Tim Ferriss interview
Frauenfelder interviews Ferriss for Make: at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2014 Center Stage. They discuss Ferriss’s data-centric approach to everything from dancing to learning languages and finding love. Ferriss:
For anything, if you want to take the path less traveled, the shortcut from point A to point B, you have to ask very different questions and sometimes very ridiculous questions
He says he is going to walk around the Maker Faire event for the next couple of hours talking to makers about things they believe that other people think are really crazy, and other unusual questions. He says the framework he uses for learning is something called D.S.S.S. – Deconstruction, Selection, Sequencing, and Stakes, which allows a different approach to learning new things. For instance for somebody learning English, they may find that as small an amount as 1.5% of available vocabulary covers a large percentage of common language interactions, and could therefore safely focus on learning that small vocabulary set first before moving on to other parts of the language. Ferriss:
The material beats the method…People ask what method they should be using to learn Spanish but the question they should be asking is, What material should I focus on?