How to learn anything in a weekend

Hear me out.

• A typical college course lasts one hour, three times a week, for fourteen weeks. Considering holidays, the actual total class time is only around forty hours. And that’s a college course.
• There are thousands of books that will teach you any topic in twenty-four physical hours. These are sometimes called “Weekend Crash Courses.”
• How long did it take you to learn to ride a bike? That’s fairly complicated for a young person. More than twenty-four-forty hours?

If you followed a new employee around on their first days of work at any job anywhere in the world, you would learn that:

• They know about the job, but not how to do it in this new environment.
• They need someone to show them how to get things done.
• It takes about a week to figure things out.

Intelligence is not the ability to remember things. Intelligence is the ability to learn. Applied intelligence is the ability to learn something and successfully apply it to a practical situation. But employers know this takes time. They don’t expect even the most talented individual to start their first day running. That’s why they provide mentors, supervisors and training materials.

When an employer needs someone new, and they have run out of personal leads, they call the recruiters to bring them candidates. But they know they’re going to get inundated with resumes. How do they trim the herd? They don’t know how to test applied intelligence. Macro capabilities are considered “too liberal.” So they hyper-focus on skills. And the more obscure the skills, the better. They always seem so much more specific, which employers often confuse with talent.

Unfortunately, most employers don’t want to see a variety of interests on your resume, even if they do represent skills. They call this inconsistency. Can you imagine a puzzled art dealer thumbing through resumes for a painter? Who the heck is this guy named Leonardo da Vinci? A bicycle mechanic? A sculptor? A geologist? A mathematician? A botanist? A behaviorist? An engineer? An architect? A musician? He can’t be all these things! He must be on drugs! If he’s a painter, I’m a fool! I’d bet $80 million that he couldn’t paint a woman without a smile!

These retarded fools should not get away with being this lazy. They shouldn’t reject you because of skills you lack when the most important skills are “macro”: the ability to size up a situation, the ability to function with others, the ability to learn and to apply what you learn. You just have to get by their idiot recruiters so you can strut your stuff.

We learn almost everything we know by getting into situations and then digging our way out. It takes about a week. And a week is just a lazy, eight-hours-a-day version of a focused, intense, amphetamine-laced weekend.

There are actually three ways to learn anything in a weekend:

1. By playing the Renaissance Man

The best way to learn a thing is to make it an extension of something you already know. This means that you have had the foresight to look for a career in some area where you have real strengths, even if they weren’t gained “on the job.”

Most of us really do want to work hard and learn new things. Sure, it takes the most effort. But it’s the high road. It’s also the most rewarding. As you apply for jobs, you gradually get smarter. Eventually, you stop lying. Or you get ambitious and repeat the process over and over until you are chased down by an angry mob of under-achievers.

I picked Technical Writing as my career because I majored in Creative Writing in college. Never mind that I attended a pass-fail “Uncle Charley’s Summer Camp” where the most famous professor wandered around half-naked, smoking pot, teaching his students about “The Biology of Spring Wildflowers.” The funny part is you think I’m joking!

At least I had done some writing. I didn’t know what “technical writing” really meant. Did it matter? Having written thousands of pages since I was a boy, the odds were that I could figure it out. You need to make the same leap of faith. What can you do? What have you been complimented for? What skills have you gained? You might be surprised how well you stack up next to so-called “experts.”

2. By playing Rain Man

In the movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman played an idiot savant who seemed retarded to the outside world, but was blessed with amazing calculation skills. When someone dropped a box of toothpicks, he studied the mess on the floor and announced the total count. He could remember what cards had been dealt out of a five-deck draw; Tom Cruise put that to good use at the casino.

Some people are good at remembering things. With effort, most of us can focus on key aspects of a topic and memorize the most important elements, how they are structured, and, ideally, how they interact in the overall functionality of a process. Without actual applied practice, this is about as useful as counting toothpicks sprayed all over the floor. But it may just get you hired.

Recruiters and employers are bureaucrats, and all bureaucrats are a form of idiot savant: they know certain things and they use those things to certify their authority. This is the opposite of applied intelligence. In most ways, bureaucrats are applied retards. They can’t do anything productive in most situations because they have relied too much on the lazy memorization of idiotic details. They don’t know how anything really functions or ties together except as it pertains to an org chart, meeting schedule or corporate policy.

As “Rain Man,” you will give these pinheads a taste of their own medicine: an endless recitation of obscure, meaningless details that they cannot refute. If they know what you’re talking about, they’ll agree with you. If they don’t, they’ll be too embarrassed to mention it.

You get your detail list by recording every single technical term or acronym that you find anywhere in the company’s website, its job ad, or within any of its extended contents. If they ask you to learn Visio, you go to the Microsoft Visio website and record dozens of technical terms you find there. Learn how to wend these into phrases, collections and eventually sentences.

