Hello Reader,

We've created two courses in the past two weeks! Rather than just teaching general superlearning principles, we applied those principles to two fields and created two superlearning courses from them: Dom used storytelling to teach powerful negotiation techniques more effectively, and Ryan applied superlearning to finance!

Dom:

We talked a lot about superlearning by telling stories! We even held a workshop about it (recording available soon). I created a course to learn negotiation techniques, which is completely story-based. The stories come from the brilliant book "Never split the difference" by Chris Voss and cover 80% of the theory. I've shortened them and added prompts to help you learn the core principles.

The course is available on Traverse and on Float for $15 (purchase either and you get both).

I've included an extract from the course below, would love to hear what you think!

Negotiating with terrorists? Have empathy!

2000, Southern Philippines

The Islamic militant group Aby Sayyaf had kidnapped the 24-year old American Jeffrey Schilling. Chris Voss was a special agent for the FBI's elite Crisis Negotiation Unit and got assigned to the case as a hostage negotiator.

His main adversary was Abu Sabaya, the rebel leader with a history of rape, murder and beheadings. He loved the media and often sent videos of his killings to Philippine reporters. He was also a cold-blooded businessman with a big ego, and demanded a $10 million ransom for Schilling.

However Jeffrey came from a working-class family and his mother could come up with maybe $10k. Chris would have to bargain down, a lot.

But Sabaya didn't budge, he kept talking about the $10 million as war damages, not ransom. A Filipino military officer, Benjie, negotiated for our side with Sabaya in Tagalog, the local language. Benjie was a true patriot and national hero. Despite Chris' instructions to get into dialog and establish rapport with Sabaya, he kept taking a hard line which just kept Sabaya repeating his war damages demand.

Chris realized he needed to negotiate with Benjie first.

"You hate Sabaya, don't you?", he started.

• Why does Chris label Benjie's hate for Sabaya?
  • Labeling an emotion defuses it somewhat and triggers a rational rather than an instinctive response.

"That's right," said Benjie, "he has raped and murdered and killed many of our good men".

• Why is it so important to get your counterpart to say "that's right"?
  • "That's right" means your counterpart is convinced you understand their perspective and have vocalized it correctly. Then they'll listen to you.
    "You're right" means they just want to get rid of you!

As he acknowledge his hate, he got control of his anger and calmed down. From this point onwards he became a superstar negotiator.

The next step was getting Sabaya to say "that's right". Chris instructed Benjie to use every active listening tactic available: Benjie should pause to encourage Sabaya to keep talking, use words like "yes", "ok", "uh-huh", "I see" to convey he was paying attention to Sabaya, listen and repeat what Sabaya said rather than argue, label and paraphrase Sabaya's feelings ("it seems so unfair, I can see why you sound so angry"), and finally summarize "the world according to Sabaya".

• Why does Benjie use pauses in his negotation?
  • Pauses encourage your counterpart to keep revealing information, and eventually clears the emotions from the dialogue (arguing infuriates them)
• Why does Benjie use words like "yes", "ok", "uh-huh", "I see"?
  • Those are minimal encouragers that convey you're paying full attention to what your counterpart is saying.
• Why does Benjie repeat back what Sabaya said?
  • Mirroring suggests similarity, helps bonding and encourages them to speak more.
• Why does Benjie label and paraphrase Sabaya's feelings?
  • Labels validate the emotion, and paraphrasing powerfully shows you really understand.
• Why does Benjie summarize "the world according to Sabaya"?
  • Summary = paraphrasing + labeling. A good summary of the other's view will trigger a "that's right" response.

Two days later Sabaya finally called. Benjie followed the instructions perfectly, listening, pausing with minimal encouragement, mirroring and labeling his words, and gradually Sabaya softened up. Then finally, Benjie repeated in his own words Sabaya's version of history. Sabaya went silent for almost a minute. Finally he said: "That's right".

• Why is "that's right" superior to "yes"?
  • "Yes" is nothing without "how" (a plan for implementation). "That's right" means a barrier to agreement has now been broken down and negotiations can proceed.

From then on Sabaya never mentioned the war damages again, nor asked for any ransom. Eventually he got tired of the case and let down his guard. Jeffrey was able to escape and was rescued by the Philippine military.

Two weeks later Sabaya called Benjie: "Have you been promoted yet? I was going to hurt Jeffrey. I don't know what you did to keep me from doing it, but whatever it was, it worked."

Sabaya was killed two years later in a shoot-out with the Philippine military.

After the negotiations, Chris was promoted to the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator. He'd done a perfect job of establishing rapport with a terrorist in order to get what you want, using tools like labeling, mirroring, paraphrasing and summarizing, to get to final "that's right" that changed the whole negotiation.

Ryan:

Superlearning for Finance Professionals

Since the age of 16, I have been fascinated by the world of finance. I was first introduced to Warren Buffet's writings by a cousin who worked as an investment analyst at a bank. Buffet's letters to his shareholders are legendary - reading them is like getting into a nano vehicle and going on a tour of one of the world's greatest investment minds.

When you read his letters to shareholders, the one thing that jumps out at you is how effortlessly he is able to combine knowledge from so many different disciplines. Investing is an intellectually challenging field, and one in which success over a long period is very rare. The reason is because investors need to understand not only finance, but also many other industries and the dynamics between them.

— Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett's investment partner) 👆

Which is why the best investors are almost superhuman in their ability to connect ideas and form connections between seemingly disparate fields. They're able to see things that most others don't, simply because they have to be able to make linkages if they are to succeed in the long run.

Brain science tells us that our memories are associative. What this means is that we remember things in relation to other things, events and memories. A memory of your most recent holiday (wait what?! COVID?!) will almost certainly bring up associated memories relating to the planning, the amount spent, and arrangements you made at work for the period that you were away.

So the brain is naturally primed to make connections between things, events and ideas. That's just how it works. So one way in which we can become superlearners is to make use of this natural ability.

But in order to make use of it, we need to give the brain practice so this ability can be honed. One way to do this is to practice interleaving. Interleaving is where you study different subjects in short bursts, and then try to notice the connections between them. Over time, this primes your brain to look for how ideas and different segments of knowledge are connected.

In my course Superlearning for Finance Professionals, I talk about how this practice can be used to increase one's knowledge of finance. Practicing interleaving regularly can enable you to become like Buffett and Munger!

The course is available on Float for $50, but with the button below you get it for $20 because we love everyone on this list 😘. I will also be putting it up on Traverse in a couple of days.

Thanks,

Dom & Ryan