How To Master Any Skill: Ernesto Burden (Transcript)

Because natural talent is helpful, but it’s definitely not the deciding factor.

The First Grade Lesson

On the first day of first grade, I raised my hand in answer to a question posed by the teacher, “Who here can sing their ABCs?” I knew this one. I could feel it here in my head.

And I opened my mouth, and out came a jumble of symbols that was like the abstract art version of the alphabet song. And the laughter was raucous and not nearly as kind as that. The teasing picked up where it had left off in kindergarten, and things didn’t get much better quickly.

About a week or two later, the teacher got in touch with my mother and said, “I really think we should move him to the slow group.” It wasn’t called the remedial group back then because they weren’t really trying to fix you or they were just trying to keep you out of the way of the smart kids.

My mother did not accept the teacher’s admonition that not everyone is cut out for academics. She is an introverted, soft spoken, shy, sometimes timid person, except when she’s not, and then woe to you. She retrieved the primers from my great grandmother’s attic that she had learned to read on and that my grandfather had learned to read on, and she began to teach.

It wasn’t easy. It was a process. But there was a pleasure in the process because it felt like it was going somewhere. She celebrated each small win and taught me how to celebrate those small wins and how to take pleasure in learning a difficult thing.

The Moment of Learning

There’s a moment in learning for everyone, for those of us who aren’t a genius, when your brain hurts, your eyes cross, you think this feels absolutely impossible. At that moment, you have two choices. You can close the book, throw it across the room, and say, “I am not cut out for French.”

Or you can say to yourself, “That’s it. That pain, that discomfort that I’m feeling right now is the exact feeling of learning. I’m doing it.” You reframe your frustration as accomplishment. And I realize it’s easier said than done, but once you know that’s what it’s supposed to feel like, it gets easier.

By the third grade, the kids weren’t picking on me for being stupid anymore. They were picking on me for using too many big words, something that still happens to this day. And they were also picking on me for having developed into a physique that required shopping in the husky department.

By that point, the goal wasn’t to escape the slow class. I wanted to do something more than that. I wanted to make the stories that I had loved so much when my mother and my great grandmother and my grandmother read them to us. I wanted to be a writer.

The Writing Journey

When I was eighteen, I was in honors English. Getting ready to finish school, I’d been accepted to early acceptance at UMass Music School and waitlisted at Williams, so close. And, so I did the only logical thing there was to do.

I sold my car for the price of a one way plane ticket and went to St. Croix. I was going to work construction and write the great American novel and drink rum. I had an old electric typewriter, and I wrote every single day, pages and pages.

And by the time hurricane Hugo hit Saint Croix in the early fall of nineteen eighty nine, I had a thousand pages stacked up in a manuscript box. By the end of that long night, every house on the hillside I lived on was flattened. Two weeks later, I left the island in a backpack full of soggy clothes, a carton of cigarettes, no typewriter, and no pages. Thousand pages gone.

But honestly, they probably weren’t that good. And nothing is ever lost. The process of writing those pages had changed me and prepared me to write the next thousand pages and the thousand pages after that. It’s the same way that grinding through those primers with their simple stories and their long forgotten characters had prepared me later to read The Sun Also Rises and to love The Lord of the Rings and plow my way through Blood Meridian.

I began to understand how much loving the practice of a thing and letting go of the outcome mattered in these kind of ventures where the distance to outcomes is measured in years and sometimes decades. I started over.

I wrote more. I earned enough rejection letters to wallpaper a room, to use the old cliche. But amongst those rejection letters, there were a few takers. When I was twenty five, I published my first novel. It was not the great American novel, and it did not catapult me into the literary stratosphere.

I did do some book signings, and I sold a few copies, and then I went back to trying to figure out how to make a living, which led to the next thing. At age twenty six, I earned a job as a newspaper reporter, and I was finally a writer, writing for a living.

Today, I’m a publisher with Yankee Publishing. I manage our New Hampshire group, which is New Hampshire Magazine, New Hampshire Business Review, six zero three Diversity, our Yankee custom marketing agency, and about a half dozen other publications and events. I’ve written millions of words.

Some of them have been published, many not. Some have been inspired. There’s been a lot of drivel. Hopefully, that was what wasn’t published. I’ve finished a couple more novels, one of which, Slate, was published a couple of years ago, and I’ve built a living and a life around words.

The Power of Belief

And for that, I’m grateful, which brings me back to the first grade. I was incredibly lucky to have the mother that I had who, yes, she had faith in me, but more importantly, she had faith in the process of learning and the academic credentials to reject the teacher’s assessment, that people should be shuttled into the slow group and not let back out again.

Throughout my life, and I’m guessing throughout your life, there has been no shortage of people who are willing to tell me that I’m not cut out for something. Well, it’s bullshit. You don’t have to be a natural to pursue your passions or to become really accomplished at them.

Sometimes when things come too easy, it’s actually a problem because you don’t acquire the grit needed to make it through the difficult parts, and being really accomplished at something always includes difficult parts, even if you are a natural.

The English author and philosopher GK Chesterton said, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” And I’ll add that if you do it long enough, with enough joy and attention, you won’t be all that bad at it either.

In the story I told about the first grade, my mother believed I could learn. And this is the first and most fundamental part of the practice that I’m sharing with you today. The way that I approach learning, the way that I approach training, and the way that I approach work and life, you have to believe that it’s possible. Otherwise, you will not get through the hard parts.

By the time I was done with first grade, thanks to my mother, I’d become that someone who believed that I could learn, that I could be somebody who was terribly bad at something and then exceptionally good at it in direct proportion to how hard I was willing to work. She had instilled in me a growth mentality.

The science shows it’s not just me. It’s all of us. If we believe we can do things, our brains change. We are not limited by a number on an IQ test.

