Below is an email I wrote to a friend about the implications of what I’m working on for the future of learning and education…

I got to this point by pivoting towards the vision of finding the future of learning.

I’ve been down in the details of startup culture for awhile so I forgot about this implication…

I actually believe if this format of support and learning is figured out with the most premium startups, it represents the future of learning and will trickle down to revolutionize education.

I think all the edu-startups have education wrong. They are trying to solve the problem through new ways of content delivery. But to transform education we have to look at how people actually learn and make an impact.

The best way to learn is very analogous to the lean startup. It’s about having a vision for something you want to do and then going and testing that hypothesis immediately by trying it. Whether it’s medicine, law, mechanical engineering or entrepreneurship. People need to test what it’s actually like as soon as possible and see if they can experience “flow” engaging in this activity.

The goal is to find something you really want to go deep into. John Seely Brown has my favorite quote in that regard, ““very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

Another great quote from Steven Pinker is: “Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields.” When colleges say they are teaching you how to think or building analytical rigor, this why it’s BS, because it doesn’t translate as well as they think it does.

Education is about supporting people to move through these 5 stages:
(1) No Desire — or intrinsic motivation (2) Desire to make an impact but uncertain about what, how or why (3) Possess an idea for a project but lack the knowledge and ability to know how to begin (4) A prototype has been built but need help gaining traction (5) The project has succeeded on a small scale but needs support going mainstream.

Essentially what Founders First will be doing is accelerating the A+ Founders who are very close to the finish line and then begin working backwards. The farther back you go there’s actually less a need to invent new things and more a need to just aggregate and streamline many of the programs that already exist to inspire young people and help them take the first step.

I wrote a quick post trying to adapt lean startup principles for education: http://maxmarmer.com/2010/05/lean-education-and-learning/

We will give you suggestions for tailoring you ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose.

But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach?

Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

-Page 24, Made to Stick

The concept described here is so powerful. It took a little while to really sink in when I first read it. But I find myself referencing this idea ALL THE TIME.

Don’t just read what this passages says, but what it implies. What they’re describing here applies to so much more than just creating sticky ideas. It describes the process for effectively doing almost ANYTHING.

The message: Don’t start from scratch and try to reinvent the wheel. The things that work almost always follow a common pattern. Research what others have said the successful pattern looks like. If you can’t find any research, at least make an attempt to infer the pattern on your own.

A page earlier the authors write,

Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creatives ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

Whatever you want to do there’s a small finite number of effective approaches that are far superior to randomness or just “trying stuff and seeing what happens”, whether it’s creating sticky ideas, creating a startup, getting people to like you or achieving happiness.Taking this idea a level of abstraction higher is an homage to the patternist view of life. We are not our matter, we are our pattern.

Buckminster Fuller, 1970:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody
has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of
us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the
rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this
nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this
false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery
because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his
right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making
instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of
people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was
they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they
had to earn a living.”

…This also inspired me to write about lean startups applied to learning and education more broadly. I think right now the way classes are taught and the way education is structured is analogous to the old linear product development model. Where classes and skills are analogous to features and customer development is analogous to passion and purpose.

—

Most learning is incredibly fat (unlean) because people make no assumptions about what they actually want to do. So all the classes they never use are akin to wasted code. The goal of education should not be broad exposure or diversity of skills, it should be passionately doing something, whether it’s making art or solving a problem.

Everything else will follow from there. As John Seely Brown said, “very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

That’s also reminds me why I had a slightly negative gut reaction to teaching customer development classes to people who haven’t done a startup or aren’t working on a startup. It’s analogous to when you said to me, “people shouldn’t hire consultants until they’ve fucked it up themselves. Otherwise they can’t even process a Sean Ellis or Sean Murphy”. Same thing with students. They need to create a first draft for a startup startup and mess it up before they learn customer development. I guess you overcome some of this problem with simulations, so they experience the problem viscerally. But that says that customer development is an end not a means. I think people need to apply customer development to solving a problem that they are really passionate about, and thinking about regularly; that resonates deeper than a simulation.

I interacted a lot with students from a few student entrepreneurship clubs this last year and I was frustrated with how many people wanted to consume inordinate amounts of knowledge about entrepreneurship before even hypothesizing about the company they wanted to start, much less just starting. It’s easy to fall into the skill accumulation as progress trap. Skill accumulation doesn’t even work very well because the Human Forgetting Curve is so steep.

