Anastasia Klimova Kuimova (CoFounder of Smena Station) on Extreme learning! It’s interesting to see the structure behind some of my own educational challenges revealed.

Today I’d like to share some interesting feedback on ‘Extreme learning’ from the Cofounder of Smena Station Anastasia Klimova Kuimova.

Anastasia and her husband are officially based in New York, but they have continually traveled the globe for the last 7 years. Together they founded Smena Station, a co-living, co working network with locations in New York, Sri Lank, malta, Thailand and many more to come. Skill-sharing is an integral part of the community they have created, using the 10 commandments of Burning man as their cultural guidelines.

Here is her take on Extreme learning and ‘How to learn anything 3 times faster’:

“I enjoyed your book, especially all real life examples:) I think you did a great job systematizing the whole education system from a distance. The idea of slot protecting gave me a very interesting new perspective on everything. I was unconsciously using some of your tricks, but I would never have figured out the system you reveal behind it all.

Funny thing happened, I was taking milinery (hat crafting) classes. I tried my very best to implement some of your ideas (actually it was easier than I thought because I think I needed a change from all my digital work). So I showed up with a list of questions I prepared over the weekend, My teacher got very excited about it, answering all of them, demanding a next session 🙂 so we got pretty close, but then an interesting thing happened – for sure I upset her somehow (artists you know..) and in a moment she told me, that I have two problems – I can’t follow strait directions (yes, I need to know what’s the goal of the application) and I always challenge authority with my questions, apparently trying to find a better way to do stuff. That was never my intention because again I had no experience and she is a world-level master and I do admire what she does. But I have a curious mind and I need to understand how things work. I got this type of reaction very often when I go to learn something. Now I know why 🙂

Really interesting how the reaction in both situations was actually precisely what Extreme Learning would predict, I over-prepared and it absolutely worked to attract this mentor, but as I went straight for some of your ‘Illusive obvious secrets’ the defenses came up exactly as predicted also. 

Maybe I got too confident with shooting questions 🙂 Anyway it was a real pleasure reading your book and seeing the structures behind some of my own educational challenges revealed! Will be working with this a lot more in the future”