Learn Fast by Going Slower - Tim Larkin | Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question for today is, how do you learn faster? By going slower. And that might sound like a contradiction, but that's why you want to listen and watch this episode. And I'm excited because we have a very special guest, and we are actually going to do something unique here. We're going to do a series of interviews because I believe that listening to this could help save your life or the life of somebody that you love. And I'm really excited because we are here with self-protection advocate. He's Self-Defense Instructor of the Year, Black Belt Hall of Fame, former military intelligence. He's trained thousands of people worldwide in his, in his techniques. And welcome, Tim Larkin.

Thanks for having me, Jim.

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this conversation for so long. And, you know, we've had these conversations and we're gonna have future conversations. So you definitely want to tune into these episodes on fear and the mind's response to violence. And also things like situational awareness. How do you be more observant and be able to, for your own self-protection for yourself and your family? And before we go on to those topics, and that's why you want to subscribe to to this podcast so you get alerted when those podcasts go live. I wanted to have a conversation with you about learning.

Okay.

You know, I had the honor of going through one of your programs about a decade ago, and it was a self-protection program, target-focused training, and it was a deep immersion. And you have— I'm kind of a geek on teaching styles, you know, because I'm looking to compress so much information in a short period of time. and get people real results. From a training methodology, I was really amazed because you took a very slow approach, and at the end, we were just really fast, if that makes sense. And so I wanted to talk about your, your teaching methodology. How does that, how does that work?

You know, I think probably I was shocked when I started learning this as a, as a young kid. My grandfather was, was really big on teaching us all how to protect ourselves. And every time I learned anything, and this, this is true throughout the military, I noticed that when it got into something that was very specific and potentially dangerous or lethal, the instruction got really calm. And we learned everything extremely slow. And, you know, accurate and correctness was the most important thing rather than velocity and speed. And that stayed true throughout just about everything I've ever learned when it came, you know, no matter how complex the skill set. And what was amazing was when, you know, you saw books, books that came out like years ago, like The Talent Code and groups like that, that started talking about deep learning and how people excelled and how the best of the best have applied this. Well, we were naturally applying it back in the military. You know, 30 years ago. We didn't call it deep practice during that time. We just taught, you know, slow, you know, slow training basically, and it was the result that we got that was much better, and I've applied this type of training to numerous skill sets, and it's just amazing. You know, you learn much faster. Also, you know, my subject matter obviously is intimidating for people, and so my goal is I want to calm everybody down. And I want to access that part of the brain that enjoys learning, and I want to give them a task that's very easy for the brain to do. And if I add velocity out of the gate before I've given you a foundation, then you're gonna, you're gonna be self-critical. You're gonna say, oh, I'm not doing it right, you know, it doesn't feel right. Laying a foundation with slow deliberate training leads to amazing fast execution. The highest levels of counterterrorism you know, units, they all do this. They all train.

They start by crawling. Crawl, yeah.

The, the— in special operations community, it's called crawl, walk, run. And, and those are the phases of training. Once you've laid out— you lay down your fit— your foundation in the crawl phase. So think of it like a small child, you know, learning to walk. Then when you get a little bit comfortable in the methodology and in the fundamentals, you then increase the velocity a little bit. You walk. And then When you really have everything down and you are meeting your goals that you set for the training, you then go full speed. Oftentimes people think a new skill set, you have to learn it full speed right away, you have to be perfect at it right away.

Right.

It's the exact opposite. You need to lay in slow, deliberate training and your brain really— because your brain doesn't know the difference between speed. It doesn't understand. It just says, what do you want me to do? When, you know, when I need this information, What do you want me to do with your body? And if you lay that out in a slow, deliberate manner and people can assimilate that, then adding the velocity is the easiest thing in the world.

What is the term you used earlier today? It was, you go slow is smooth.

Oh yeah, it's the firearms mantra, which is slow is smooth, smooth is fast, fast is deadly. And I've used this throughout my training. And what people need to take away from this is yes, I use it in self-protection and You know, as I tell everybody, there's never, there's never something that you want your brain to work more accurately on than if your life's on the line. You want good information, you want to be able to execute. But what's great about that, and what a lot of people have found out, is the same training methodology that I use works in less serious situations even better. You know, any new skill set you're learning.

Mm-hmm.

