How A Slight Change In Mindset Accelerated My Learning Forever

A personal sports story and a practical life tip.

A few years ago, I spent 2 weeks learning how to Kitesurf in Egypt. It was a stressful time in my life as I was in the early stages of a startup with a lean bank account, but a friend of mine managed to convince me to travel 2000+ miles to an isolated spot by the Red Sea, basically in the middle of nowhere.

Ras Sudr — Egypt, A Kitesurfing paradise in the middle of nowhere.

I had the opportunity to study the behavior of multiple beginner groups going through an identical learning process and gained an interesting insight that considerably accelerated my learning curve.

I now use this technique every time I learn something new.

If you are not familiar with Kitesurfing, it’s a sport where you speed over water using a kite to harness the power of the wind and a board as a floatation device. It is incredibly fun.

Kitesurfing = Freedom (Photo Credit: Konstantin)

All beginners are taught the following steps, in this order:

1. Basic theory
2. How to manipulate your kite in shallow water (or on land)
3. How to use the power of the kite to get dragged in the water (called body-dragging)
4. How to take off with a board on your feet
5. How to sail in both directions
6. How to turn

We are going to concentrate on Step 4: Taking off.

Here is what your teacher would tell you:

1. Stabilise your kite in the air above you (12 o’clock)
2. Sit in the water while holding your board in your hand
3. Put your feet into the straps of your board
4. Pull your kite back just a little (at 11 o’clock) (See drawing)
5. Pull your kite in one motion into the power zone (almost to the horizon) — This will pull you out of the water immediately and get you moving.
6. Bring your kite back up before it hits the water ☺

The takeoff: this is what your kite should do.

Watching people go through this learning curve is fascinating. The beginners are all bobbing in and out of the water. One second they’re pulled out of the water the next they are back in, never gaining any speed or momentum.

Before trying this out myself, I spent some time working on understanding why this was happening and what I could do to avoid bobbing and instead sail away after my takeoff.

I sat down in the sand and started analyzing what the more confirmed kitesurfers were doing in comparison to the beginners.

That’s when it hit me: The beginners were half-assing it. That’s all.

Beginner kites were not coming even close to the horizon whereas confirmed kiters were flying down towards “6 o’clock” as if their lives depended on it.

Notice the difference in between a beginner’s and an expert’s kite trajectory for the takeoff

What struck me most is that it has NOTHING TO DO WITH TECHNIQUE. All you have to do is pull on one side of your bar, hard (the bar is the equivalent of a steering wheel for your kite).

If you don’t pull hard, you kite moves slowly and gives you less power. It’s not rocket science, yet 99% of beginners only pulled half way. When it was my turn, I shut my brain off, and did exactly what the pros were doing. I pulled hard, and waited for my kite to get low before pulling back.

I was out of the water speeding on my first try.

A few minutes later I made a sailing mistake and got slammed face first at high speed into the water, but that’s another story. So why do most beginners only pull halfway? Because they feel shy. They aren’t comfortable in this new situation so they tiptoe around instead of “jumping in”.

Here’s how their inner voice goes: “Let’s just pull a little and see what happens. It might work. I’ll pull harder next time.” What’s interesting is that they ended up crashing way more times than I did.

I convinced myself not to feel shy, rehearsed the move on land and in my mind many times, and was determined to simply replicate what I saw the experts doing. Two hours later, I was having a blast sailing around, while the others were still “pulling a little more to see what would happen”.

The reason I’m sharing this story with you is because it’s such a clear example of how timidity slows down the learning process. Remember, this step didn’t call for any technique whatsoever. All you need to do is pull on a bar hard enough. In this example after hours or sometimes days of trying, the beginners eventually all ended up pulling hard on the bar, and making it.

They all followed a slow process that led them after many unsuccessful tries to mistakenly pull hard enough once, see that it worked, and only then internalize the lesson and start applying it consistently.

Ironically, these people crashed many more times than I did because they were playing it safe and trying not to crash. They thought they were taking less risks when in fact they were insuring a longer and tougher learning process.

Fast learners know this trick of the mind and apply it all the time. Refuse to be shy. Don’t overthink it. Once you know what to do, do it all the way. Jump in. You will learn faster, and you will have a lot more fun in the process.

This is one of my favorite techniques to accelerate my learning curve in any activity especially if it involves physical skills. Fast learners take the plunge and go all the way. They harbor the crazy hope that they might get it right on the first try.

And sometimes they do.

Since learning this lesson, I’ve applied this technique over and over in many different situations.

For my own learning

As a rule of thumb, when I catch myself thinking “let’s give this a try” and my palms are moist, I know that it’s time to remind myself of this story and to make sure I’m in the right mindset. The impact has been amazing.

When teaching others

This has turned out to be a powerful tool when teaching beginners — something I’m very fond of. When I’m teaching a beginner friend how to surf for example, I will usually count on him not being in the right mindset from the start. To help him overcome his shyness, I always explain that he will instinctively want to “try only a little” and stay in a crouched position on his board instead of standing up.

Together, we then work on tricking his brain into avoiding exactly that by focusing on training his body. With the board laying flat on the sand, I have him simulate the action of standing up on his surfboard with the correct position, in one motion.

As soon as he gets it right, we start counting. We do it enough times in a row that he stops relying on his brain to tell him what to do and instead trusts his body to remember how it’s done. (The amount of times you should repeat this varies from person to person. It can be anywhere from 10 times to 30+.)

When we are out in the water and I push him into a wave, the adrenaline is pumping and his brain is yelling at him that he is not familiar with this dodgy situation and should only “try a little.” But by this time, he knows his brain is wrong and in that fraction of a second where he questions the yelling, his body takes over and executes on what it knows.

He’s up and surfing the first wave of his life, and most likely has no idea how he did it. His body is taking in the feeling though, and on the next wave it will repeat the process with even more ease.

Wave after wave, little by little, the mind reconnects with the body and he can start putting the parts of the puzzle together; as a surfer.

(Tristan de Montebello specializes in teaching total beginners how to learn new activities lightning fast. He is on a quest to teach 1000 adults how to learn guitar. Learn more at AboutTheStart.com. Many thanks to Scott H Young and Andrew Warner for their help and encouragement in publishing this article.)