Monday Musings - Monday Musings (Learn Like an Athlete)

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Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

It’s been a wild couple of weeks.

We’ve had a pair of Write of Passage retreats in Denver and the Bahamas, and put together an epic vision for the future of the company. We’ll be making at least eight new full-time hires before the end of the year, which will more than double our team size. Our vision has legitimately 5x’d in the past two weeks.

I’m aiming to write the big picture plan in the next few days and share it with you soon.

Here’s what I want to share this week:

1. Learn Like an Athlete: Knowledge workers should train like athletes. Specifically, they should learn in sprints, build a daily training regimen, and track their progress obsessively. Read my essay here.
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2. Podcast with Jason Zweig: My interview with Jason Zweig, a legendary personal finance columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and the author of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, which Warren Buffett has described as “by far the best book about investing ever written.” This is a masterclass in writing for the Internet. Read the full transcript. (Listen Here: Apple | Pocket Casts | Spotify).​
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3. ​How to Find Great Writing Ideas: A little trick I’ve learned to source interesting ideas and write Monday Musings every week.

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Coolest Things I Learned This Week

Why do we push kids so much harder in sports than we do in school?

Growing up, there was a stark difference between the way adults treated me on the playing field and in the classroom.

In sports, my coaches pushed me and raised my ambitions. They showed me how there was no upper bound in life. They saw perfection not as a line to reach, but as an ever-receding asymptote.

High expectations were the norm. When I fell short of my goals, my coaches and I dissected the heck out of what happened. In high school, I’d analyze my golf swing in slow motion and dress myself up with all kinds of wires to gauge the movement of my body in 3D. At other times, I’d track every shot I hit and cross-reference my results with pro golfers to identify where I fell short. Though my coaches were often critical, they were hell-bent on helping me improve.

I see parallels in professional sports too. Desperate for improvement, teams are quick to adopt new technologies. Sometimes, they come in the form of the military-grade launch monitors I used to measure my golf shots. Sometimes, they come in statistical revolutions such as Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” approach with the Oakland A’s or Sam Hinkie’s “trust the process” approach with the Philadelphia 76ers.

All these examples share one thing in common: a fear of complacency and a yearning for greatness.

Schools are the opposite.

They're stale and sclerotic. The Internet has basically changed everything but schools. Most kids still learn predominantly via lectures and textbooks. Teachers hesitate to adopt new technologies too. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings learned this the hard way. Many years ago, he led the Series A round for an app-based learning platform called DreamBox, only to see it get squashed by a stagnant education system that refuses to improve.

The stagnation doesn’t end there. Common core curriculums are stubborn in their refusal to change. There are new sports all the time, such as eSports and skateboarding. It seems like a new sport is added to the Olympics every few years. Athletes and the Olympic committee know you need to change with the times. But schools are like an Olympics that has kept only the original sports — running, long jump, shot put, and javelin. There's no way I'd watch that.

Unlike sports, low expectations are the norm in school. Teachers often temper their students’ expectations by “setting reasonable goals.” Today, public schools in San Francisco, the same ones I used to dream of getting into as a kid, are getting rid of advanced programs. Ambitious and self-directed learners are suppressed by a conveyor belt system that crushes the joy of learning.

Teachers don’t train very hard either. Think about it: How many teachers have coaches, watch themselves on video, or are familiar with the cutting-edge of education research?

Meanwhile, athletes can go as fast as they want. Serious ones aren’t just encouraged to be the best in their age group, but the best in the world. You see it in the Olympics where 16 year-old gymnasts dazzle us with twists and twirls.

The data says it all. Marathon runners are getting faster and golfers are shooting such low scores that golf courses are being re-designed for higher difficulty.

Meanwhile, academic performance is falling.

In the 1970s, 1-in-2 college graduates aced the Wordsum vocabulary test. Today, only 1-in-6 do. As recently as 1991, only 11 percent of 8th-grade students at California’s public schools could solve seventh-grade math problems. Standards are falling too. Between 1958 and 1988, the average GPA at Dartmouth rose from 2.2 to 3.2 — because of grade inflation, not smarter students.

In sports, rising performance comes with rising standards. In schools, falling performance comes with falling standards.

Schools have lost their culture of excellence. They’d be smart to borrow from the world of sports, where the torch of ambition burns bright.

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Photo of the Week

Yesterday was the 3rd anniversary of the first Write of Passage live session.

We were on a team retreat, so I got to celebrate with my co-founder Will Mannon, who is responsible for making the course a rad and lively experience. With the next phase of our company, we'll pull from the world of sports to improve writing education.