I've applied it with my children, I've applied it with me learning new skill sets. I get so motivated that I've picked a new skill set every year and I find a really good instructor and they take me through the process and I find that by doing that, I'm a much better instructor. You know, I can be much more empathetic and I can really instruct people during that, that learning phase. And what everybody needs to understand is the mistakes you make as you go slowly and deliberately doing training are just gold because that's where the learning is taking place. You know, rather than looking at mistakes as like, oh, I'm terrible at this, I'm no good, you should actually be very happy because your body is saying, oh hey, I didn't get what I wanted out of that, let's make an adjustment. But you do it at a rate that you can make those decisions. You're not going so fast that you don't understand that you're making mistakes. And, um, that methodology over the years not only saved a lot of lives, but performance-wise has increased people's performances just And those would be 2 bonus takeaways from this conversation.

Not only that, you know, the theme of what we're talking about is you can learn faster by actually slowing down and being methodical, doing the deliberate practice and the deliberate work. But 2 things I just pulled out of even what you just said, things like some people are so scared of making mistakes.

Yeah. And that's what people— you should embrace the frustration. You know, embrace that because it is a learning— it is a really big learning thing. Like, I did something where I wanted— I realized, hey, I haven't really updated my shooting. You know, I was taught years ago, but a lot of new, cooler methodologies have come out, much more efficient, and I haven't formally been trained in them. So I said, okay, I'm going to do it. Well, I caught my ego. It's like, oh, well, but I'm the guy, I should know all this stuff. And I went with a great trainer who took me step by step through everything and all the new methodologies. And I made the decision to just clean the slate and not, and just act like I've never done this before. And I let them take me through step by step. And it really was a pleasure because I got the new muscle memory put in and I didn't have the baggage of the old way of learning or my old performance standards. I allowed my performance to suffer while I'm learning the new skill set. And then my performance went through the roof.

Right.

I went far beyond where I was before. And it was there, but there's this idea that people think they have to jump right to full-speed execution of everything. And, you know, and the more professionals, the people I hear at the higher levels of what they do, the real experts, when you really talk to them, there's some version of what they've done where they've done slow-delivered training.

Yeah.

I remember talking to a friend of mine who went to the music school. They talk about it in The Talent Code. And, you know, he's an amazing, amazing violinist. But he said, yeah, he said we'd be sitting in these cabins in northern New York. And he said the teachers had a very deliberate instruction. If they could walk by while you're practicing your piece and they could figure out what piece you were playing, you were going too fast. And that goes to the conversation— yeah, that goes to the conversation you and I had earlier where I do that with my students. So when I tell people to go slow, I give them a demonstration of that. But what we learned— I had a white paper done on this, and I had a whole science team come in and study this for me, a bunch of PhDs. And what we learned was we have to regulate ourselves because what we think is slow— if I tell you to go slow, most likely you're going 40% too fast.

Right.

And so you have to even dial that back more. So we don't really even understand what slow is. And so I tell people, make it almost comical, almost coming in. People somehow think that that type of training is gonna somehow not lead to fast execution. And, you know, we were given other numerous examples of people learning complicated dance moves.

Mm-hmm.

They break everything down slow, step by step. I told you about my one friend who was a Broadway performer who was doing a very difficult Performance on real roller skates on a very small platform where people could get really hurt, and they spent 6 months going step by step on carpet with their shoes before they ever put skates on. And it's laying those types of foundations that will absolutely increase your performance.

When you break things into parts, you know, little by little, a little becomes, becomes a lot.

Yeah, and the reason I do is because, you know, I'm dealing with people protecting their lives. And so I'm always looking for the best methodologies. People have this idea that they think they have to do lots and lots of work or lots and lots of practice. It's the quality of the practice that you do. And teaching your brain how to, how to do quality practice is an essential skill set. You know, for me, it's essential because I'm trying to save your life. You know, I want to make sure I give you good information.

Yeah.

But on any, anything that you care about that you want to pursue, laying down a slow, deliberate deliberate practice, you know, foundation, it's just only going to make you better.

I'm excited about these conversations because I think imagination really is power and be able to use it. There was a study done at the University of Chicago where they took 3 groups of people, A, B, and C, and had them do free throws. And then they said, Group A, for the next 30 days, I want you to practice an hour a day. Group B, don't do anything. Group C, practice an hour a day, but just in your mind.

