Wanzology

 How you doing welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of WANZOLOGY. I am your host, The Wanz, and I hope that wherever you are, life is good. And if it's not…move! Move somewhere else. It's probably better. Well, maybe…chances are slim. As Buckaroo Banzai said, “Wherever you go, there you are.” So, I am still trudging through, not even trudging, I'm, I'm learning a lot as I'm going through my own little book called #THEBOOKOFWANZ.

And if you haven't picked up a copy yet, all you need to do is go to Amazon and put #THEBOOKOFWANZ, all one word. And it'll pop up nice, sort of red cover with white lettering, big, bold, and brassy. #THEBOOKOFWANZ. Things that I learned when I was touring, because I would go out before shows and talk to kids waiting in line. And I learned that there are so many similarities between us. I couldn't figure out why we looked at the differences between us. And they taught me a lot about fear, faith, and being able to build one's self. Being able to build yourself, two words, so that you can present as yourself, one word, in a cool way. That's what the book is all about. It just gives you things to think about. It's a perspective type thing. Got it? Cool. Alright, let's get into it.

Today's chapter is, When You Believe You Know It All, You Miss Out On What You Need To Or Could Have Learned.

My father used to tell me, “Quit acting like you know every damn thing.”

He was right. I didn't. I had to learn things. That's why I went to school. Why I went to college. Why I got jobs and, to this day, ask questions. Knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you can do. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Don't think so. Remember you used to not know how to speak the language that you know now your parents taught you what a cat was and how to say the word. They taught you how to say ‘car’, ‘train’, even ‘mommy’, ‘daddy’. In order to communicate, we had to learn a language.

Believe me, it makes things much easier than grunts, groans, pointing at stuff. Problem is, we don't all learn the same thing, the same way. Even though we are the only species of human being on the planet, we are individuals who make up a collective species. Within that collective are those who do and will learn faster and will know more than you do about almost everything.

They may even be the type to tell you how much more they know than you. Don't be one of those. Nothing stifles learning faster than believing you know it all. Experience is the best teacher. It's been that way since we were born. As we grow, we go through things. We learn how to walk, how to talk, how to dress ourselves. After a while, we're masters, or so we think. Especially when we've done something someone else hasn't, we tend to feel superior, knowledgeable, and sometimes arrogant. Sometimes, without us even being aware of it. We become the very thing we can't stand, a know it all. A very good friend of mine told me once, “no one likes to be told something they already know.” And in my experience, he's right. Can you imagine someone telling you how to put your underwear on, or how to pour milk into a glass? How'd you like some instruction on what pants look best on you, or what you should be when you grow up? Yes, your parents did all of these things and more until we knew things on our own.

We proved to them that we had learned and then some. We took what they taught us about how to walk and then we learned how to run, how to put on our own makeup, how to break the law and not get caught. Well, some of us didn't learn that lesson very well. My point is, when we think we've learned all there is to learn about something, we take that knowledge and try to use it. Forget about the world and everything in it changing or evolving. We already know all we need, yeah? Right.

We used to not know how to work a computer. Really smart folks knew how to do that. Or fix a car, braid hair, or cook the perfect steak. The nice thing about there being so many unique people on the planet is that we have an almost endless supply of teachers. Are you willing to listen and learn? Well, are ya?

Another thing my dad always told me is, uh, “a smart man learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” And, you know, when I was in 8th grade, 7th and 8th grade, I, I had kind of come out of being picked on. I actually started to grow a little bit. I wasn't 4'10 anymore. I broke 5 feet. I was very happy. But still, the damage had already been done, in my head. I was really, really good at feeling less than. I couldn't play basketball as well as some. I couldn't jump as far or as high as some. Things that I really like to do, I mean, I kind of like to play basketball, but I really like to play football, but I was still small, small-ish. When I tried out for the football team, needless to say, I always got put up against the guys who were going to be linemen or linebackers, and they were 3 to 5 inches taller than me and outweighed me by like 30 to 50 pounds, and they had had new technique and all this other stuff.

