Nelson Nash: Learn To Unlearn (23 of 30)

In this segment of Nelson's seminar series, we started a brand new day where Nelson wanted to get everyone's mind set at the right playing field, where we were all open to learning and recognizing how we learn as individuals. That being said, he wanted to start the day with this incredible video all about a backwards bicycle. So we're going to play the backwards bicycle video first and then we'll go into our debrief with the group who is live in attendance at the seminar. I hope you enjoy it.

Hey, it's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. You've heard people say it's just like riding a bike, meaning it's really easy and you can't forget how to do it right? But I did something. I did something that damaged my mind. It happened on the streets of Amsterdam and I got really scared. Honestly, I can't ride a bike like you can anymore. Before I show you the video of what happened, I need to tell you the backstory. Like many six year olds with a MacGyver mullet, I learned how to ride a bike when I was really young. I had learned a life skill and I was really proud of it. Everything changed, though, when my friend Barney called me 25 years later. Where I work, the welders are geniuses and they like to play jokes on the engineers. He had a challenge for me. He had built a special bicycle and he wanted me to try to ride it. He had only changed one thing. When you turn the handlebar to the left, the wheel goes to the right. When you turn it to the right, the wheel goes to the left. I thought this would be easy, so I hopped on the bike, ready to demonstrate how quickly I could conquer this. And here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Destin Sandlin. First attempt riding the bicycle.

So the faster I go, the better.

Yeah, yeah. I couldn't do it. You can see that I'm laughing, but I'm actually really frustrated. In this moment, I had a really deep revelation. My thinking was in a rut. This bike revealed a very deep truth to me. I had the knowledge of how to operate the bike, but I did not have the understanding. Therefore, knowledge is not understanding. Look, I know what you're probably thinking. Destin's probably just an uncoordinated engineer and can't do it. But that's not the case at all. The algorithm that's associated with riding a bike in your brain is just that complicated. Think about it. Downwards force on the pedals, leaning your whole body, pulling and pushing the handlebars. Gyroscopic precession in the wheels. Every single force is part of this algorithm, and if you change any one part, it affects the entire control system. I do not make definitive statements that often, but I'm telling you right now, you cannot ride this bicycle. You might think you can, but you can't. I know this because I'm often asked to speak at universities and conferences, and I take the bike with me. It's always the same. People think they're going to try some trick, or they're just going to power through it. It doesn't work. Your brain cannot handle this. For instance, this guy, I offered him $200 just to ride this bike 10ft across the street stage. Everybody thought he could do it.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

You didn't understand.

You didn't understand. So this way. All right. All right. So whenever you're ready.

No, then you have to keep your feet on.

All right.

Like, you got to start. Rol.

Go.

All right, back up.

Okay. Keep your feet on the pedal. Go.

Go. Right on.

Just keep your feet on the pedals. Tails on. Yeah. Come on.

All right, one more time.

One more time. Once you have a rigid way of thinking in your head, sometimes you cannot change that even if you want to.

So here's what I did. It was a personal challenge. I stayed out here in this driveway, and I practiced about five minutes every day. My neighbors made fun of me. I had many wrecks. But after eight months, this happened. One day I couldn't ride the bike, and the next day I could. It was like I could feel some kind of pathway in my brain that was now unlocked. It was really weird, though. It's like there's this trail in my brain, but if I wasn't paying close enough attention to it, my brain would easily lose that neural path and jump back onto the old road. It was more familiar with any small distractions at all. Like a cell phone ringing in my pocket would instantly throw my brain back to the old control algorithm and I would wreck. But at least I could ride it. My son is the closest person to me genetically, and he's been riding a normal bike for three years. That's over half his life. I wanted to know how long it would take him to learn how to ride a backwards bike. So I told him if he learned how to ride a backwards bike, he could go with me to Australia and meet a real astronaut. Are you gonna give up? Go ahead.

This is how it starts.

Look at this.