Before learning customer development people should focus on vision — just exploring their own interests, and finding problems they want to solve.

Education is usually like the linear product development model startups use, in that students follow the process and get to the end ( a degree) yet most fail to find something they are passionate about. And failing to find their passion they get a regular job to pay the bills and that cycle is really hard to break out of.

In approaching my education, I have an hypothesis about what I want to do: This business Founders First. And I’m going to learn way more doing this then I could from scattered classes. Then I’m looking to learn what I need to make this happen. And along the way I get to meet great people, make an impact and integrate ideas from many disciplines.

Then after this project I get to go broad again: refocusing on things like the humanities. It doesn’t make sense to explore unrelated interests in left field when I’ve found something I’m passionate about. It’s like building all sorts of cool but extraneous features even after I’ve found product market fit. Once Product Market fit – I.e. Passion for a project, is found double down all your energy there.

Free form inspiration mode is waiting when you’re looking for the next thing to do.

I’ve written a few blog posts before about how to improve education and career development paths

(1) No Desire —intrinsic motivation suppressed (usually by the school system) (2) Desire to make an impact and be entrepreneurial, but uncertainty about how to channel that desire (3) Possess an idea for a project but lack the knowledge and ability to know how to begin (4) A prototype has been built but need help gaining traction (5) The project has succeeded on a small scale but needs support going mainstream.

I believe the world’s biggest problem is not one of the many challenges we face such as global warming or extreme poverty, but rather that we have too few people engaged in working on solutions. The root of this problem stems from the ineffectiveness of the world’s institutions to support people in finding their passions, and their inability to help people align their work with these passions. Entrepreneurship in its broadest sense can give people the intrinsic motivation to solve these problems. And the way to solve the world’s biggest problem is to support a greater percentage of the population through each of these 5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey.

Founders First, my current focus right now, is trying to support groups 4 and 5. In hindsight, I can see that what I’ve been working on has evolved through solving problems in each of these stages.

1- Technology Club — One major goal was to find exciting people, projects and companies and integrate into my uninspiring education

2- Youth Action Research Network — Bring together all the people inspired to do something more and actually start doing

3- Force For the Future stage 1 – targeting college students with ideas who are having trouble making waves

4, 5 – Force For the Future stage 2: Founders First — targeting founders who are alumni of start accelerators

I’m confident that the best way to approach solving the problem of liquidity through the 5 stages, is to start from stage 5 and work backwards.

It is actually the most doable, because by the time people are there, they are very motivated. And the ecosystem for people in that stage is the most developed, because enough people in this stage have been able to create profitable or impactful organizations.

Tackling the other stages is much more complicated, and requires a lot more infrastructure. To affect stages 1-3 where most of the world’s population resides, we requires resolving political conflicts, alleviating poverty, overhauling institutions, and overcoming pressures from peers, family and other lower level Maslovian needs. And while it’s important for work to be done there, I don’t think we can create any lasting change until the higher stages are more organized and developed, otherwise we’ll just have people temporarily reaching new levels and then falling back down to tell all their peers that it isn’t possible and isn’t worth trying.

In the T Model you alternate between a broad, horizontal phase and a deep, vertical phase, (though it’s actually an upside-down T because starting with the horizontal phase is a must) . In the broad, horizontal phase the goal is to try as many things as possible, and in small doses to maximize variety. You want to continue experimenting until you find many things you are passionate about and also accumulate many reference frames to better categorize and make sense of new experiences and information.

Once you have a huge pool of things that excite you, look to switch to the vertical phase, where you will hone in on a few specific passions and combine them, to do something tangible. (This tangible thing should be something you can point to quickly and say, “I did this” and the word “project” could be considered loosely accurate).

Going through this cycle is very simple conceptually, but rarely executed. But if you look at most successful people they’ve usually followed a path similar to this. This is because in order to be really successful at something you need to be passionate, you need to be able to focus, and increasingly you need to be interdisciplinary. Success without passion exists, but those people are usually severely unhappy and prone to burn out.

