If everyone is the big cheese, who will do the work?
In a presentation by David Martin at the Arlington Institute, he pointed out that all the people in the Ivy League schools were there to be leaders.
But not everyone can be a leader by definition.
So what are they doing?
Good question, and when you look deeper, you can see the apparent failure of the economic model based on the education system.
You might remember the story of the guy that did the entire MIT undergraduate program in a year. In other words, using self study of the existing curriculum, he was able to reduce the time to completion by 75%.
This was a result of several universities moving their curriculum online so the “plebs” could learn from it.
Scott Young was perhaps the first to demonstrate how this could be done.
He went on to chronicle the adventure and several others using the learning method he developed to accomplish this amazing feat.
Now, bear in mind the biggest criticism of what he did was not that didn’t really learn the material but that he didn’t get the degree for doing so.
Which in and of itself demonstrates David Martin’s point about leadership.
I recently started Young’s book Ultralearning. In it he describes what he did in his MIT challenge and formulated methodology for others to follow.
This isn’t the first interesting book on learning. There are others including the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, Peak by Anders Ericsson, and the Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin.
These other books give you a look at learning methodologies, including deliberative practice and the chunking version of memorization.
Young starts his approach with a series of principles.
The idea is that learning has to be adjusted for the person doing the learning. And to use the new skills as quickly as possible to engrain them.
I recognize this in the trading arena. The faster you get to the approach that best suits your personality, the faster you get to developing a net profitable trading approach. You discover by doing.
When you embrace the thing that most closely resembles how you operate, the more harmonious the process will be.
Not that it won’t be hard, but that it won’t be conflicting.
Which is what a friend of mine discovered as an adult.
As a kid, he said he sucked in school. Nothing made sense to him, and the experience was both difficult and demotivating.
As an adult he headed into social work, which was interrupted by a request from a friend. His friend was a home builder with a labour problem. So he asked my pal to help him, which he did.
He enjoyed the process of building houses and was encouraged to take up carpentry.
During his carpentry apprenticeship, he was required to do some class work.
But this time, his experience was altogether different.
He described how all the numbers would float and assemble themselves together.
Everything just clicked. It all made sense to him, and he understood it with ease.
The result was (and remains) a very successful career in home building and renovation.
One of the things that Young emphasizes is the freedom for someone to explore their curiosity. Things are seldom fixed, and topics can be approached in a variety of ways.
People using his Ultralearning method go on to describe is that they use the success of the experience to take on bigger and bigger challenges.
This is what my pal did with carpentry and the evolution of his career.
This process was explored in another way by David Epstein in his amazing book Range. Throughout, he demonstrates the unusual learning trajectories of various people. The idea behind Range is that the journey many great performers take is non linear.
They try a range of different things, and those experiences help the person embrace new and bigger challenges.
The constant is curiosity and the freedom to learn and explore.
In the startup space, you have an evolution of this thinking.
At the beginning, you are learning by the seat of your pants. If you make a discovery of a product or service that will scale, eventually you have to systematize your approach.
There will be new challenges and learning, but many of these will be dictated by the business rather than chosen as a direction of exploration.
And this may be one of the core challenges of the modern corporation. The learning curve is steep at the beginning, but eventually, in order for the corporation to operate and scale, it must systematize for optimal execution. This form of execution is not the same as learning.
This is the problem that Clayton Christensen spoke about in his book The Innovators Dilemma. Large companies with established customers can’t use the startup approach of exploring what their best customers will want. The process at their level is optimized for execution rather than learning.
This is why the young scrappy startups are able to come along and upend large established companies. They have a different culture, where the learning process takes precedence over systematization.
Eventually, these companies grow to the point where they run into the same problem.
The solution here, demonstrated by Steve Jobs and more recently Nvidia is the ability and willingness to cannibalize existing products. This puts the emphasis continuous learning.
What Young explores is the who to take the what why and how of a given skill or knowledge base and shape it for an outcome. Calculating that outcome is a part of the process.
One counter-example he uses is the person who took an MBA to improve work prospects in order to get recognition and better opportunities from their boss.
Which didn’t happen.
The reason is that they were learning to fit into the system rather than to expand their capacity to build and create.
Many businesses say they want self starters and people with an ownership attitude, but place these people in a structure that neutralizes these impulses.
It is clear that the economy is evolving in ways that are hard to fully comprehend. Part of this is technology. There is a mushrooming governance and administration element. Another part is a monetary system at the end of it’s use by date. And added to the mix is a concerted effort to reshape social structures and culture around control.
All of these things mean that our approach to learning will require a dramatic shift.
Ultralearning represents a viable approach for the rapid acquisition and deployment of new knowledge and skills. And this will be even more pressing, given the ongoing loss of knowledge taking place accidentally, incidentally, and deliberately.
And what Ultralearning emphasizes is the essential nature of tailored individual actions for outstanding results. Which is likely to come into conflict with the “leaders” who want to shape the world into a homogenized system for tomorrow.