Background

Dr. Richard Byrne was the Keynote Speaker at Bio'76, which was the combined meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI), the Biocommunications Association (BCA), the Health and Science Communications Association (HeSCA), and the Association of Biomedical Communication Directors (ABCD). His presentation was powerful, and was filled with his technical insight, personal reflection, and comedic wit. In 1985, Dr. Byrne produced a cassette tape series of twelve professional lectures, which defined what he called, "Breakthrough." The concepts presented in his Breakthrough series are universal and are applicable today. In conjunction with Dr. Byrne's wife, Mary Anne Byrne, the Journal of Biocommunication proudly included the first four of Dr. Byrne's lectures in JBC 45-2, and lectures five through eight, here in JBC 46-1.

 

The following article is the eighth presentation from this "Breakthrough" series. It has been transcribed from a cassette series produced by Richard Byrne in 1985. Some of the content has been edited from the original transcription text in order to provide clarity or context to the reader.

 

 

Dr. Richard Byrne

 

Learning to Learn

Do you know how all this technology craziness is going to turn out? I'll bet you don't, I sure don't! There's no way to know. Will computers transform our lives? Will we win, will we lose? It's like a great mystery novel. Have you ever read one and you didn't want to finish the book because you were like three pages from the end? It's different from a movie, because in a movie, you don't know where the end is going to be, but in the book, you can see the back cover. There are only three pages left! So you decide to get it out every night, you read a paragraph and then you close it. The next night you go back two pages, because this book is going to be over in three pages! You don't have a clue how this is going to turn out, but you sort of don't want it to end.

 

I have another experience like that. I rode on Space Mountain, the popular ride at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. This was a time when they had the speed racked up a little bit. When Space Mountain first started running, they had it moving so fast that people weren't able to walk when they got off the ride. Then, they slowed it down, and it was so slow that people were yawning and making sandwiches. Once they got the speed to where it was just about right, they racked it up a little and that's when I got on it. I had never ridden on it before. First, you strap in, then you go up this steep ramp, and then you get shot into the universe. It's just unbelievably tough! I didn't know how it was going to turn out, but I assumed that I'd make it. I mean, during the middle of the ride I thought, well, I'll probably make it, I probably won't die. I certainly won't give birth! There were signs all over, if you are pregnant woman, please don't ride this ride! I thought, well, I've got that part covered, but I did not know if I was going to make it.

 

That's where we are right now. We're in an age of complete uncertainty. High adventure and excitement, but also uncertainty. That's because we've had a breakthrough. We have had a breakthrough and after a breakthrough, you enter what is called the void. We've already talked about it. The void. We don't know what the rules are. We haven't worked them out yet. We don't know how it's going to turn out.

 

Now, what you have to learn to do is how to have joy in the void. You have to learn to enjoy not being certain. Some people get crazy. They get crazy when they're not sure how it's going to turn out! We buy these computers and now have to ask, "How much will they cost?" We can be pretty sure about that, good. Next, "When we will make our money back?" Well, I don't know. "Now, wait a minute here! Look before you leap!" Often, people don't want to do it until they're sure how it's going to turn out, and we can only say to them that there's no way to know. The process is what's important, not the outcome. The process of growth and learning, that's what's important. You may not remember this, but when I was a kid, there was a radio show called "It Pays to Be Ignorant." There was a theme song, "It pays to be ignorant, to be dumb, to be dense, to be ignorant. It pays to be ignorant, just like me." I know most of America is now much too young to know that, but we're in a moment in time when it pays to be ignorant. You have to be willing to acknowledge things that you don't know. You have to live in the not knowing and keep doing the job.

 

You need to go to the source to learn. You see, I'm not saying stay ignorant; I'm not saying it pays to be stupid and not learn. You need to learn all the time, but you need to go to the source. One of the sources of learning about new technology, surprisingly, is our children. Children understand technology in an intuitive way, because they're born in a world full of technology. If you don't understand how to learn from children, just imagine that you dropped your grandfather's gold watch down the cold air shaft and there's a three-year-old child in the room. If you can't figure that out, you've got problems! You can say to the child, "Do you see that watch down there? Would you go down there, please, and get that for me?" The child says, "All right," and down and back up the hole they go, because the child can do things you can't do.

 

Have you ever tried to keep up with a child on a jungle gym or if they are doing gymnastics or something? Do you think the gymnastics coaches can do what the gymnast can do? Give me a break! The coach says to the little gymnast, "Do a three and a half double flip, and then land in the spraddle position on the beam," and a six-year-old girl, performs the complicated flips and spraddle, and then asks, "How was that?" The coach replies, "Well, you bent your wrist slightly." The truth is that he can't perform the routine at all, but he's still critical. We have to learn how to do things from the children.