This is such a big deal. Get up. You got it. Did you See his brain. Get it? So he. In how many weeks have we been doing this? Two weeks. In two weeks, he did something that took me eight months to do, which demonstrates that a child has more neuroplast. Am I even saying that right? Than an adult? It's clear from this experiment that children have a much more plastic brain than adults. That's why the best time to learn a language is when you're a young child. Alright, today's bike log. I can ride smooth. I can ride fast. I'm thinking the experiment is over. Okay? Now I'm in Amsterdam, a city that has more bicycles than people. The question is, can I ride a normal bike now? I mean, I've spent all this time unlearning how to ride a bike. If I go back and try to ride a normal one, will my brain mess up? So I've tweeted a smarter every day meetup, if you will. Going to see if somebody brings a bicycle and I'm going to try to ride a normal bike.

It's backwards.

It's backwards.

This was one of the most frustrating moments of my life. I had ridden a normal bike since I was 6. But in this moment, I couldn't do it anymore. I had set out to prove that I could free my brain from a cognitive bias, but at this point, I'm pretty sure that all I proved is that I could only redesignate that bias. So what you're not seeing is just a group of people here looking at me, looking at the strange American.

That can't ride a bike because they think I'm dumb. But I'm actually two levels deep into this because I've learned and unlearned. All right? After 20 minutes of making a fool out of myself, suddenly my brain clicked back into the old algorithm. I can't explain it, but it happened in a very specific moment.

Got it, got it, got it. I'm back. Oh, it clicked. Hold on. It clicked. I got it. I got it. Okay, there it is. There was the moment. Okay, I can read it. I tried to explain this to the people around me and they just didn't get it. They thought I was faking the previous 20 minutes and I couldn't get anybody to believe me. That looked like I faked that, didn't it? Just a face. You think I'm faking? You don't believe me?

You think I'm lying, don't you? I'm not lying. I felt like the only person on the planet who had ever unlearned how to ride a bike. And I Couldn't articulate it to anyone because everybody just knew that you can't forget how to ride a bike.

So I learned three things from this experiment. I learned that welders are often smarter than engineers. I learned that knowledge does not equal understanding. And I learned that truth is truth, no matter what I think about it. So be very careful how you interpret things because you're looking at the world with a bias, whether you think you are or not. I'm destin. You're getting smarter every day.

Have a good one.

Okay.

If you want to support Smarter every day, you can download a free audiobook@audible.com smarter I recommend Commander Hadfield's book, which is An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. I read it. It was awesome. If you think about it, I had to learn how to ride a different kind of bicycle. And my son did as well. But Commander Hadfield had to learn how to ride a different spaceship. Not only that, but a different type of space station. He was on Mir and the International Space Station. Anyway, if you're interested in supporting Smarter Every Day, Audible.com Smarter and Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, I'm destin Getting smarter every day.

Have a good one.

Everything's wrong. Sticky reactions.

Wrong. Why don't you ride it? You just build it. I can't ride it.

I just build it.

I'd like to hear three of you tell me you take away from what you just saw.

Truth is truth.

Yeah. Knowledge does not mean understanding. Knowledge does not equal understanding.

Yes.

It's all in how you think.

Okay.

I would take it a step farther. I would say that the young mind is more powerful than the old one. That's been programmed because the young one doesn't have stinking thinking.

It's twice as hard to unlearn than.

It is to just learn something new.

Yes.

Anybody else? Ladies.

You know what you can if you never try. Say again? You never know what you can if you never try. Try. Okay. That is the most fantastic teaching hoo that I know of right there.

Persistent takeoff. Yes.

In your practice. You ever considered dialing that thing up and have your client or prospect see that video? Just go, YouTube the bicycle you can't ride. That's it. That's very expensive.

Yes, sir. I'm just thinking ahead after the video. You know, it took me eight months to learn this, but only 20 minutes. Go back to this old ways. So it makes me think, as an advisor against all of us, is we need to be okay. Make sure we service the clients at the Six month one years. Make sure we keep remind them of these benefits. Because if we just place the policy and then walk away, they talk to other people. They're gonna maybe go back and rethink why did they spend this money on the policy? The noise will eventually seep in again.