I remember we had this drill called hamburger. I think it was, I think this was the drill. Hamburger. You put the ball down on the ground and then you have two people who are sort of facing each other, but they're each about a yard or two off the ball and they turn around so their backs are facing each other and then they lay on the ground and wait. And the coach…when he's ready…blows the whistle. And as soon as you hear the whistle, you got to get up, grab the ball and run through the other person. If you get the ball first, if you don't get the ball first, you have to stop the person with the ball. Well, this works great if, if the person that you're in the box with is like somewhere near your size, your ability, and it seemed to me like no one was. I got my ass handed to me all the time. So, I kind of convinced myself that maybe I wasn't cut out for football. Maybe I was never going to be like Paul Warfield or Larry Csonka or Jim Kick definitely wasn't going to be Bob Gresie. For you sports history buffs, that's the Miami Dolphins team of 72, which is my first favorite team ever! But I wasn't going to be that. Lickin’ my wounds, I tried to figure out something else that I like to do. And one of those things was tennis.

Now I really didn't know anybody who played tennis, but I had watched it on TV. My junior high school had one side of the gymnasium faced like, you know, pavement where the outdoor basketball courts were, but you could hit a tennis ball up against the wall.
I measured how many layers of bricks it was that measured the height of the net, and then I would just practice hitting the ball up against the wall. Forehand, backhand, forehand, backhand, for what seemed like hours. And I thought I was getting better. I really did. I even picked up a couple of people that I would play tennis with.

I started really feeling like, “Hey, this is something that I could do. And so, I really got into who the players were and what the tournaments were, but there were people who were better than I was. So, did I get to play in tournaments? Nope. Now I could have learned from those who were better than I was. I could have figured out a way to get lessons, maybe. I could have done a lot of things, but I didn't realize my superpower yet. And because there were people who were better than I was, I didn't reach the goal of being actually, you know, like on the team on varsity where I could play. And so I quit, went back to what I was doing, listening to the radio. Singing to myself all the time.

This happened with golf. This happened with football. This, oh, basketball was the worst in eighth grade. I tried out for the basketball team and didn't have the skill set, you know, I just wasn't as good as anybody else because I didn't really practice with anybody, so you know, you can only do so much in your driveway. Especially if you don't know technique and all this other stuff. It was just bad. So, when I told my mom that I got cut from the team, she was livid. So livid, she went to the school to talk to the coach. As much as I begged her not to do it, she did. What did that lead to? More persecution for me. “Ooh, look, Wansley's mom has come up here. She came up talking to the coach. “Oh, my baby, my baby got cut from the basketball team. Why you cut my baby from the basketball team?’” Damn. That's kind of one of those stains that just kind of doesn't wear off. It's embarrassing. I can tell you it's one of those things that I look back on now and, and it had me heading in the wrong direction. I didn't want to try. I didn't want to learn. I didn't want to put myself out there and take a chance. Unless, I was singing something. Oh, then it was, you know, it was all over. I could just open my mouth and stuff came out and people smiled and, clapped and it was great. But I also started watching people by the time I got to 9th grade and 10th grade.

When I got to high school in 10th grade, it was, it was like a hobby. Watching people. Like my dad said, “a smart man learns from his own mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” So, I started figuring out that you know, I don't have to do something to figure out whether I like it or not or whether I think it's good or not.
Hell, there were hundreds, thousands of examples around me all the time. I became a people watcher. And the more I watched people in school, on the street, at the mall, grocery store, I'd just watch them. And I'd start to see patterns. And I'd start to see things that I either liked or didn't like. Clothes, shoes, buzzwords, like, ‘man’. And everybody was like, hey man, how you doing man? But I started to learn I could do things. I even could be funny. Which I hadn't really thought of, but I started learning how to recite comedy routines from television shows at school. I really got into Monty Python.

Monty Python used to come on Tuesdays at eight o'clock on PBS, public broadcasting station. And man, Wednesday morning was me and like three other people in one corner of one hallway, cutting up and mimicking whatever skit we saw the night before. “This Sir, is a dead parrot!” It was amazing. Well, I kind of like put that little graph on everything. Anytime I was around people. I watched what they did, and they showed me a lot of things. Some things I wanted to do, some things I definitely did not want to do. But I stopped believing that I didn't know anything, and turned it around into, “Huh, I wonder how they did that?” And I kept watching. I'd imitate them.

“Oh, that’s how they did that. Huh, how do you crack an egg with one hand? Oh! Thanks, Julia Child, for teaching me how to crack an egg with one hand. How do you actually get top spin on a tennis ball? Oh, slow motion, Arthur Ashe, at Wimbledon, or the, or the U. S. Open.” Oh, these are things that I could, like, mimic on my own.