 

Below is a transcript of me, speaking at a conference recently. This was an international meeting of city managers, which was held in the Midwest.

 

"Why is it that five year olds don't have any fear of technologies, or of computers? They watch television. They were born into a world that had microcomputers. Microcomputers first appeared in 1975. The first one appeared on Popular Electronics in 1975, so anybody who is less than nine years was born into a world that had microcomputers. For them to think that computers are scary is kind of like you saying I don't trust chairs. Chairs get me nervous! They look at you and they ask, 'You don't trust chairs? Chairs are just around!' But you were all born into a world that did not have microcomputers so they still look weird to you, but to kids, it's no different than a drinking glass, jungle gym, swing on a tree, microcomputer. It's all part of the natural universe.

 

I'll give you one other tip before I come to this. Learn from kids. How many of you have kids? Good. You have to start learning from kids. Kids approach the technologies in a completely different way than adults do. Completely different ground of being. They approach it the same way they approach a jungle gym. Have you ever watched a kid approach a jungle gym? Do they look around for the operating manual? 'Excuse me, where's the operating manual for the jungle gym here? Do you have a warranty for this jungle gym here?' The problem with executives is that you buy the technology and you spend three days reading the warranty so you know where to send this sucker when it breaks. Kids don't do that, they just get out there, they hang on, they swing and they say, 'Hey, I could be killed on this! That's good!' That's exactly the way they work with computers.

 

I told this story recently. It happened to me a week ago, Saturday. I had the new AT, the RS100 and the Crosstalk software. I know how to ship files. I know how to do that. So I took the computer and I hooked it up and I put the modem in the cable, and I got ready to ship a file and it wouldn't ship, and it was shipping, but it wasn't receiving. So I tried again. Shipping but – oooh. So I just picked it right back up and went right back to where I got it. Now, that computer had arrived that morning and I had the first one that arrived in L.A. I had picked it up an hour later, and I carried it away, so how much do you think they know about that computer? Very few of the salesmen even saw it! They hadn't even seen it! They didn't even see the box it came in! So I went back for help. Is this stupid or what? What help could they possibly give me? So, I said, 'This won't do that, help me do that,' and they said, 'Well, did you use Crosstalk?' 'Yes.' 'Are you sure it's formatted?' 'Yes.' Yawn, 'Well, our guy's not here. It's a Saturday. The guy who should know how to do this is not here.' I said, 'Well, I want to tell you something. I spent a lot of money for this, I'm not leaving the room until it works. So if you think you're closing tonight, wrong. I'm here until this works,' and they looked at me like, 'Oh, Richard! Please go away! Please leave!' I was just standing there and they were all standing around kind of looking at me, looking at the computer, and like oh my God, and the president is standing there! All of a sudden the door opens, and a little kid walks in, 13-year-old kid. He's got acne, he's got punked out hair, no socks, white tennis shoes with holes in them, and cut-off jeans. The president said, 'All right! Benny, come here!' This little kid is named Benny Goldman and he walks over and the president says, 'Benny! Look, the new AT computer! You haven't seen this. Here's the RS100. I don't know if you've seen it or not. Get this thing to work!' The kid just sat down and he said, 'What is it? What is Crosstalk?' He started saying things like this, 'That's not it, what's that? That's not it. There. There you go.' That's about how long it took, and I looked at it, and sure enough, there's the file scrolling down. I said, 'No, wait a minute, wait a minute... how did you do that?' The kid said, "I escaped and did a control, alt, and delete thing, and I reset, and I booted it up, and it ran perfectly. I said to him again, 'How'd you do that?' He says, 'Never mind, just use it.'

 

Now, that that makes good sense! Just use it! How much is it going to help me to know how he did that? To say, "Well, I did this and I did that." I mean, I wouldn't remember it anyway! Furthermore, the kid probably doesn't know how he did it! I mean, he hit a bunch of keys and that wasn't it, and he hit a bunch of others and that was it, and then he handed me the computer. Kids learn intuitively, and we can learn that same way. The question is, how much do you want to learn? How much do you need to learn? That's all dependent upon what you intend to do with it. I think there are four ways in which we can use these technologies. I think some people actually want to be creators. Creators, they want to create technologies. They want to create software, they want to create operating systems, they want to create chips, they want to create wires and circuits and so forth. If you really want to learn to be a creator of the technology itself, you've got your work cut out for you. You need to go study mathematics and the sciences and economics and politics and marketing and so forth. You have lot to learn, and in fact, you could never learn it all, because it'll always be changing.