Often completing this cycle even once sets off a positive feedback loop, marking the start of a lifetime of engaged pursuit and contribution. On completion of the first cycle an internal flame is lit, that once ignited is very difficult to put out. John Seely Brown former head of Xerox Parc describes this phenomena as such, “Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

Many people don’t complete the T cycle because they get stuck in one phase or the other. People who get stuck in the horizontal phases are people who are very creative and always have lots of little side projects going on, but they suffer from a lack of “big wins”, that provide the reputation and credibility that lead to greater opportunities and chances for financial sustainability— not to mention that gratification that comes from pulling off something big. People stuck in this mindset are resistant to focusing on a particular project because they can’t bear the possibility of turning down an interesting opportunity. They fear picking only one thing would put them in a box, vaporizing their multi-facted identity they associate so strongly with. The lives they lead are very unique, but by not reaping the rewards from alternating into cycles of focus, they strongly limit their ability to realize their potential.

Many people also jump into a focus phase prematurely, spending all their energy on something they aren’t passionate about. This is more dangerous than being stuck in the creative phase because the extrinsic reward will be there for focusing even if the activity is done without passion. This often fools people into believing they are headed in the right direction for themselves. But people who make this error frequently end up suffering from burn out, hitting midlife crises or working tirelessly to reach the top of their field only to be left wondering why they are so unfulfilled and whether all the sacrifice was really worth it.

There’s also a large sector of the population who isn’t in either the creative or focus phase and are resigned to getting by with whatever pays the bills. While the onus is on the individual to find their passion, trying to do so in our education system is like swimming upstream against a level 5 rapid. And most people just get swept away. (Even at the better public and private schools, you’re still swimming upstream, just against a lighter current).

If you can complete even one T cycle, the rewards will start rolling in. Executing a project you’re passionate about is rare, and separates you from a cacophony of wannabes. Everybody talks about things they want to do, but few people have the self-discipline and initiative to make projects come to life. This scarcity of executors, makes people pay close attention to you if you are one, and opens up a whole new set of opportunities unavailable before. Opportunities will start chasing you down instead of the other way around. When this happens the second T cycle has begun. You now have the chance to explore horizontally again, this time with more freedom and opportunity.

The exploration here is much richer. You’re a more developed person. You have access to more people. You have more financial freedom. You get flown places to speak and are invited to contribute to more interesting projects. You have more influence, and as a result, people listen to what you have say and want to support or join your cause. This more intensive exploratory phase should lead to a new point of focus, where you can again combine your rapidly growing pool of knowledge, experiences and passions to build something new, likely more ambitious than your last.

As you turn the corner towards your second focus project, true interdisciplinary thinking begins to emerge. You can combine your breadth of knowledge on many subjects with the depth of your previous focus, charting new territory from a variety of informed perspectives.

All in all, a cycle probably takes anywhere from 2 to 7 years, so you have the opportunity to pursue both learning and doing many times in your life. And the T cycles start linking up very naturally. When they do that they begin resembling something like a series of s curves— a natural evolutionary growth cycle with some intriguing implications (to be explored later). Strictly interpreting the analogy of the T implies alternating between stages of being 100% horizontal and 100% vertical. But it is probably not realistic nor optimal to be one phase 100% of the time. A good rule of thumb is to allocate 80% of your time to the designated phase and 20% of your time to the other phase, i.e. 80% Creative & 20% Focus or vice versa. This allocation will also give the T smoother curves if graphed, creating a more natural looking S curve.

This model can be used as framework for decision making and allocating priorities in almost any field of interest. I’ve shared this model with numerous friends the last few months and many have appreciated the insight and clarity it has produced.

I hope to explore more facets and implications of this model. A few areas I’ve mapped out: The emotional journey through different phases. Why the T Model Works. How School Follows the Exact Opposite of the T Model, which is why students hate it. My Personal Path Along the T. Complimentary Theories to the T Model from Stefan Sagmeister, Seth Godin, and IDEO’s Tim Brown.

This blog post is part 2 of the Sandbox Network ‘Palomar 5′ series: a six week innovation camp in Berlin from 9 October – 24 November 2009. To follow the progress of the conference, you can view the official Palomar 5 blog. Alternatively, if you are on twitter, follow hashtag #p5 for real-time updates. You can also check out one of our camp member’s daily video blog on Youtube. (Part 1 is here)

Two thirds of the Palomar5 Innovation Camp has already passed. Four weeks down, two to go until the 2 day Summit, when we will have the opportunity to present the fruits of our labour to an eminent group of thought leaders, politicians, scientists and investors.

