Rapid Learning invites you to skip most of your pre-planning efforts and start immediately with trying something. That is why STEP 1 in Rapid Learning is Go!

Think about what often happens to your carefully-made plans the moment you actually take an action… Right! Your plans no longer apply! This is because whatever tiny first action you make changes the circumstances in ways that cannot be predicted during the planning stages.

Your extravagant planning efforts may, in fact, be a stalling maneuver. It could be that trying to plan out everything wastes both time and energy, and pushes your nervous system towards depression and burnout because you try not to be where you are: at a place where it is time to take action even if you have no plans. Trying not to be where you are contributes to burnout by making efforts that do not correspond to reality. It’s like using a lever inside of your house to try to move a rock that is outside in the woods. Instead of making an effort to jump into life you hold back trying to figure everything out beforehand. Can anyone ever figure everything out perfectly? (No.) As Isaac Asimov asserted, “To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”⁰⁰⁵

By explaining all this I am NOT saying, “Don’t plan.”

I am merely saying, “Consider that your efforts to plan may be neurotic fear-driven procrastination in disguise… trying to make something safe that cannot possibly be made safe. Action is inherently evolutionary because doing anything changes everything. Instead of surrounding yourself with followers who expect you to tell them what to do to follow your plan correctly, surround yourself with inspired edgeworkers who do experiments and share mistakes as valuable intellectual capital.”

You can’t navigate the future until you are in the future, so what about just making the moves that need to be made now? Each move creates new circumstances that inform the wisdom of your next move.

Did you ever plan to Go!, read books about how to Go!, wish to Go!, feel jealous about others who Go!, make up really good explanations for why you are not Go!ing… but you don’t Go!? This is called being stuck at Go!

Were you ever stuck at Go!? (Yes.)

Being stuck at Go! is your soul hiding out.

In other words, “Depression is hibernating spirit.”⁰⁰⁴

It is easy to imagine that by not Go!ing you can avoid STEP 2 in Rapid Learning Through Pressure, which is to receive Feedback!

Hesitating as a strategy to avoid feedback is hilarious because the whole Universe is a gigantic feedback generator. You get feedback whether you Go! or Stay! So why not do what you really want?

It can make you far more enthusiastic about asking for feedback if you recognize that there are only two kinds of feedback you could possibly receive. The first kind is Go! This means that what you tried is working, so keep going: return to Go! and Go! again.

That may be shocking. If you have invested everything in your efforts and made a gigantic push to Go! and you succeed, then what you might most want to do at that point is back-off and take a holiday. But if – contrary to your wishes – everyone around you says. “Keep going!”, then Go! may be the most challenging kind of feedback to receive! Did this ever happen to you? (Yes.)

The second kind of feedback you can be given is Beep! which simply means that what you tried does not work very well. The results could be better. A Beep! suggests that it might be worth trying something different.

If you went to school, one of the first things you learned is that Beep!s are bad. A Beep! invokes that sinking feeling in your belly when the teacher calls out your name to answer a question. Sadly, one of the biggest take-homes from school is the terror of being Beep!ed. We learn to lie, cheat, and steal anything to avoid being Beep!ed.

If you receive a Beep! and you have the thoughtware wired up in your mind that Beep!s are bad, then you easily fall into the Beep! Swamp, notoriously full of dead floating fish, five hundred years of stinking frog-poop, and leeches… those blood-sucking worms… Leeches are the parasitic voices murmuring stories directly into your brain such as, “I’ll never make it. I’m not good enough. I’m a slob. I am worthless. Nobody loves me. I’m too stupid. I’m too fat and ugly. There is no room for me here. This wasn’t worth it. They have abandoned me. They make it and I don’t. It’s not fair. They don’t see me. Who do those assholes think they are anyway, to give ME feedback! Look at their life!” Please write your three most familiar life-sucking vampire voices here:

1. _____________________________________________________________.

1. _____________________________________________________________.

1. _____________________________________________________________.

The voices are life-sucking because if you listen to them, if you believe they are true – even to a small degree, even for a second – if you give legitimacy to even one deprecating or arrogance-inducing voice in your world, then you have transferred your authority over to an external source: the voice. Without your own authority how can YOU live?

Clarity gives you power. If you hear a voice, you are in the Swamp. This is useful information. A voice either criticizes or praises you or others. Even one voice signals that you are definitely in the swamp! That is your “X” on the map. Understanding that when you hear a voice in your head you are in the Beep! Swamp is so effective it can seem magical. The magic is that through taking responsibility for being where you are you create the possibility of being somewhere else!

But when you fall into the Beep! Swamp and you want to get out of it, what should you do? How can you get out… assuming, perhaps naively, that you actually do want to get out… which may be a false assumption… Perhaps you would rather stay in the Beep! Swamp for a while longer.

After all, it is soooo familiar.

It may feel self-destructive, but if self-destruction is familiar then you are right at home!

You may even feel powerful in the Beep! Swamp because you get to righteously complain, blame other people, justify yourself, make excuses, make intrigue, be resentful, and paddle around in Beep! Swamp slime writhing in a Poor Me orgy… something you may have grown quite fond of in a perverse sort of way... Maybe you know someone who does this?

