I taught my kid to ride a bike these last 48 hours. It was an honest-to-goodness two-wheeler too - not a tricycle… It was the first time I’ve done this and the most important thing I did in the process was search “How to teach a kid to ride a bike” on YouTube... A few minutes later, I knew how to do it.
This video, “How to bide a bike in less than 5 minutes”, has 1.2 million views. The man who posted it has 2 videos - this is one of them…
The method worked! I was astounded…
To be clear “teaching how to ride” is more like, pedaling for a feet and clumsily stopping than full on speed racing, but I think that qualifies as “riding”.
In the video the man says the first step is to ask the kid “Do you want to learn how to ride a bike?” He mentions that no amount of teaching will work if the answer is “no.” Talk about a key lesson for life...
Motivation is key - it’s the most important ingredient. Without motivation, all the resources and the best teachers in the world won’t help.
I’m still amazed how often incredible things just are there upon a simple search. While I’m somewhat biased because I work for Google Search, if you just search for “best way to learn x” more often than not there's a great resource just waiting. The limit often is being able to ask the right questions… and then having the motivation to follow the answers.
Some days I feel like learning everything and others... the opposite. With the help of a number of people on Twitter I put together the simple list below with motivation tricks. Hoping this helps avoid days of lethargy as I pursue this project:
And with that, I stop the first installment of whatever this project is. As the list of motivation tricks suggests: “Just start!”
A final note: I’m now earnestly learning how to make a podcast. I got the key ingredients and I’m shooting to have something to share in a few weeks. Until then, there’s these posts. Is this going to be a blog? (Do those exist anymore?) Is it a newsletter? We’ll see where this goes.
Happy Fourth of July!
@gasca