Before we dive deep into the Palomar5 experience let me give you a quick overview of the last month:

Our first two weeks, focused on understanding the thought landscape we’re operating in, generating hundreds of ideas for projects mixed in with some intense bonding experiences. Two weeks of intensive prototyping ensued, and now we’re transitioning into storytelling mode for the summit.

The last 4 weeks have been amazing but I was hoping to get more done. But that’s probably just my restlessness to change the world talking. But it is strange how fast a month has flown by.

We had our second “reality check” yesterday, where we all presented what we’ve been working on to many highly respected professionals and received their feedback. Someone asked me how long ago the first reality check was, it felt like ages, a month at least, but in reality it was only two and half weeks.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re trying to describe a prolonged experience and it feels like time has passed incredibly quickly but when you reflect on things you did in the beginning and it feels like it happened a long time ago, it probably means you are doing something right.

The Final Stretch

I have spent a lot of time the last few years learning about frameworks that have supported me in developing visions for a better future, but it has taken time for my entrepreneurial skills to catch up to the size of what I’ve set out to accomplish. The last half a year I’ve become increasingly anxious about pontificating while building takes a back seat. With only two weeks left of the camp part of me wishes more had been accomplished while here. But I have to realize that while we’ve been here a month, real work only started two weeks ago and our last two weeks of focus have been incredibly productive. The end goal of the Palomar5 camp is not to create fully functional products for the summit. Of greater importance to Palomar5 is conveying the underlying vision behind our projects and validation of the experiment of bringing 30 diversely talented young people from around the world and forcing them to live and work together for 6 weeks. Fully functional projects that make an impact are definitely vital for the success of Palomar5, but we don’t want to be another idea factory producing theories and patents; we want our projects to make a mark on the world, but the purpose of the 6 week camp is just to create the gravitational core for these projects to continue to flourish once the camp is over.

The summit should play a huge role in jumpstarting this process, but it all depends on the quality of our storytelling and how well we convey the enveloping experience of Palomar5: the lifestyle, the passion, the big projects and all the little creative projects the flit in and out serving as creative fuel for our bigger initiatives. If we do this well, TED-esque as we all like to say, (it being our common inspiration and the height of sexy intellectualism), we’ll create a buzz around the camp that will accelerate the development of our projects.

The Malzfabrik and Beyond

While we’ve spent most of our days in our stylish cubes dreaming up the next big thing followed by nightly recharges in our sleeping boxes, the weeks have not been without some atypical extracurricular activity.

After an intense first three weeks the Palomar5 team announced a mysterious weekend trip with few details except that we were supposed to bring our passport and pack warm. We speculated about trips to Poland or Holland.

On Halloween morning we piled on our bus unsure of our intended destination. A few hours later we found ourselves at the beginning of 8 kilometer canoeing expedition down a river somewhere in northeast Germany. We exited our canoes 3 hours later to find ourselves on the outskirts of a sparsely populated town with a nearby castle awaiting our presence. In the evening our creativity was out in full bloom as we showed off our elaborate characters including killer Mario, the bloody nurse and cross-dressing men.

Our favorite part of the weekend getaway at the castle was the sauna buried in the basement with plenty of half naked sandboxers to go around. We now request saunas wherever we go.

Other highlights included a Sunday afternoon project constructing an 8 meter mask out of branches and twigs, which was burned in it the evening. And I enjoyed my longest period of silence in a while during a solitary forest walk.

Atmosphere

Earlier this week we attended the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On our walk back we noticed how this experience felt like the beginning of a new school. We’ve been living together for a month now and it feels like this is just the beginning of a new phase of our lives, which it is, but at the same time our concentrated camp experience is heading into the final stretch. The flight home will be very strange. The following weeks we’ll experience withdrawals as we return to reality, basically from the future. While we’ve been working on inventing the future of work, we’ve also been living it. This experience has seamlessly combined, friendship, fun, adventure and the birth of some really ambitious projects.

One thing I might change if I knew this could last beyond 6 weeks is not working as many hours during the day, I feel like life is cyclical, times where intense focus is required and other times where experimentalism is a better frame of mind. Making the most of my time here has been a higher priority for me. Trying to change the world takes sacrifice; again my restlessness talking.

How we maintain the community after the camp is an issue that looms large in all our heads, both for the continued success of our projects and the friendships we’ve built.