 

There's a second level, though, where you might simply want to be a consumer. You're not going create it, you're just going to use it. You're going to buy software off the shelf and you're going to do graphics and you're going to do your own finances and you're going to do word processing, or whatever. As a consumer, you need to learn far less. I usually tell executives that they need to know about 10% of the commands of any software package to get about 90% of the productivity out of it. If you learn how to turn it on, turn it off, build a file, save the file and let it go at that and do that for 90 days, you probably only need a dozen keystrokes, literally a dozen. You could write them on one side of a 3 by 5 inch card. If you could do that for 90 days, your productivity would increase, I guarantee you. I have a computer that is currently the state of the art of personal computing. It is a powerful, powerful computer. A computer with this power 10 years ago would have cost a half million dollars, so there's been a hundredfold increase. In fact, in the last 20 years, there's been a million-fold increase. What now costs one dollar in processing power, 20 years ago would have cost one million dollars. We're in an age of exponentiation. Tremendous increases in capacity. I will never be able to do everything that computer can do. I will never learn all it can do. The more I learn, the more I learn that it already knew. This is not depressing to me, that's encourage to me. I can do the work I needed to do using perhaps only 5% or 10% of the commands that that system will accept. That's the level of consumer.

 

There's a third level, which is at the level of critic. That is, some people are very opposed to the computer age. They think there are many problems in giving a computer to a two or three-year-old child and having them sit at the terminal hour after hour, day after day. These critics need to learn as much about computers to articulate their opposition, as an advocate does to articulate his or her support. A critic frequently is weakened because they are uninformed. The critic hates this technology, and at the same time, knows they can't run it.

 

Originally, I became a technologist, and I became a photographer because I had a photographer. I had a staff photographer that was assigned to me and I would say to him, "I'd like this picture and in the sky I would like this title," and he would explain why we couldn't do that, "Well, we don't have an Illumitran, we only have a Repronar, and we need a Strobmax 9000 and that costs $700," and so forth. I finally began to suspect that really, he didn't want to work and I did. Because I had to go through him, I could only do as much work as he was willing to do. I thought the shortcut to this problem was that I had to learn how to do the work, so I wrote to Eastman Kodak and asked them to send me everything they had in print on still photography. I bought an inexpensive camera, a bulk loader to load film and I came in the next Monday and began to learn how to load film in the laboratory. The photographer came over and said, "I'll do that for you!" and I said, "No, no, I'm learning to do it myself. No problem!" Suddenly, the quality of his work rocketed up because he could see the critic was going to become competent. The jig was up, the game was over. Critics need to be as competent as advocates.

 

The final level, I think, is cast away. I think there are people who are going to be cast away in the computer age. They are going to choose not to learn. They are going to choose not to develop an alternative skill, like my father and mother. My father builds cabinets and my mom paints. You can do macramé, you can do hand crafts and live in the mountains. There are many alternative lifestyles that are productive, life enhancing and make a real contribution, but, if you don't learn an alternative skill, you live in an information society in an urban area and you are not competent on the technologies of information management, you will be cast away.

 

How do you learn these things? Well, you can take classes, you can go to community college, etc., but I think there are better ways. I think one of the best ways is to learn by barter. Learn by barter. Find somebody in your community or in your company who has a computer and ask them if they would you be willing to let me come over for an hour and watch them do what they do. Do not ask them to teach you because they will then become teachers and show up in a funny looking outfit and start to teach you. They'll have a little lesson plan and they'll teach you. No, no. Just say, "Can I come hang out with you and watch you do what you do?" They'll probably agree and then you can offer to take them and their wife or husband or kids, or whatever, to dinner, in exchange for watching them for a couple hours. Be sure the guy is actually showing you what he does, instead of what he thinks you want to know. Learn by barter. It's a version of the buddy system. I think everyone's who's using a computer should have a buddy. A man or a woman, somewhere, who is also interested in the same kind of thing.