Here’s a snippet of an interview between an employer and Rain Man:

The better you are at this shtick, the worse you will be at any real-world job. But you’ll get hired. That’s a lot better than the da Vincis will fare.

By giving up on #1 and #2 and offering real cash money for a third option

I haven’t spent a lot of time on options #1 and #2 because I knew you would end up here eventually. You haven’t got the energy for #1 or the memory for #2. All you can do is stroll into that interview full of style and gall.

I wish I could say I hadn’t done this before {sigh}.

Try to pick the busiest, most distracted interview time possible: Friday afternoon or Monday morning. Be prepared to make an impression. Dress meticulously. Speak clearly and slowly. Find a connection between you and your interviewer. Ask questions about the company and its goals. Show interest in the interviewer, personally and professionally. Flatter them. Half of being hired is getting these morons to like you. If it works, write me a testimonial. If it doesn’t, don’t whine. Nobody likes a whiner.

Your Weekend Study Plan

Elsewhere in this book, we created a resume for “Administrative Assistant.” One of the qualifications was the “Microsoft Office Suite,” including PowerPoint. The problem is, you’ve never used PowerPoint.

Most of us have created a document in Microsoft Word. If you haven’t, this may be where you have to start: a weekend learning Microsoft Word. You need some basis in word processing to understand a program like PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is a software program. You will need a good book to teach you about it. You could search the Internet for materials, but that’s tedious. You’ll get bits and pieces, but nothing complete. If you go to a major bookstore, you’ll find loads of books on PowerPoint:

• Microsoft PowerPoint: Simple Projects with CDROM
• PowerPoint for Dummies
• How to Do Everything with PowerPoint
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
• Microsoft PowerPoint Step by Step

etc., etc.

There may be more than one “for Dummies” books. Take the more recent one. This is a true beginner’s guide. It assumes that you know nothing about PowerPoint, and very little about software programs in general.

“Microsoft PowerPoint Step by Step” is part of a well-known series. It includes extensive tutorials and thorough explanations.

Both of these books are good candidates for your weekend. If you can afford them, buy both. Otherwise, browse through the books and see what looks best to you. Much of your learning will depend on your comfort level with the book you choose.

Friday

You must dedicate 100% of your time, energy and attention to this project. Make no plans. Begin right after work, no later than 7 p.m. You have only one goal tonight: to understand why PowerPoint was created, and how you will use it in your next career.

If you do not have PowerPoint installed on your computer, go to the Microsoft website and download a trial copy. Or open your Internet browser and search for it:

+PowerPoint +trial +download

While the download completes, open your book. The first few chapters will teach you all about PowerPoint and how it relates to the Microsoft Office Suite. Study it thoroughly. When the download completes, install the PowerPoint trial version. The book will probably ask you to open the program and have a look around. Take your time.

By the end of the evening, you should realize that PowerPoint is just another Microsoft program, with all of the navigation, help and general interfaces of its other programs like Word and Excel. You’ll know that it creates special files called “presentations” that contain many types of content, including video, audio and text. These presentations can be viewed like regular files or published to an Internet website. You’ll understand why your next employer wants you to know it.

Saturday

Every good beginner’s book starts with easy steps and progresses to more advanced ones. If you find yourself confused at any point, set the book down and take a breather. Lay down. Close your eyes for fifteen minutes. Then start again.

As you move through the book, run every tutorial thoroughly. These will teach you how to apply what you are learning.

If the software you are trying to learn is extremely complex, this process may take most of the weekend. For PowerPoint, you should be able to digest the book by Saturday night. You should know how to create and save presentations, how to build more complex and powerful presentations, and how to publish them almost anywhere. This is a big day; get some sleep.

Sunday

This morning, verify that you have read the entire book and finished all of the tutorials. Then go back and, chapter after chapter, look at the chapter title to remember why it was written and how it relates to the “big picture” of PowerPoint. If you’ve forgotten, go through the chapter again.

For four to six hours on Sunday afternoon, you have a new assignment:

• Think of a personal topic, like your last vacation.
• Create a PowerPoint presentation about it. Use every single technique you learned in the book.
• Let your friends look at it. Does it look professional? How can it be improved?
• Polish your project and save it.

Congratulations! You’ve just learned your first new skill. If you think of yourself as a “Renaissance Man,” you really do know a lot about how to use PowerPoint. If you’more like “Rain Man,” you have documented all of the terms that describe PowerPoint, and can talk about the program’s structure and functionality. If you opted for door #3, you have a fuzzy notion of what it is all about, but your confidence is building.

Eventually, you will find yourself able to build related skills in as little as a single day.