Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

The Write of Passage enrollment window is open for another week, and the next cohort begins on October 5th.

This week, I'm hosting two workshops: (1) a Twitter spaces event, and (2) an overview of the course experience called What is Write of Passage?​

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. How Learning Happens: The school system doesn’t take inspiration seriously, and it’s time to change that. For a roadmap, we should look to teachers like Richard Feynman who attracted students with joy and kept them with rigor. Read the essay or watch the ​YouTube video.
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2. Podcast with Jimmy Song: Jimmy is one of the biggest names in the Bitcoin world and a Write of Passage alum. He interviewed me about my approach to learning, filtering information, and navigating the world of information abundance. It's the first interview I've published from my new production studio. Watch it on YouTube. Listen to it here: Apple | Spotify​
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Why Do We Teach Like This?

When I was a kid, I was a baseball expert. Every morning, before school, I'd pour through the newspaper's sports section. At any point in the season, I had an encyclopedic memory of the standings and statistics. Everything I knew about baseball followed my obsession with the sport.

School was the opposite. If I'd learned baseball like I learned math, I would've started the semester by memorizing historical records. The first test would've quizzed me about where the first game was played, the name of the guy who invented baseball, and who had the highest single-season batting average of all time. Boringgggg.

In real-life, I memorized these facts because I loved the game. Memorization was the effect of loving baseball, not the cause.
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The problem is schools are built for kids who aren't interested in what's being taught. This makes for rote classes with kids treated like Pavlov's dogs.

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From Abstract Subjects to Concrete Examples

School curriculums are too abstract. Part of the reason we make fun of formulas like y=mx+b is they feel so distanced from real-life. It's impossible to learn when you're constantly asking: "Why is this relevant?"

For adults, relevance centers around utility. For kids, it centers around obsessions. I’ve always wanted to build a baseball-focused math course. I would’ve been much more interested in statistics if I’d pretended that I was Moneyball's Billy Beane trying to build a roster for the Oakland A’s. Calculus would be much more interesting if it was framed in the context of how pitchers throw curveballs.

A course like that is only possible with the Internet. For the first time in history, we can scale curriculum around individual passions. And once you start thinking at Internet scale, you see these passions aren't so individual. Yes, there are only a small percentage of people within a particular niche. But a small percentage of the billions of people who use the Internet is still a massive number.

Until the Internet, a baseball-centric math school wasn’t possible. You need economies of scale to pull it off. The Internet provides that. In a conventional school, most kids would be bored if the entire math curriculum revolved around baseball. But on the Internet, where millions of kids need to learn math every year, and tens of thousands are interested in baseball, you can justify a baseball-focused math curriculum.

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Real is Better than Fake

School doesn't need to feel like such a separate and abstract sphere. Kids should do the real thing whenever possible.

The best way to learn fast is to have a stake in the outcome. Practice first, theory second. If you want to learn cooking, host a dinner party. If you want to learn to invest, buy a few stocks. If you're going to learn about an idea, write about it in public. Risk awakens our learning muscles like a splash of cold water.

As a high school principal in town says: "Real is better than fake."

In college, I took two semesters of entrepreneurship class. It was all theory, no practice. Nobody earned a penny. Instead, every student should’ve received $100 to launch an actual Shopify store. Starting a real business would've helped us learn faster and experience the joys of making money on the Internet. The best way to learn business is to start a business.

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Where's the Intensity?

We unreasonably expect kids to spend more time learning than adults spend working.

Part of the problem is a kids’ time is so poorly managed. They spend too much time “learning” but don’t acquire enough knowledge. If we implemented what we know about learning science, they’d learn twice as much in half the time.

Lack of time isn’t the problem. Lack of intensity is. I once visited a private basketball gym where top NBA players practice every summer. There, I watched all-stars like Kyrie Irving and Russell Westbrook train. They came in with a written plan, sweated bullets for a few hours, and left. All their practice time was informed by statistics and game film from the previous season. Everything they did at the gym was filmed and reviewed by coaches. Those 90 minutes were all the training they needed for the day. But during that time, they were intensely focused. No phones. No distractions.

We should bring that intensity to schools. Unfortunately, the current system discourages it. No matter how hard they work, kids spend the same amount of time in class. What if kids got their afternoons off if they crossed off everything from their to-do list in the morning? We'd reward achievement and intensity of focus, rather than just time spent learning (which incentivizes distraction and a lack of focus).

In so many schools, length is seen as synonymous with quality. Nearly every writing assignment has a minimum word count, which pushes kids towards filler. And when students fail to meet expectations, we add homework instead of changing our approach.

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Photo of the Week

Most of my beliefs about learning are purely intuitive. But that doesn't mean they're brash or impulsive. As a child, I remember sitting in class whispering to myself: "I can do so much better than this."

For years, the frustration was a purely negative experience. I knew something was wrong with the school system, but I didn't have a positive vision of how it could be better until I pursued golf at the highest level. I was smaller, skinnier, and weaker than most of the people I competed against, so I had to outsmart them. I became thirsty for knowledge.

At the time, I worked closely with an instructor Terry Rowles. To date, he's one of the best teachers I've ever had. He pushed me like crazy and showed me how much conventional wisdom was backwards. It was my first "Emperor has no clothes" moment.

Like I'd done with baseball a decade before, I memorized golf statistics because I loved the game so much. Unlike school, everything I learned in golf was tangible. I could apply the lessons directly on my swing. While my peers slept through classes (literally!), everybody on the golf team was dedicated to practice and improvement.