The New Way to Learn

Welcome to the 1,202 new members of the curiosity tribe who have joined us since Friday. Join the 76,887 others who are receiving high-signal, curiosity-inducing content every single week.Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Rows!After spending 7+ years in traditional finance, I had Chronic Excel Fatigue–the result of countless hours spent wrestling with the dated, legacy technology that hasn’t been updated since 2006!Fortunately, I discovered Rows—spreadsheets, reimagined. Rows is a truly magical product experience. It allows you to seamlessly pull data on stocks, crypto and more, and instantly integrate with services like Stripe, Google Analytics, Twitter, Salesforce, Instagram, Facebook and public databases like Crunchbase and LinkedIn.Rows is one of the most insane new product experiences I have had in recent memory. I use Rows for everything from managing my Startup Portfolio, social analytics, fund investing, and LPs to tracking household budgets and personal finance. I may never open Excel again.For your next spreadsheet, give Rows a try. You won’t be disappointed. Join thousands of teams that have stepped up their spreadsheet game with Rows.Today at a Glance:It has become in vogue to bash the traditional education system and the learning models it reinforces in our youth. I’m certainly guilty of it. In a broad sense, it’s always quite easy to criticize the incumbent—but much more difficult to propose a viable alternative, particularly one that works at scale.Traditional learning models fall short in two respects: (1) they endorse compartmentalized knowledge and (2) they create forced, linear progressions.The ultimate meta-goal of learning is for knowledge to compound over time. We want to learn in such a way that new knowledge builds on top of existing foundations—ideally in an accelerating, non-linear manner.Networked Learning is a way to return to our roots and allow knowledge to freely interact and compound. There are many ways to engage it, including: (1) Explore vs. Tour, (2) Analogize Constantly, (3) Paired Learning, (4) Read Broadly & Quit More, and (5) Slow Down Learning.The New Way to Learn“Traditional learning models are dead.”If you’ve been scrolling Twitter or attending any group events over the last five years, you’ve probably heard some variation of the above statement countless times.It has become in vogue to bash the traditional education system and the learning models it reinforces in our youth. I’m certainly guilty of it. In a broad sense, it’s always quite easy to criticize the incumbent—but much more difficult to propose a viable alternative, particularly one that works at scale.In today’s piece, I’d like to lay the foundation for an alternative, better learning model: Networked Learning. Let’s begin with the traditional model and its deficiencies before diving into the details of the new way and how to use it.Note: I say *foundation* because my thinking on the topic remains a work-in-progress. I believe I have identified a truly better way for children and adults to learn—and clear methods to use it—but the challenge of deploying it at scale remains.The Traditional ModelI graduated from my public high school thinking I hated most subjects.It was odd—I was a pretty interested kid, but I drifted from class to class, doing the bare minimum to deliver an adequate report card to my discerning parents and clear the academic hurdles required by Stanford Athletic Department’s admissions team.Reflecting on it with the benefit of hindsight—and a bit of maturity—what I actually hated was the learning model the traditional education system forced upon me: A learning model grounded in linear, compartmentalized learning. A learning model that praised rote memorization of facts.Unfortunately, this learning model is drilled into us for so many years that the bad habits stick with us throughout our life. As a result, few find a way to learn more effectively in adulthood.Stick with me today and I’ll help you break the vicious cycle…Let's start with a quick breakdown of the traditional model and why it's broken.Problem #1: CompartmentalizedTraditional education asks you to create containers in your mind.I imagine them like little houses. You have your history house, your English house, your science house, your math house, etc. Each house is discrete and closed off to the rest of the houses and world.Let’s say you have a history test on Monday. On Sunday night, you sit down with a coffee and cram some new abstract information about Genghis Khan into your designated history house. You remember it for the test on Monday and manage to ace it. Your teacher, parents, and friends pat you on the back and say "great job!”—but by the following Monday, you've forgotten it.“Oh well,” you say, “I didn’t need to know about Genghis Khan anyway…”This process repeats for every subject. Knowledge is crammed and trapped into its designated house.The problem? Trapped knowledge is basically useless. It's insulat...