Thread by @startupdaemon

Why isn’t our children learning? Because our teachers isn’t teaching – not beyond the trivial.

This is the most condensed primer on being effective as a student & teacher you will ever see. Because odds are you haven’t seen any.

The purpose of all teaching & learning is one and one only: to prepare you to be the very best that you can be in this Grand Dynamic that is existence.

Get the Big Picture of the teaching/learning dynamic, some books to give you a head start & heuristics from experience.

I. First-order: This is about action and movement. Become aware of your strengths and talents as you ACT upon them in a deliberate manner.

Uses time-tested customs & heuristics. Builds basic tools and skills, learning the language of the art.

Teacher leads student into new things and mastering basic skills (new to the student but time-tested to the group/teacher).

This is about as far as your formal education goes – if you’re lucky enough that it does at all.

II. Second-order: This is about building strategy and vision. Develop processes & heuristics of your own – building your own systems & direction through practice.

Become aware of your weaknesses and learn how to channel your strengths to render weaknesses irrelevant.

Teacher pushes student to experience new ecologies (where student’s weaknesses are a significant disadvantage) so that student learns to circumvent weaknesses and triumph all the same.

This is about as far as workplace mentorship goes – if you’re lucky enough to get any at all.

III. Third-order: This is about generating new potential and radically new ways to see oneself and world.

Seeing is made possible because first- and second-order learning have become internalized as authentic knowledge – become inherent to your mental dynamic.

The teacher’s role is resigned to that of an old friend, a sounding board, a last-ditch safety net against personal blowup.

Good teaching here is about encouraging you to trust your instincts, often against everything that your mentor’s experience says.

You learn how to teach/learn like all other competences - by doing it.

But there are three books that I would have found incredibly useful to avoid silly mistakes had they been available early on in my life.

A. To keep learning - and at a steep curve - throughout life, you might benefit from understanding how nature "learns" & how it's trying to kill you.

Antifragile is about that and so much more that makes up the world. Foundational book for risk taking.

B. In a world of infinite possibilities, you need to focus your effort to get the most of it. And be deliberate about it.

So Good They Can't Ignore You is the most straightforward intro to re/inventing your blueprint for lifelong learning & development. Very high-energy.

C. Peak creativity is peak learning. Because a Master in any field or endeavor reinvents and recreates it forevermore.

Reaching such competence & fluidity takes decades. Mastery is the book to show you what the path might be like - so you have a living chance at getting there.

HEURISTICS & GUIDELINES

SITG: I've taught hundreds of students in graduate school and worked with dozens of interns. My experience spans farming, academia and business. My biggest mistake in life has been wasting years not taking enough risks & not learning as much as possible.

Three sets of skills that will serve you for life:

• Grit – running towards adversity with a smile and a laugh
• People – mastering your mind & building networks
• Semantic systems – their powers and limitations

It's never too early or too late to get to work on these.

GRIT is the "whatever it takes" of life itself. To blaze your authentic path, you have to learn to be patient in the face of your ignorance and that of others.

Grit is trained in like a muscle. You learn grit by taking on difficult tasks & skills to master and doing the work.

The visceral understanding of grit is the direct sensation that there are no shortcuts to anything of value. Without grit, there is no will.

Do the work. That's grit as an action-decision.

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PEOPLE & their psychology are the fast track to effective learning & teaching.

Self-knowledge helps you develop your own tactics & stratagems for better learning.

Knowing others gives you better access to their experience & expertise, esp. so you don't repeat their mistakes.

A lot of early-stage learning is about overcoming insecurities & self-sabotage.

You can start learning grit through self-analysis - confronting your fears & owning your character flaws.

At higher levels, you use your psychology to devise the best learning modes for yourself.

Knowing yourself first is how you get to know others best.

Because you can't experience everything yourself, building a network of mentors & collaborators is the most critical asset in scaling your learning process.

Psychology is how you expedite & optimize this conduit.

SEMANTIC SYSTEMS is how we communicate knowledge and build networks outside direct practice & experience.

Much of what passes for value in the modern world is entirely vested in semantic systems: media, programming & education itself.

Just about anyone has a predisposition towards mastering at least one of the three most critical sets of semantic systems:

• Language & storytelling.
• Physics & mathematics.
• Computer programming.

In a hyperconnected world, these will only get more powerful.

Even if you have found your calling in some form of traditional artisanship, mastery of semantic systems brings your work to another level.

A handcrafted table and a custom-designed house are media, too. They tell stories about the people who made them & inhabit them.