NEIL COWMEADOW - THE EXPERT GUITAR TEACHER IN TELFORD. GUITAR TEACHER AND AUTHOR. GUITAR LESSONS THAT WORK! DEDICATED TO TEACHING SINCE 1999 - ACCELERATED LEARNING TECHNIQUES: LEARN FASTER, PLAY BETTER, AND UNDERSTAND...

Episode 166 - Observe The Masses...

The Thursday Thesis  - 29/8/2019

Within the world of business, finance and investing, Warren Buffet is pretty much a legend in his own lifetime.

Now in his 80’s the Chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway investment fund is still playing The Game he loves most – the Game of Money.

You might ask “Why would he want to keep on working at his age?”

Because it is his game – his fascination and his calling.

He certainly isn’t in it for the money itself: with a personal net worth of around 80 Billion dollars it would be hard to make much of a dent in his fortune. In fact, that amount of money invested at just 3% would earn him an eye-popping 2.4 Billion dollars a year, pre tax.

He's a lone wolf - happy to pursue his own passions and interests when it flies in the face of popular opinion.

Buffet is, by nature, a contrarian - believing that he should try be brave when everyone else is fearful, and when everyone else is brave – he should be fearful.

Part of his philosophy is, in essence, Observe The Masses – Do the Contrary.

There’s a curious logic to the way he thinks: reasoning that there are fewer successful investors than unsuccessful investors, those in the minority have the best odds of success.

Observe the masses...

It works across all areas of life – even learning to play guitar – where the most common approach is to “teach yourself” what you don’t know how to do, and only a minority book themselves in with a teacher to accelerate their progress.

 That’s why most wannabe guitarists quit or are frustrated and stuck.

Observe the masses...

Work surveys constantly report that around 70% of people hate their jobs, approximately 25% are indifferent and only around 5% of people actually get paid for doing work they really enjoy.

Observe the masses, do the contrary.


When everyone around you is moaning about the economy, Brexit, the state of the country, or how crap the local football team is doing this year, feel free to run the other way. Consciously choose to be positive instead – don’t get caught up in a game of one-downsmanship with people who are more negative than you are.

You know the game, don’t you?

It’s the one where – no matter how big their problem is, yours is so much worse.

When the usual crowd are milling around - moaning and bitching about the crap on TV last night, the price of a pint or that trollop from accounts and her new shoes – run. Just get yourself away from their tractor beams before you are sucked into their negative vortex and begin to compete for the “My Life is Crappier Than Yours” prize.

There’s a lot of competition for that award, but even if you won it, you’d still be a loser.

Given the choice between what most people do and what the minority do - day in, day out – do you want to run with the pack or howl with the lone wolves?

Be more wolf: Observe the masses, do the contrary.

Harrrroooouul!!


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  -22/8/2019

Precise.

Specific.

They are two words I adore.

They’re solid words, and there’s something very reliable and dependable about them: they stand for accuracy and certainty, a gimlet-eyed no-nonsense attention to detail and a straight-backed “X marks the spot” rigour that borders on being finicky.

I love the words, but recoil from their rigidity.

Nobody could argue against Precision and specificity in the study of absolute measurements: mathematics, logic and the like.

But they’re words which don’t play nicely. Their strictness excludes them from the creative act, because they lack the sense of fun which is the hallmark of invention, creativity, the arts and true insight.

They are also the sworn enemies of learning.

So, how do we learn best?

It turns out that learning can be learned and accelerated - just like any other skill.

The trick is to begin with what I call Useful Generalisations: the core ideas which are true for the great majority of cases, the great majority of the time. In other words, find out what works most of the time, and which – logically – has the highest probability of being correct, most of the time.

With the most common and therefore most useful concepts secured, we can shift our attention to the next most likely occurrences: the most common exceptions to the Useful Generalisations. By noting their deviations from the Useful Generalisations we can develop a set of rules – an algorithm – we can now handle the great majority of situations and occurrences.