And I started figuring out that I didn't really have to be as good as anyone else, I just had to be good enough for me. And I learned by watching others. Now, this works in a lot of different idioms. I mean, to this day, I say all the time, “How do I know it's been a good day? If I can watch the first 12 minutes of a newscast, and I don't see myself or anyone, I know it's been a good day!” What does that mean exactly? It means that I didn't make decisions, or I didn't know anyone who made decisions that the consequences were so bad that they made the evening news. So no matter how bad my day was, if I wasn't on the news, well, that was a good thing. Think about it. I mean, you make mistakes, right? But when you're young, they always seem so big. And as you get older and the mistakes start costing you time, money, conversations, friends, relatives, the whole value structure changes. Now can you be accountable enough and learn that the common denominator in all of those losses, was you. Can you learn that you're like a pebble thrown into a still pool? Soon as you hit the water, you make ripples. Now think about it in the sense of anytime you go somewhere and do something, you make ripples. And those ripples affect other people. Can you learn from somebody else what not to do? Well yeah, just like you can learn what you can do. But here's the thing. If you think that you know everything already, why would you possibly try to learn something else? And therein lies the problem.

You're going to meet, or have met, people who are quite sure they're smarter than everybody else. And they are not afraid to tell you. They're not afraid to prove it to you. It's pretty easy to watch someone, say, like, you're standing in line at a restaurant you've never been to before. Watch the person in front of you order something. If you don't know what it is, are you brave enough to ask what it is that they ordered? Or why they like it? Maybe when you come into the restaurant, you sit down, and you look around at everybody else's table and you see something that looks different. Interesting. Do you ask, “Hey, what is that?” And then order the same thing? It happens.

That's what I'm talking about. Being open to learning, learning things that you might already know. Imagine that. Imagine a parent thinking, “Wow, I don't know everything.” Scary proposition, especially for the parent. The last thing you want to seem is unknowing. Because you're there to guide your children, right? But is there really any reason you can't learn from them, too? I mean, their experience is not yours, and vice versa. If you don't have that level of communication with your kids, how are either of you going to actually learn something? It becomes the parent dictatorship, and, you know, and the kid feels like a slave and wants to rebel and do all this other stuff. I started wearing clothes that my kids wore. I started talking like my kids.
And it was the stuff of jokes between us. I wasn't trying to be like them. They were things that I just liked, and just like Monty Python, I would imitate. And what did I learn? Lots. Mostly, I was better able to judge whether or not I taught my kids well. Because if they knew something and could demonstrate it, there you go.

It's the way it works with almost everything. How do you know you know something? Because you can do it. How do you really know that you know something? Well, you can explain it to somebody else and they then know how to do it. Just like elementary school teachers teaching you multiplication, subtraction, division. All that stuff didn't like come in a cereal box, you know. We learned it. One of the cornerstones of my whole philosophy is that THE LEARNING NEVER STOPS.

Doesn't matter what it is. I'm still trying to learn how to code. Still trying to learn better ways of writing music. I'm still trying to learn how to play instruments better.
I go see bands and watch other people play, And then go home and try to play like them. I mean, I taught myself how to play drums. I taught myself how to play bass. I taught myself how to play guitar before I finally, after a couple of decades, figured out that I should just take lessons and get it over with. But I had to learn how to learn. That was the best thing about college. It taught me how to learn, and that I could. Now all I did was just take that stuff and put it on people. It's amazing. But you might be able to find out. If you don't convince yourself, you know it all. So as the book says, that would be the Book of Wanz, When you believe you know it all, you miss what you need to learn or could have learned.

Remember, a wise man, a wise person, learns from the mistakes of others. So, pay attention to what somebody else is doing, and don't make the mistakes they make. Good luck.

Thanks for hanging with me, y'all. I really appreciate your attention. I'm not a doctor. No, I'm no psychologist, but I learned how to pay attention, and all I'm doing is sharing my perspective and it will always be up to you whether it's useful or not. Try it. You might like it. Cool. I know I say that a lot. Cool. That's leftover from the seventies. Oh man, that's so cool. Don't be jiving me, dude. Come on, man. Don't jive me, man. Oh, brother. I'm out of here, y'all.

Be good. I'll see ya next week.