But just in case you do want to get out of the Beep! Swamp… I’ll tell you how: First, admit that you are in the Beep! Swamp. Upon detecting a voice you say to yourself, “Hey! It’s one of those vampire voices! I am in the Beep! Swamp! I must have gotten a Beep!”

Take a deep breath, collect your wits, go immediately back to the friend or enemy who gave you the Beep!, look them straight in the eyes, and with no undertones in your voice, say, “Thanks for the feedback.”

No further conversation needed. Suddenly you are back in the Rapid Learning cycle. Use the details of the Beep! as a precise description for which behavior to change to get better results. A Beep! is a design suggestion for intelligent re-iteration.

This takes you to STEP 3 in Rapid Learning Through Pressure: Shift!

Shift! means to move your ‘point-of-origin’ – the place from which you are perceiving and deciding things. Shift your interpretations, your plan, your criteria for success, your posture, your focus of attention, your purpose, your velocity of delivery, your intention, your attitude, your intention, your tone of voice...

Shift! something! Anything! Try something completely different.

Here is a fascinating thoughtware upgrade to replace the old thoughtware you might still be implementing from your school days.

STANDARD THOUGHTWARE: A Beep! is an embarrassing sign of stupidity.

UPGRADED THOUGHTWARE: A Beep! is a strategy redesign proposal.

Your Shift! brings you back to Go! where you immediately implement your new behavior in your next try.

This is Rapid Learning.

Go!

Get your Feedback.

If the Feedback is Go! say, “Thanks for the feedback,” and keep Go!ing.

If the Feedback is Beep! say, “Thanks for the feedback,” and use the Beep! to Shift! your starting point, your style, your rules about how to behave.

Be sure to Shift! both inside (attitude, old conclusion, story, opinion) as well as outside (timing, tone, gesture, focus, etc.).

Then Go! again.

Go! Feedback! Shift! Go! You will be using this simple powerful learning procedure for the rest of this book – perhaps the rest of your life!

By the way, saying, “Thanks for the feedback,” when you get a Go! with the same level of sincerity as when you say, “Thanks for the feedback,” when you receive a Beep! makes you reliable to receive positive feedback. If you receive positive feedback as a compliment or as praise, then people must avoid giving you positive feedback for fear you will merely use it to feed your ego rather than using it to confirm your creativity. Positive feedback is also just feedback, useful info.

Did you ever Go! and get Beep!ed, and Go! again and get Beep!ed again, and then Go! again and you keep getting the same Beep!s? (Yes.) This is simply because you forgot STEP 3 of Rapid Learning: Shift!

You gotta Shift! baby! Shift! Try something else! Anything else!

Unless you try something different you will stay stuck in a rut, duplicating what already isn’t working! As you may have heard: the only difference between a rut and a grave is their length. Rather than behaving as creatively as a corpse you might want to Shift! and Go!

The magnificent value of Rapid Learning Through Pressure is that it derives maximum benefit from the intelligences of whoever is on your formal or informal feedback team. This does not have to be people you like. It is simply people who notice what you are doing and have ideas about it. By bringing immediate, direct, ruthlessly-honest feedback and coaching into your team’s context, you create the option of choosing to radically rely on feedback and coaching. Then, when you want to accomplish something – anything – all you have to do is Go! while keeping one ear open listening for feedback and coaching from your Rapid Learning team.

If you live in gameworlds that have feedback and coaching woven into their context, IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOU TRY. As soon as you are in motion your team will more-or-less impartially see how you are doing compared to your stated objectives and will immediately provide you with course-correction details. This is a service you can ongoingly provide for each other to optimize group intelligence. By radically relying on the Beep!s and Go!s from an empowered feedback-and-coaching team there is nowhere you can’t go.

Certainly, some of the feedback you receive may be projections, jealousy, competition, misunderstandings, fear-based arrogance, revenge, or manipulation. But if you estimate that 80% of the feedback you receive is pure gold, you can let the other 20% roll past you like water off the back of a duck.

Suddenly you stop avoiding people’s feedback and coaching. Instead there arises a deep longing to be connected in to a greater wisdom and you find yourself approaching people, maybe even strangers, maybe even your enemies… and saying, “Could you please give me feedback about _________.” You may have heard that two heads are better than one! But wait until you try thirteen heads!

Your team’s feedback may not give you the shortest path to your goal because they are not perfectly-wise Beings. But they don’t have to be… and besides, there aren’t any perfectly wise Beings. The feedback and coaching simply needs to be safe-enough-to-try and good-enough-for-now. If your project is something that has never been done before (which is quite likely these days…) the optimal path to a valuable outcome is unknown. So just start and rapidly learn as you go.

If anyone ever asked you to give them feedback and coaching, you know from your own experience of giving feedback and coaching that your own support team is not bored. When you ask them for feedback and coaching, each person’s full-band-width intelligence is thoroughly called into action through ‘parallel play’ – everyone creating value at the same time. Each coach invents and communicates original clarity and possibilities for you, which keeps them in a state of ecstasy, because 5 Body-creating often feels like being in love!