The Five Steps to Mastery

So how does a kid whose first grade teacher doesn’t think he’ll ever learn to read become a grown up who makes a living with words? How does a chubby, nonathletic kid grow up to be an avid and relatively fast marathon runner? How does a kid who was told not to sing while Christmas caroling with the other kids because he was throwing everyone off grow up to become a working musician who gets paid to sing?

Five steps. Alright. It’s a little arbitrary, but I felt like this was a TEDx talk I had to give you, here are my five steps. So here they are.

Step One: You have to believe you can do it.

Step Two: You have to study how to learn this particular thing. How did other people learn it? Then you need to make a learning or development plan that includes small, measurable goals in targeted practice.

Step Three: You have to fall in love with the process, not the outcome. Accept that most of these things are lifetime pursuits. Be present to the simple joy of practice.

Step Four: This is the challenging one for many people. You have to get feedback. You have to run your race. You have to submit your story. You have to give your TEDx talk. Go to the audition. Face the music. Take the test. Order your dinner in that foreign language you’re learning. It’s so uncomfortable.

Step Five: Sometimes when you do that, you’re going to get negative feedback. You have to reframe that negative feedback into something useful.

Learning from Failure

And here’s a little story about that. When I was in college, I studied theater. And one summer, I auditioned for a musical at a local community theater. I had been working really hard on piano. I thought I was getting there. I was teaching myself, and I thought that I could impress the director if I accompanied myself on the piano for the vocal audition.

This was a terrible idea. But I believed. And, so I played “And So It Goes” by Billy Joel, which is a very slow song, but it moves along because it’s in a waltz time. I didn’t know a lot about time signatures at that point. Being self taught, you end up with these gaps in your knowledge.

So I played “And So It Goes” and sang it. And when I finished, everybody politely clapped all the other actors who are auditioning. And the director looked at me for a minute and then said, “Did you intentionally play that in four four time instead of three four time in the hopes of boring us to death?” And then he just stared at me as I slithered off the stage.

What’s the lesson? What do you take away from that? You take away, “I am not good at music. I should not do this anymore.” Or you could take away, “Auditions are humiliating and embarrassing. Find something less risky to do.”

What I took away was, “What the hell are time signatures? I’m going to learn about time signature.” I actually, I’m lying. That’s what I said the next day. First, I went home. I drank too much. I felt really bad. I got up. I felt even worse. Then I got curious about time signatures.

You don’t know about time signatures? Get curious about them.

Building a Practice

Most of us have to practice to get good at a thing. Think about it this way. In order to become accomplished at something, you have to build a practice around it.

Let’s take running as an example. A lot of people take up running, and they maybe they work up to three miles three times a week, and they always run it at that same speed, and they never get any faster. And they say, “I’m not built for running.” How could they know?

When you do that research part of it, when you develop a practice, you realize people who run relatively fast or people who run really fast, the Olympians amongst us, have all sorts of pieces that go into their training, into their practice. They have short interval runs and tempo runs and lactate threshold runs. I’m not going to define all these. Don’t worry.

There are long, slow distance runs, and there are easy recovery runs, and those go into these two week blocks or these four week blocks. They go into eighteen week marathon training blocks. Those go into multiple years of training that it takes to work up to a specific goal race. I like to look at my training in two year cycles, but my early efforts at running races as kids were abject failures.

The Long Game of Skill Development

The very first five k I ever ran, I went into it with so much enthusiasm and so little fitness. I went sprinting out of the gate, kind of shaking and jiggling as I did it, and I probably ran four hundred, eight hundred meters, and I realized how badly this was going to hurt and watched everybody disappearing away in front of me, and I faked a twisted ankle and limped off the course.

Any subsequent race during that period of my life drew more comments about how I looked than what my speed was. And so I gave up until I was about thirty seven, and I came back to it. And when I was forty two, I ran my personal best in a marathon just under three hours.

I’m fifty four this year, and I almost beat it back in May. These are the longest of long games. So the question is, how do you stay motivated when these are such long distance goals, this accomplishment, if you’re not a natural? I mean, sure, there are people out there who could go out and run that three hour marathon in their first race. It’s just for those of us who aren’t naturals, how do you grind out these long term goals?

Happiness as an Activity, Not a Destination

You have to acknowledge what Aristotle pointed out about twenty four hundred years ago. Happiness, which he called eudaimonia, is not a static state. It’s not an end goal. It’s an activity. Most of us think, “I’ll be happy when I get that job, I start my business, I graduate, I run that three hour marathon, I finish the novel, I get through the TED Talk,” but it’s not true.

We’re briefly thrilled, and then we level set back to whatever state of happiness we were at as we were working towards that goal. You have to fall in love with this moment, this practice, this set of reps, these pages, this page that you’re writing right now, even though it may blow away in a hurricane tomorrow, you’re getting what you need from it.

You have to fall in love with being the thing you are. You have to be a writer, a singer, a marathon runner, a quilter, an entrepreneur, an axe thrower, a tango dancer, a mountain climber, a French speaker. When you know who you are and commit to being that, you believe, and that’s the essential part.

The Gift of Belief

The rest is just mechanics, whether you are a natural or not. I’m not a natural, but here I am. And I’m up here because once upon a time, someone showed me that effort trumps natural talent and that I could do anything I wanted if I wanted to do it badly enough and worked hard enough at it.

I said in the beginning that being gifted wasn’t necessary, but one gift is, and that’s the gift of belief. I hope in this time with you that I’ve been able to pass some of that along, that gift of belief that I was given as a first grader.

If there’s something that you’ve been dreaming of learning, that buried dream, that thing your soul cries out to try, but the world says you don’t have the knack for it, I want to tell you, I believe you can, and you should too.

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