Yes.

There's constant messaging that you have to. The power of that phenomenon is unbelievable. Do you realize that that's your primary problem out there in your practice is getting through that barrier in the people's mind, how they think and why did they think that way. Now, does this correlate to what I started off with yesterday? Noise?

Yep.

Yeah.

Do you realize how much financial noise there is out there? It is staggering. And the media is out there just drumming this stuff into nonsense in people's heads. And people actually believe that. Remember my comment about my radiology client up in Golden, Alabama, that he was coming along very well at learning all this stuff, but every time I went to review with him, his first question was, who else is doing this if he's reverting? Just like you said, back to the old modus operandi. Well, do you think it's possible for me to go back to doing things the way the world does? No, there's no way.

The stupidest thing in the world. But it took time to get all this done. This didn't evolve overnight.

See, when I first saw it, I tried to get the message done in two and a half hours in seminars. It went clean over everybody's head.

Was not getting a success out of people understanding it except very rare occasions. Well.

I had experience years ago with Larry Wilson. Wilson Learning Corporation. Anybody ever heard of Larry Wilson? Yeah, we were very good friends.

He created.

Counselor Selling for those who don't know him. Larry is a schoolteacher. Had a real bad habit of spending 1.25 times income.

Had to find something else to do. Got in the life insurance business. Did extremely well. But it bugged him. He couldn't explain why. Was he good? He called himself an unconscious copter. Remember that? Yeah. And so although he had four kids at the time, he took all the ear and said, I'm going to find out why I'm good.

Now, folks, when you start looking magic affairs.

Seek and ye shall find in the Bible as absolute truth.

Answers will come to you. And you didn't even know they were out there. Just the fact that you were looking.

Diligent, searching these wills appeared well, in the course of his.

Pursuit, he ran across bank of America who was looking for somebody to teach their people.

To Develop a sale training course with their bank. That's how Councillor Southern was born. And he was very successful with that, made a lot of money with it. Any reason that life insurance guys ought to understand that?

He called on Equitable Life of New York and made his presentation and struck out.

As he was leaving the room, someone caught him by the elbow and said sir, if you intended to.

Sell this idea to this group, you came to the wrong place.

Go to Birmingham, Alabama, see JB Conway, the agency manager down there and if JB likes it, you're in like plan. Now jb, my agency manager is one of the most well read people that I've ever met and a great leader and he just loved that sort of stuff. So he said let's do this, Larry put on the course where I went and then JB had my partner and I to put it on with the agency every year. It was a 40 hour block of instruction designed to be put on four hours at a time over a 10 week period. Each of the sections should gestate for a week. You learn this stuff and let it sink in.

All right? So remember that. I said I see I was trying to get too much information in people's head over too short a period of time. And especially when it's facing the phenomenon, you just saw the lot minds that people have out there that you're wasting your time with. So I redeveloped the course, rewrote the course, it's in five parts and it's actually designed to be put on two hours at a time over a five week period.

And so.

After I wrote it, I got a group of 18 people. That's how big the conference room was. The oldest one was 75, youngest one was 25. There were males, there were females, there were all sorts of different occupations. I wouldn't let but one life insurance person in the room.

Finished the part one. And on a Thursday evening, six o', clock, we started quit at eight.

And when the session was over, 60% of them hung around and said wanted to ask questions. I said go home, it's over, I'll be here next Thursday 6.

I deliberately did not call a single one to remind them. Well now that stubborn, isn't it?

20 people showed up and I triggered one all the same, 18. But others said come listen to this, this is different, you need to know this. Well the time the third session was around, they were saying you need to write a book. You need to write a book. All right, now you know the rest of the story.

That's how it all came to pass. But it was not an easy thing to do because of the fixed mind that people have out there.