise because he isn’t allowed to, by the FCC.
People were buying his products like hotcake, yours truly included, and if they were really special, with some personal help from Kern, they produced noteworthy but flash in the pan result.
Flash in the pan results mean: you didn’t learn what was being taught.
If you listen to/watch a Frank Kern video, you may get to the level of understanding. Not all, but a nice number of people do.
Then what happens? You run into snags when you try to do what he teaches you to do.
So you complain… you say he deceived you.
Frank get enough of FCC trouble back when, so he changes his business model, and… gasp: continues teaching, now for free, and takes on a few clients and starts teaches them… and even those big money, successful clients can’t duplicate his teaching… or not quite.
So what he is doing now, if he deems you and your business a good choice for his teaching, he teaches you one thing and monitors your doing or that one thing… and gets paid handsomely for it.
Can all of those clients do what he tells them to do? Hell no… not exactly. Which means not the kinds of results your business can produce.
So he moves one step further from teaching, and creates a do it for you agency… again big freaking bucks… and still some not so great results.
All the while, he gives away his simple sounding advice, for free… without any concern that you’ll get something for nothing.
Now, why is that that he now doesn’t charge for what he used to sell for a lot of money?
So here comes the story of the Nobel price winning physicist who taught at a famous university:
When interviewed he shook his head sadly: it is hard to find any student for my graduate course to whom I can teach to do physics. ((His weeding technique for suitable candidates was this: he would ask them why they were wearing the jacket they were wearing to the interview. Depending on how they answered, he could gauge their creativity… I often use the same method, and find later that creativity is missing for the person.))
Why? asked the interviewer? Because they learned physics, what they think they know, while I “invented” physics, what I want to teach.
Learning means: you get someone else’s knowledge, and you think you know it.
But when you test it, you cannot build on it, you cannot use it… you can only regurgitate it.
Why? it is second hand knowledge, what is also called Tree of Knowledge.
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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
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What I cannot create, I do not understand.
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For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
The process to make it your own is a creative process, where you make the second hand knowledge your own.
I call it “connecting the dots”. Others call it creativity. You can also call it “play”.
It depends on opening up “spiritual” capacities in your DNA, capacities like recognizing patterns accurately, and the ability to look widely and see unrelated areas of life in the same glance, so you can see the same pattern in more than the area you first saw it.
And the ability and the willingness to lose your agenda… agenda, any agenda, narrows your cone of vision, narrows your ability to see what is outside of the agenda.
The other thing that it depend on is how much knowledge you have in how many different areas of life, science, industry, art, politics, humanities, etc.
If you don’t have enough, if your world is small, then you won’t have a chance to connect too many dots.
The Nobel Prize winning physicist and I have one thing in common and that is this: when we were young, we both went on vacation with a book that had a companion book with the solutions. Mine was mathematics, his was physics… I guess.
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
And both him and myself spent the whole vacation inventing the solutions to the problems in our book…
It change me, to my core. It changed my attitude forever. From thereon I was never satisfied with explanations, or being shown solutions… I had to invent my own… until I got to marketing.
There I found an impenetrable wall. I found myself without any tools to invent my own solutions…
I found that my world was severely limited by my inability to ask good questions, to create boundaries that make the solutions pop out.
It turns out that this, the ability to limit the view at will, not in its width, not in its depth, but in its “resolution” i.e. its particle size or its relevance is everywhere…
- It’s there when I muscle test for missing nutrients.
- It’s there when I muscle test for the “healing” diet
- It’s there when I want to isolate what sensation in my body would give me answer to the question: what’s going on that I feel this or that?
- And, it’s there when I have no idea how to answer the marketing questions that would enable me to give a direction to my marketing.
I have spent a week, maybe two watching video after video, Frank Kern’s videos, TED talks, being really curious to find some answers why I am such an incompetent fool in marketing.
And yesterday I suddenly saw what Frank Kern does… so now I can put some effort in going from consciously incompetent fool, to consciously competent, and maybe even unconsciously competent with enough practice.
Even if it takes blood, sweat and tears, it is exciting. It is exhilarating, to tell you the truth.
Once you start connecting the dots, the world is your oyster, in that area… the number of dots you can connect… area.
Otherwise your knowledge is like little island nations warring for dominance, all saying that they are the most important to your success in life.
If you are sure, you are an arrogant fool
If you look at the number of TED talks that say: the one thing, the most important piece of knowledge, what you miss… the answer… you can see all the people who don’t have a network of knowledge, who don’t have dots to connect, who live in a small world and ignore the rest… narrow cone of vision, no curiosity, even the Nobel Prize winning speakers… sorry to break it to you.
In my programs I endeavor to take you through the phases to enable you to connect the dots: to acquire the abilities, turn on the spiritual capacities to be able to connect the dots.
But, honestly, I am contemplating abandoning teaching, or making it completely free (and ineffective) and taking on clients for whom I can do, or direct them to do one limited thing and keep an eye on how they do it.
No need to understand… just do it, and rake it in.
While I may keep on some private clients whom I can practice what I can do to turn “human being” on.
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