 

If you want to learn something, agree to teach it to someone else. When I first had a microcomputer, I could not use it. For six months, it was a constant reproach. It sat in my den looking at me, smirking. I couldn't even load a disk. I would walk in the den and I'd say, "You rotten…I spent $6,000 on you, you lousy, no good…," and t would say, "Ha, ha, ha, I am a computer, and you don't know how to run me!" I went crazy. Finally, one day a friend of mine who owns a very successful company said to me, "Oh, you have a computer?" I said, "Yeah, I sure do!" I didn't tell him couldn't turn it on. He said, "Well, would you come teach our board of directors how to use it?" and without pausing I said, "Of course!" because I was a professor, a teacher, "Why sure, I'll do that!" Then I realized, oh my God, what have I gotten into? I went to their offices, and I interviewed them, asked, "What do you do, what do you do? I see, and what else?" Then I went back and I studied the computer and the software that I owned – I didn't own much. I thought, well, it would be interesting for them to learn this and maybe learn that and maybe learn that. I planned what I would teach them that would help them do what they already do! I found an amazing thing, I found that it was not difficult to teach them at all; it was just difficult to learn. I had a problem learning; I had no problem at all teaching. As soon as I taught them what I had learned, I began to teach classes. I set up classes and I said, "Here, would you like to learn VisiCalc? Here you go! Would you like to learn graphics?" I didn't know how to do those things. In fact, ever since then, I have taught people only things that I don't know how to do, because the act of preparing for the teaching helps me to know how to do it. Instead of spending time learning how to do it, I just prepare to teach. So, I'm always teaching people, which is why I'm learning.

 

So, should you wait? I've already mentioned that the computer is going to get smaller, they're going to become more powerful, and they're going to get cheaper. So shouldn't you wait? Would I be better off if I had waited six years ago, instead of getting in? I'm telling you, no. I'm much better off having gotten into computers and learned, because now I'm way ahead. When I got in, I didn't know why. I got a computer based on the strong hunch that something was going on. Have you ever walked past a house, and feel that something's going on in there? You can just tell, there's something going on in there! I don't know what, but – or you walk past a shop in a shopping mall. Look at that! Something's really going on in there. When I looked at microcomputers, just two years after they appeared, I thought "Oh wait, something's going on right there." So I learned the technology, not knowing how I would use what I had learned. I don't know. I mean, how will you use the information in these articles? I don't know. Will you use it? I don't know. Could it make a big difference? I think so, I hope so, but I don't know.

 

It's up to you to create value out of this relationship. It's up to you to create value out of using a technology. I'll tell you one thing for sure: You have to let go, you have to surrender and let go. You're going to have to be slightly out of control. You have to learn from the "s" sports: surfing, skiing, skating, swimming, sailing, soaring. All those "s" sports that run the razor's edge between fall and flying. Have you ever seen somebody skiing, who is not falling down? This dude is not falling down. That's actually what he is mostly doing, he's not falling down. He's standing in the snowplow position in the parking lot and has his knees together. He's not falling down. He's also not skiing. Now, you get him up on the beginner's slope, the little booboo slope, you push him a little bit and he starts to fall, and when you begin to fall, you begin to learn to ski. The more you fall, the more you ski.

 

Finally, you get to be crazy. You go to the intermediate slope, you progress to the expert slope, you attempt the downhill racer slope, and most of what you are doing is falling. It's kind of like stepping off the cliff with skis strapped on. There's that razor's edge. You've got to be out of control to be in control. What do you hold onto while you swim? Can you swim? What do you hold onto while you swim? You hold on to the process of swimming. You don't hold onto anything. You have to let go, or you're not swimming. So as you get ready to learn this new technology, when you leap out into the void, the only way for you to have joy in it is to let go and trust the process.

 

 

 

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References

Byrne, R. Breakthrough - Championship Living in a Computer Age (Audio Cassette Series), Springboard! 1985.

 

 

About the Author

The late Richard Byrne was a former professor and dean at USC's Annenberg School of Communications. He was known for making computers less intimidating for all of us. In 1982 Dr. Byrne founded one of the first consulting firms of its kind, called Springboard! His company was devoted to acquainting executives with high technology. As president,Dr. Byrne traveled as far as Europe and Thailand presenting as many as 200 lectures a year. He enlivened complex computer terminology with humorous wit and common-sense explanations. Dr. Byrne, who had previously taught at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Texas, left his position as a full-time professor at USC in 1984 to devote himself to an increasingly lucrative lecturing career.

 

Licensing

The late Mary Ann Byrne had chosen to license this content under a Creative Commons Attribution, NonCommercial, NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The Journal of Biocommunication Management Board and Editors believe that transparency in academic research is essential. Our JBC authors are now required to disclose any possible conflict of interest when submitting a manuscript. In accordance with the Journal of Biocommunication's editorial policy, no potential conflict of interest has been reported or declared by Dr. Byrne's estate.

 

 

Acknowledgment

The Journal of Biocommunication wishes to acknowledge the late Mary Anne Byrne, who before her death, had graciously allowed us to publish the content from her late husband's recorded lecture presentations.

Dr. Byrne's portrait was provided by Mary Ann Byrne.