This learning pathway always delivers the most “Bang for the Buck” for us, because it always attends to the highest-returning investment of our time first, and prevents us from becoming lost in the fine detail of the seldom-encountered, the rare, and the unusual.

So to begin learning anything always try to find experts - teachers, coaches and mentors to show you the most important ideas first.

With hindsight, trying to teach myself something I didn’t know how to do was not a wise approach, and it cost me too much time.

Yet I tried it, and the chances are that you have done so, too.

The Broad Sweeps, the Big Ideas and the Useful Generalisations must come before the unlikely, the Rare, the Precise and the Specific, because (to quote Goethe) “...the things which matter most must never be at the mercy of the things which matter least...”
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Won't be long..

The Thursday Thesis  - 1/8/2019

I once heard it said that “A fool sees only the differences, a Wise Man sees that things are all same”. I can’t remember where I heard it or from whom it came – but I remember thinking “Wow!” at the time, and thought about how true it was of music.

You see, way back (when God was a boy) I was taught that the music of Bach was different to that of Beethoven, which was totally different to that of Copland, Kraftwerk, Eno and Lemmy.

The same teachers informed me – and the rest of the class of teenage, spotty hormone-hostages - that Rock and Roll wasn’t “proper” music at all, and that The Sex Pistols were more or less scum, because the noise they made was so vulgar and they were mere musical simpletons - degenerates who couldn’t read music.

A whole load of crap, as I later understood.

The Academic Fool pointed to the differences they perceived between music from different ages, hanging their own labels on other people’s works – without even a by-your-leave from the composers and performers whose efforts they postured upon.

As fools and children do, I went along with it – soon nailing my colours to the mast by becoming a “Rocker”, complete with denim jacket emblazoned by band names (the more obscure, the better), my hair flowing in luxurious ringlets, and the biggest “Fuck-off Flares” you’ve ever seen.

The Rockers fought The Mods, who scrapped with The Skins, who bullied the Hippies... Oddly, everybody picked on the Funkateers, because everybody (except the Funksters) knew that Funk was for tossers.

Happy Days!

Over time I began to see that every genre of music contains elements of other genres: every New Wave recycles the ideas, chord sequences, melodies and rhythms of all the music that was ever made and played before the New Wave rose up, repackaging and remarketing the simple and familiar to appear like the new and innovative.

It happens all the time: we spot the difference, not the sameness.

It’s dangerous, sinister and divisive, as well as foolish.

The same mentality that somehow got kids fighting over musical styles went mainstream and bullied its way to centre-stage in public life.

Today we have Fools who promote equality for all by pointing out the differences between us. It’s moronic to think that this can do anything but undermine recognition of our sameness.

Regardless of sex, skin colour, belief system and point of origin on the planet, we are all members of a very big Tribe: we are all fundamentally the same.

And so, as The Fools who pretend to Wisdom label us by race, religion, sexuality and anything else they can dream up, they pigeonhole us into their stereotypical categories and sub-categories, often causing us to overlook the most fundamental of all truths: we are human.

If we are daft enough to adopt their labels and definitions for ourselves, how can we not set ourselves in unconscious opposition to all that which we begin to perceive as “other”?

If I am foolish enough to accept the label of “White, Anti-Theist, European Male” then do I not automatically set myself apart from “Black, Christian, African Woman” or “Brown, Moslem, Asian Male” and all other people who are labelled as different from me, based upon their skin colour, sex and origin?

If you or I were to be so foolish, how could we see them as anything “other” than us, or they as “other” than them?

So, in this way, those Fools who scream and stamp their feet for Equality for race X, decry criticism of religion Y, and demand special Rights for their Flavour-of the-Month special interest group – oh, how they do make fools of us all, because to grant equality to one or other group creates and entrenches division.

We are all born equal, and we are all the same in the eyes of a Wise Man.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]