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I was a very confident boy, and not without reason. I had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late into the evening, when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles and watching television. I would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs, and run out, because I was the Incredible Hulk. Obviously, you can see the resemblance. This routine went on for some time.
When I was seven, I went to summer camp. My parents found it necessary for peace of mind. At noon each day, the campers would go to a pond where they had floating docks, and you could jump off the end into the deep end. I was born premature. I was always very small. My left lung had collapsed when I was born, and I've always had breathing problems, so water was something that scared me to begin with. But I would go in on occasion. On one particular day, the campers were diving through inner tubes, and I thought this would be great fun, so I dove through the inner tube. The bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. I tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube, and I went wild. I thought I was going to die. The camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us, and from that point onward I was terrified of swimming. That is something I did not get over, and my inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. That is when I realized that I was not the Incredible Hulk.
But there's an ending to this story. At age 31, that's my age now, in August, I took two weeks to re-examine swimming and question all of the obvious aspects of swimming. I went from swimming one lap, so 20 yards, like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate (I measured it), to going to Montauk on Long Island, close to where I grew up, and jumping into the ocean, swimming one kilometer open water, getting out, and feeling better than when I went in. I came out in my Speedos, European style, feeling like the Incredible Hulk. That's what I want everyone in here to feel like at the end of this presentation. More specifically, I want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. I would like to share my approach. If I have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me.
So, moving onward: swimming, first principles. First principles, this is very important. I find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. The turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, "I will bet you a year's supply of stimulants..." (no, I'll correct that to the transcript as given): a friend of mine said, "I will go a year without any stimulants, this is a six double espresso per day type of guy, if you can complete a one kilometer open water race." So the clock started ticking. I started seeking out triathletes, because I found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. I tried kickboards; my feet would slice through the water like razors, and I wouldn't even move. I would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. Hand paddles, everything. I even did lessons with Olympians. Nothing helped. Then Chris Saka, who is now a dear friend of mine, who had completed an Ironman with a 103-degree temperature, said, "I have the answer to your prayers," and he introduced me to the work of a man named Terry Laughlin, who is the founder of Total Immersion Swimming. That set me on the road to examining biomechanics.
So here are the new rules of swimming. If any of you are afraid of swimming or not good at it, the first is: forget about kicking. This is very counterintuitive, but it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. Kicking harder doesn't solve the problem, because the average swimmer only transfers about 3% of their energy expenditure into forward motion. The problem is hydrodynamics. So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. You do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. The body is denser than water, so 95% of it would at least be submerged naturally. So number three: don't swim on top of the water. In the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water, but actually rotating from streamline right to streamline left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible.
So let's look at some examples. This is Terry, and you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. His entire body really is underwater, and the arm is extended below the head, with the head held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up. This is very important, especially for people with lower body fat. Then here's an example of the stroke. You don't kick, but you do use a small flick. You can see this is the left extension, and then you see his left leg small flick. The only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side, and the entry point for his right hand. Notice this: he's not reaching in front and catching the water. Rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining. Very important. Incorrect above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. Not their fault, honestly. I'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. Below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what I did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes, in two workouts, with no coach and no video monitoring. Now I love swimming. I can't wait to go swimming, and I'll be doing a swimming lesson later for myself if anyone wants to join me. Last thing: breathing problems. A lot of us have them, certainly when you're swimming freestyle. The easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll and just look at your recovery hand as it enters the water, and that will get you very far. That's really all you need to know.
Languages: material versus method. Like many people, I came to the conclusion that I was terrible at languages. I suffered through Spanish for junior high and the first year of high school, and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much "dónde está Alano," and I wouldn't even catch the response. Sad state of affairs. Then I transferred to a different school sophomore year, and I had a choice of other languages, and most of my friends were taking Japanese, so I thought, why not punish myself? I'll do Japanese. Six months later, I had the chance to go to Japan, and my teachers assured me, "Don't worry, you'll have Japanese language classes every day to help you cope. It'll be an amazing experience." It was my first overseas experience, in fact, so my parents encouraged me to do it. I left and arrived in Tokyo. Amazing. I couldn't believe I was on the other side of the world. I met my host family, and things went quite well. All things considered, my first evening, before my first day of school, I said to my mother very politely, "Please wake me up at 8 a.m.," but I didn't say that. I said something pretty close, but I said, "Please rape me at 8 a.m." You've never seen a more confused Japanese woman. Then I walked into school, and a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper, and I couldn't read any of it. Hieroglyphics. It could have been kanji, so Chinese characters adapted into the Japanese language. I asked him what this said, and he goes, "Ah, okay, okay," and so on. And it came to me in waves: there had been something lost in translation. The Japanese classes were not Japanese instruction classes per se. They were the normal high school curriculum for Japanese students, the other 4,999 students in the school who were Japanese, besides the American. That's pretty much my response. That set me on this panic-driven search for the perfect language method. I tried everything. I went to Kinokuniya, I tried every possible book, every possible CD. Nothing worked until I found this. This is the Jōyō kanji list, a tablet, or rather a poster, of the 1,945 common-use characters, determined by the Ministry of Education in 1981. Many of the publications in Japan limit themselves to these characters to facilitate literacy, and some are required to. This became my Holy Grail, my Rosetta Stone. As soon as I focused on this material, I took off, and I ended up being able to read the Asahi Shimbun newspaper about six months later. So, a total of 11 months later, I went from Japanese 1 to Japanese 6, ended up doing translation work at age 16 when I returned to the US, and have continued to apply this material-over-method approach to close to a dozen languages. Someone who was terrible at languages can, at any given time, speak, read, and write five or six. This brings us to the point, which is that it's often what you do, not how you do it, that is the determining factor. This is the difference between being effective, doing the right things, and being efficient, doing things well whether or not they're important. You can also do this with grammar. I came up with these six sentences after much experimentation. Having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar by translating these sentences into past, present, and future, we'll show you subject-object-verb placement, indirect and direct objects, gender, and so forth. From that point, you can, if you want to acquire multiple languages, alternate them so there's no interference. We can talk about that if anyone's interested. Now I love languages.