No matter what happens I think we can all say that the camp has inextricably altered our lives. And we’ll look back on our lives in a few years time categorizing our experiences with two denominations: BP and AP. Before Palomar5 and After Palomar5.

The pace of learning at this camp has been so high. I’ve often thought about what kind of person I’d become if every night I could go to bed completely mentally exhausted from the pushing my 3 pounds of grey matter continually past its limits. Palomar5 has given me four weeks of that dream. Everyday we discuss wide-ranging ideas, on many topics like learning, innovation, and culture.

One night Valentin and I were up late debating whether culture or technology was the stronger force driving society forward. While interesting, these conversations rarely lead to anything tangible, but Palomar5 begs to differ. The following day we were discussing how the iPhone achieved widespread cultural adoption so fast with technology so far ahead of what was previously available (normally a sticking point for products ahead of their time) and how our projects could succeed by similarly speeding up cultural adoption. The conversation immediately jumped to a new level as we drew on last night’s debate. Something in both our minds then clicked, “Wow that’s a first! Last night’s debate was enjoyable, but I never thought it would actually be productive.”

What We’ve Been Building At Palomar5

The theme of the camp of was the future of work, but that was just a starting point to sell the project. We’ve been given very little structure, and that’s the way like it. Lack of direction does not mean chaos, at least over the long term, our projects have naturally converged around big themes: Social consciousness, data and entrepreneurship.

These are incredibly important areas where a lot of growth will be made, and it’s even more notable that we were not told to pick 3 these topics, but our internal compasses driven by creative destruction, cycling through hundreds of projects over the last 4 weeks, led us here.

Our vision for redesigning society for digital age and generation is now more palpable with these themes guiding us. What’s notable is that while many of dreamed of redesigning society this kind of re-envisioning around our idyllic yearnings hasn’t always been possible. The industrial era required sacrificing creativity in the name of scalable efficiency, which was necessary to create the infrastructure to raise the quality of life to what is today. But while this era is long past its expiration date, it continues to live on like an infectious bacteria, contaminating our work and lives. So many of us realize it’s time to reinvent society and its organizations from the ground up, we now just need to commit to making it happen. Count Palomar5 in.

Magnifying Glass — Palomar5 Project Sneak Peak

Here’s a sneak peak into the vision of the project I’ve been most intensely involved in:

We’re postulating the future of work is going to have a lot more startups, because that’s where all the innovation is coming from.

The startup accelerator model is a big part of the future innovation landscape, think YCombinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, and now there are accelerators for more than web startups, using basically the same model like Palomar5 and the Unreasonable Institute. We think we’ll see a lot more of these.

The rise of accelerators means that there are now two big emerging markets: Pre and post accelerators.

We’re trying to build many of the tools needed to support startups post-accelerator: expert feedback systems, social network amplification in order to get connected to the right people, just in time learning to acquire skills to overcome new challenges, and repositories of best practices and eventually developing some kind of recommendation engine to streamline and automate the whole ecosystem.

Also, while startups are more innovative because they have freedom, flexibility and autonomy corporations still possess advantages of scale and greater resources.

Startups need to achieve advantages of scale as well, but they will be able to do this modularly and collaboratively. Currently large organizations are organized like big towers, even Google operates like this. But startups will be able to achieve scale and preserve their autonomy by acting like lego pieces. Currently, startups don’t have lego functionality, they’re just rectangular blocks that don’t interface well with each other but we’re providing the knobs and the holes to assemble large towers for particular projects that can easily dissemble at the conclusion of the project and build a new tower.

The prototype for our skill acquisition platform for entrepreneurs has recently been launched. Currently we’re only offering it to alumni of startup accelerators. http://forceforthefuture.com/founders-first/

Conclusion

There’s a lot of uncertainty in many of our lives now, but I love it. Many of us have nothing to go back to, no work to return to, just the opportunity to take the projects and relationships built over the 6 weeks as springboard for the next few years of our lives. It’s easy to get scared by the uncertainty, I still fall victim to it from time to time, but I know it’s really just a sign I’m taking good risks. While it’s comforting to know what life has in store, the predictability is antithetical to impact and growth.

A few nights ago Eddie (Harran) was hopping around in the cube with typical exuberance saying, “I wish could just work with you guys for the rest of my life” “What’s stopping you?” “Well, nothing!”