Mentally.

And they came back 30 days later, tested them. Group A improved 24% because practice makes progress, right? Group B, who didn't practice, same, right? No, no, no advancement. Group C, who never went on a court, never touched a basketball, just for an hour visualized perfect practice like you're saying, improved 23%. Just 1% less than people actually went out and did the physical practice.

Yeah, that correlates with what we were finding is that level I mean, and again, you want to do the physical, right?

Absolutely.

You want to do the physical, but don't think that the mental training is not absolutely accurate. Because again, that's what makes us who we are. You know, it's our imagination, our brains. We're not the biggest, fastest, strongest species.

Yeah, we can't fly. We don't have claws.

We don't have any of that. So what makes us unique, what makes us, you know, you know, the superior, you know, species right now is the fact that we have a brain. And we know how to use it. And, and that's what really hit me because, you know, you'd think being a guy who's in the physical world and, you know, I have multiple black belts in that whole world, I can't tell you. I would say probably the biggest impact I make on people is changing their perceptions, behavioral changes that are— that's done through this type of training in their brain, not only to make them safer, but they just get more efficient in a lot of things that they do. And I couldn't argue with the results. It wasn't the way I was initially trained. It's the way I wish I was trained. So I'm giving people the program I wish I had started with right now.

And we're going to have these conversations because I want to, I want to talk about how to apply imagination towards situational awareness. And also, I want to talk about this fight or flight. When people feel anxiety, they freeze, you know, what, what they could do in, you know, life or death situations. Because if you could do it in that extreme, You could do that in your, you know, in your career.

Absolutely.

In your day-to-day. And so, um, what would you recommend everybody who's watching this right now, talking about slow practice? You would— they would have a skill, and so you would recommend that they approach it, break it down into chunks, and then do it just deliberately at a slower velocity and build up to—

Yeah, there's no doubt. Like, you know, you guys, we gave the example of Everything from learning a, you know, musical instrument to learn to fly, learning to dance, you know, me, self-protection. To read, you know. It's all the same thing. You want your fundamental skill sets to be done deliberate and slow so you can just do them accurate over and over and over again like that. And the idea is don't add velocity until you, you have a thing. If you lose accuracy at any step of the game, Go back, go back to the crawl phase if you have to. If you're at the walk phase and you feel pretty good, you then might go to the run phase, but you'll notice in the run phase, oh, my accuracy's suffering, so you drop back to walk.

Yeah.

You know, it's actually, if you can discipline yourself to do that, and you know, if you have training partners or anything you're learning, you'll be amazed at how much faster you'll learn this stuff. You know, I gave you the example earlier of the interview with the musician Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park. Great guy, really interesting. But he said what— he's so happy. One of his biggest breakthroughs was this new processor that he could load all of his music into, and then he could ramp it down. And so he'd load it in, they played at full speed, and then he could ramp down the tempo to about 40%.

Mm-hmm.

He'd then bring all the musicians in so they could learn their chords at 40%. And they got everything perfect and then they were slowly able to ramp up and he said it led to fast execution, learning the song. I think he said it was almost a 40% improvement.

Amazing.

On how quickly they could, they could do it. So when I hear stuff like that and when I hear amazing experts, it's across the board. It's not just self-protection. It works really good with what I do. It's critical, but it's a universal principle on learning any physical skill set. You know, I love it.

Tim, how do people stay in touch with you? Where can they go?

You know, I'm all over the place. You can get me, you know, Tim Larkin on Instagram. You know, Tim at Target Focus Training is my main site. And then if they want free, free products, great free program that I have up for an introduction, if they're interested in self-protection, surviveviolence.com.

SurviveViolence.com. And so we're gonna put all the links as we always do in the show notes at jimkwik.com/notes. And here's your next step, everybody. I challenge you to do this because we know knowledge is not power, it's knowledge times action equals power. I challenge everyone to take a screenshot of this episode and tag Tim, tag myself on it on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter, all your social media, and share Share with us the physical skill that you're going to apply this slow method to. Is it going to be learning how to type or learning the salsa or learning archery or maybe self-protection? Share that skill. And, and I always— I'm going to reshare and repost some of our favorites. Thanks for being on, Tim. Awesome.

Thanks, man.