Four years at MIT cost about $250,000 all in. Or, you could engage in more than 2,000 of their courses on their site, for free.
What’s the difference?
When you do education, you pay tuition, plus you pay with a focus on compliance. Traditional education requires that students trade in freedom of choice, coerced by tests and exams. And what do you get? You get an ‘A’ and you get a certificate.
The power of that certificate is extraordinary. Students (and their families) will go a lifetime in debt to get that paper. They’ll make choices about time and focus and geography for that paper, ignoring what’s ostensibly possible in exchange for the certainty of acquiring it.
Learning, on the other hand, is self-directed. Learning isn’t about changing our grade, it’s about changing the way we see the world. Learning is voluntary. Learning is always available, and it compounds, because once we’ve acquired it, we can use it again and again.
Many adults in the US read no more than a book a year. That’s because books aren’t assigned after you’ve got your paperwork done.
We’re surrounded by chances to learn, and yet, unless it’s sugarcoated or sold in the guise of earning a scarce credential, most of us would rather click on another link and swipe on another video instead.
The exception: People who have chosen to be high performers. Doctors, athletes, programmers and leaders who choose to make a ruckus understand that continuous learning is at the heart of what they’ll need to do.
“Will this be on the test?” is a question we learn from a young age. If you need to ask that before you encounter useful ideas, you’ve been trapped. It’s never been easier to level up, but the paper isn’t as important as we’ve been led to believe.
October 4, 2019
Your anecdote isn’t true.
I know it happened. I know that your experience, your feelings, your outcomes are real. And they’re yours.
Statistics suffer when compared to anecdotes. Because your mileage may vary. Your interaction with the randomness of the world will never match up to what the statisticians tell us to expect. Because averages and correlations are never what we actually experience. We experience a tiny slice of it.
But, at the same time that the larger truth can’t be experienced, your anecdote can never represent the larger truth, because it’s yours. What happened to you will never happen to anyone else, not in quite the same way.
By relying on well-told stories, we ignore the real truth, the universal truth of how the world actually is.
Yes, our mileage varies. But please let me know what the reality of the world is.
October 3, 2019
That’s unlikely.
If I’m lucky, I can glance at them.
But just for a second or two.
Our fears burn so bright that if we truly face them, we think we might be blinded.
Of course, we may think we’re looking at our fears, dead on, but it’s more likely we’re just seeing a distraction, a shadow of what’s actually holding us back.
Because once we’re truly clear about the fear, it fades. It might even disappear.
October 2, 2019
If you want to change the mind of a scientist, do more science. Do better science. Get your hands on the data set and prove your assertions.
If you want to change the mind of a bureaucrat, bring more power.
If you want to change the minds of the nerds, build something that’s new.
If you want to change the mind of a teenager, amplify the other teenagers.
If you want to change the mind of the audience, put more emotion into your story.
If you want to change the mind of a believer, bring in the perceived authorities.
If you want to change the mind of a banker, eliminate risk.
If you want to change the mind of an engineer, build a prototype.
If you want to change the mind of a hustler, show the money.
If you want to change the mind of a sports fan, win the game.
Other people don’t believe what you believe, and they don’t see what you see.
October 1, 2019
Halloween is a month away. And over the next few weeks, a lot of cheap chocolate is going to get bought in preparation for the ringing doorbell.
Cheap chocolate is made from beans picked by poor kids in dangerous conditions.
And cheap chocolate is made from beans that don’t even taste that good, but come from more hardy trees, so it’s more reliable to grow.
Some of the poorest people in the world raise cacao beans, and the market is driven by the low bidders. The low bidders are the folks who have no room for flexibility in their supply chain because the end product they sell is so price sensitive. For forty years, it’s been a race to the bottom, one that has led to plenty of ignored pain.
On the other hand, expensive chocolate turns the ratchet in the other direction. The folks who make the bars, particularly those who do direct trade, keep paying higher and higher wages. They keep children out of the system. And they encourage their growers to use the tastier artisanal Criollo and Trinitario varieties, keeping them from extinction.
The race to the top often creates more winners than losers. That’s because instead of seeking to maximize financial returns at the expense of everyone in the system, they’re focused on something else.
September 30, 2019
It’s worth remembering that if someone knows how to do something, that means, with sufficient effort, you could probably learn it too.
You might not be willing to put in the time and effort, but it’s learnable.
“I went to art school. That means that everything I can do with a pen you can learn to do as well.” Alex Peck.
September 29, 2019
A checklist to get you started—you can either do the same thing or a different thing…
More of the same
Persist
Get the word out
Doing something different
Change an element of what you do
Raise your prices
Lower your prices
Make it better
Tell a different story
Serve a different customer
Enter a new segment
Change the downstream effects of your work
Earn trust
Make bigger promises
Organize
Get better clients
Do work that matters to someone
September 28, 2019
When anyone has the ability to announce breaking news, urgent updates, RIGHT NOW, steal attention and emergencies, then sooner or later, many will do just that.
Attention is scarce, scarcer than ever, and we’ve given everyone a machine that can steal attention, and a keyboard that can be used to steal even more.
The race for cheap, unearned attention is a race that can’t be won. As soon as someone gains the lead, someone else will lower their standards and take a shortcut to get even more. The players have already surrendered their self-esteem, so it’s simply an escalating hijack of trust. And so we have dark patterns, once-respected media outlets with shameless headlines and an entire industry based on clickbait, come-ons and trickery.
It’s pretty clear that there’s an alternative. A chance to work toward the top instead. To deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. The opportunity to create remarkable products and services for a focused audience, stuff so good that people want to talk about it.
This is marketing. To choose to race to the top and then to do it well.
September 27, 2019
That’s something worth building.
Electricity is a ratchet with leverage. Once communities have access to a little electricity, a solar lantern, say, they quickly discover that they want/need more electricity. The productivity increases create more income which gives them more money to buy more electricity. The leverage that this productivity and income give them (combined with the actual power at their disposal) creates a one-way route toward the future.
The same thinking applies to a personal career.
The first speech you’ll give will be difficult. The tenth one will be easier. Each speech, well-delivered, creates more demand for more speeches. Each speech given gives you more leverage to give better speeches. Better speeches create more demand…
This is the opposite of shoplifting. Shoplifting isn’t a ratchet. The system actually pushes back harder and harder the more you do it. And it has no leverage.
Some businesses work at scale because they’re ratchets (they cause motion in one direction) and they’re able to reinvest from that ratchet to create more leverage. Amazon is certainly the most shining example of this simple process.
But it can also work for the local university. A little learning creates demand for more learning. Useful degrees as a label for effort offer leverage to those that receive them, and the demand for more learning and more leverage gives the university resources to expand and do it even more.
When in doubt, look for the ratchet and look for leverage.
PS A new episode of my podcast Akimbo is out this week. I think it’s an episode worth checking out.
September 26, 2019
But in fact, just about everything is a portrait.
It’s our temporary understanding of the world as it is, not an actual experience of it.
We see things through our filters, match them to our expectations and live out our story of what we expect and why. We build a narrative around every interaction we have, and that narrative is rarely as accurate as we’d like to admit.
It gets easier to work our way through a situation if we preface our retelling with, “the way I experienced what she said…”
HT to Paul.
September 25, 2019