Ballroom dancing: implicit versus explicit. Very important. You might look at me and say, that guy must be a ballroom dancer, but no, you'd be wrong, because my body is very poorly designed for most things, pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks, perhaps. I used to be much bigger, much more muscular, and so I ended up walking like this. I looked a lot like a Rutan, our close cousins, or the Incredible Hulk. Not very good for ballroom dancing. I found myself in Argentina in 2005 and decided to watch a tango class. I had no intention of participating. I went in, paid my 10 pesos, and walked in. Ten women, two guys, usually a good ratio. The instructor says, "You are participating," immediately. Death sweat, fight or flight, fear, sweat. Because I had tried ballroom dancing in college and stepped on the girl's foot with my heel, she screamed, and I was so concerned with her perception of what I was doing that it exploded in my face, never to return to the ballroom dancing club. She comes up, and this was her approach to teaching: "Okay, come on, grab me." Gorgeous assistant instructor. She was very pissed off that I had pulled her from her advanced practice, so I did my best, didn't know where to put my hands, and she pulled back, threw down her arms, put them on her hips, turned around, and yelled across the room, "This guy's built like a goddamn mountain of muscle, and he's grabbing me like a [bleep] Frenchman." Which I found encouraging. Everyone burst into laughter. I was humiliated. She came back and goes, "Come on, I don't have all day." As someone who had wrestled since age 8, I proceeded to crush her in Mel Gibson style, and she looked up and said, "Now that's better." So I bought a month's worth of classes and proceeded to look at competition, because I wanted a deadline. Parkinson's law: the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it. So I had a very short deadline for a competition. I got a female instructor first, to teach me the follow role, because I wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needs to develop, so I wouldn't have a repeat of college. Then I took an inventory, along with her, of the characteristics, the capabilities, and the elements of different dancers who had won championships. Then I interviewed these people, because they all taught in Buenos Aires, and I compared the two lists. What you find is that there's explicit expertise, where they recommended certain training methods, and then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing. The protectionism of Argentine dance teachers aside, I found this very interesting, so I decided to focus on three of those commonalities. Long steps: many tango dancers use very short steps, and I found that longer steps were much more elegant, and you can do it in a very small space. Second, different types of pivots. Third, variation in tempo. These seemed to be the three areas I could exploit to compete if I wanted to compete against people who've been practicing for 20 to 30 years. That photo is of the semifinals of the Buenos Aires championships, four months later. Then, one month later, I went to the World Championships and made it to the semifinals, and then set a world record following that, two weeks later. I want you to see part of what I practiced. I'm going to jump forward here. This is the instructor that Alicia and I chose for the male lead, his name is Gabriel Misse, one of the most elegant dancers of his generation, known for his long steps, his tempo changes, and his pivots. Alicia, in her own right, is very famous. So I think you'll agree they look quite good together. What I like about this video is that it's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together. Because of his lead, he had a strong lead, and he didn't lead with his chest, which requires you to lean forward. I couldn't develop the attributes in my toes, the strength in my feet, to do that. So he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm, so he can lift the woman, to break her, for example, as just one benefit of that. Then we broke it down. This would be an example of one pivot. This is a back-back-step pivot. There are many different types, and I have hundreds of hours of footage, all categorized, much like George Carlin categorized his comedy.
So, using my arch-nemesis, Spanish, and Nless, to learn tango: fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator. Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn't do, but more often than not, it shows you exactly what you should do. The best results that I've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: what's the worst that can happen? Especially with fears that you gained when you were a child. Take the analytical frameworks and the capabilities you have, apply them to old fears, apply them to very big dreams. When I think of what I fear now, it's very simple. When I imagine my life, and what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that I had, it makes me wonder. I've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the American public school system, to either fix it or replace it, and have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far, built, I'd say, about a half dozen schools with my readers at this point. If any of you are interested in that, I would love to speak with you. I know nothing, I'm a beginner, but I ask a lot of questions, and I would love your advice. Thank you very much.