This is only my 2nd or 3rd public speech I’ve given, excluding participation on panels, but I hope to do more in the future. Unfortunately due to time constraints and the density of the content I wanted to cover, this speech required written prompts. Expect future talks I give to be presented more dynamically from the heart.

A full post and transcript of the speech is here.

Max Marmer’s World Future Society Speech 2009 from Max Marmer on Vimeo.

The argument that colleges expose you to things you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is not that compelling a value proposition because it is not very hard to find new things that are interesting.

You need to be selective about the 20% of your time you spend entertaining new ideas that are interesting but not related to your core passions and work. Ideally you’d like everything that’s interesting but not in your core circle to have the potential to become one of your core skills.

It becomes one of your core skills by being developing it enough to put you in the top 25% of people.

Personal Example:

Why do I watch so many TEDTalks then?

I want to reduce what I don’t know I don’t know and it gives me a lot of conceptual ammo to formulate new ideas and frameworks about the cutting edge.  And understanding the cutting edge is one of my core pursuits.

Should other people watch TEDTalks who don’t have a desire to be on the cutting edge? Yes, but they probably shouldn’t try to watch as many as I do. Their watching should be more targeted and focused on the talks closely related to their core interests.

The “why” and “how” questions are much more interesting and elevated. But as a basic rule of thumb if someone only asks ‘what’ questions that’s probably the only kind of questions they can answer without reflecting for the first time.

Why are you focusing on what you are lately? You went surfing yesterday? How did you learn to surf? How did you finance your trip to Europe? Why are you studying physics? Reframing your go-to questions in conversation from “what’s” to “why’s” and “how’s” will make the conversation more insightful. I’m not sure if it will make you more likable, though. It will for the people who actually reflect on their actions and will be happy they finally have a chance to share.  But it probably doesn’t do any damage to ask someone who doesn’t reflect on their choices and actions, because they will either take it as a challenge and engage, or they will shrug their shoulders and the conversation will effortlessly move back to “what” like nothing happened. So in some sense it will be a selection mechanism for meeting other interesting people.

“What” also seems to be a question that is subconsciously egotistical. After the questioner receives an answer he has the feeling that he knows you and what you’re up to and can share it with other people. That person who was previously masked in uncertainty can now be put into a box and the lid can be sealed.

Personal Anecdote

When people at my high school asked where I was going to school and I told them I was taking a gap year, they immediately asked, “Oh where are you going?” While I will be traveling some during my year off it is not my focus. My focus is on number of entrepreneurial pursuits and learning from “Real World University”.

The path I’m taking is unconventional and the unexpectedness sometimes seemed to spark people out of rut that the only viable path the future held was AT LEAST 4 more years of boring school work before doing anything interesting. My response injected a tinge of uncertainty into their worldview, which slightly intrigued them, but only because it was a box they needed to fill. I felt most of the time these inquiries from my peers were insincere. They didn’t want to know how or why I’m doing what I’m doing, they just wanted to resolve their uncertainty. Most of the time I indulged and gave a watered down mundane answer, “startup stuff”. I saw the wheels turning in their head, “Oh technology, okay, I wouldn’t want to do that anyway *remain on course, nothing to see here*. And we both went on with our day.

But one time in English class I saw just how much tension is created when one of these boxes is left ajar. We were in breakout discussion groups and the conversation wondered to where we were all going to college and then it was my turn to share. And I thought these were people whose perspective I actually wanted to hear, but I knew I’d be interrupted due to time limitations of class and if I started telling them what I’m doing but didn’t finish, the box would be as good as closed and they wouldn’t ask me about it later. So I told them if they really wanted to know what I’m going to be doing, they could ask me about it outside of class. But they wanted me to tell them NOW. “Just tell us! Max, C’mon why are you being so difficult! It’s really not that hard.” They were laughing not yelling but in a very annoyed kind of way. Eventually they got so loud that the teacher asked what was going on and almost in unison said, “Max won’t tell us what he’s doing with his year off.” After they wouldn’t accept my offer to talk about it after class I had been speaking in abstract provocative platitudes to mess with them. “I’m leapfrogging 6 years of life” “I’m proving competency not signaling it” etc etc.

The uncertainty was pulling at their heart strings. I kept offerring to tell them more outside of class but they didn’t actually want to know, they just wanted to close the box.