Making Progress

Drawings from my past keep showing up on Facebook. It’s a little surprising for me to see some of the pictures I had done years ago. In my memory, I’ve always drawn pretty much the same as I do now. Such is not the case though; I’ve improved over the years. Progress happens so slow that it’s imperceptible. In my art, I can’t feel any improvement from one picture to the next. Nevertheless, progress happens, and all we need to see the fruits of our labor, is the right perspective.

Here is a picture drawn my senior year in high school:

Here is one drawn last week:

Being born with talent would be a lot easier, but being ignorant of so many things myself, I find it more encouraging that skills can be learned.

Not so Common Sense

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

— Isaac Newton

Basing an education on experimentation alone at the expense of collaboration and reading is like nipping at the heels of a giant rather than standing on his shoulders. The 10,000 hours required to become an expert will be fruitless if performed in a vacuum. If when we look for greatness, we also hunt for the giants whose shoulders the great stand upon, their genius and talents largely demystify to us and can become our own.

The reason for this is that discovery is inherently difficult. This is often true even if the discovery to be made seems like common sense in retrospect. In fact, as I will demonstrate, just because something is easy to understand, it does not mean that it is easy to discover.

A lesson in art and discovery
To demonstrate the difficulty of discovery, I’m going to teach you a quick art lesson covering some basic principles artists who attempt to draw realistically must know. You will learn a little about linear perspective. Then, we’ll take a closer look at who discovered some of the principles of perspective and who used it. More importantly, we’ll examine how some of the principles that I’ll teach you in just a few paragraphs were missed by great minds like Rafael and Leonardo da Vinci.

As an aside, one thing I love about using art to teach about learning is even those without art training can evaluate art pretty well. While a person with no art training may not be able to create the illusion of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface the way a master illustrator does, she can still evaluate whether or not a three-dimensional drawing is convincing. A non-expert can’t look at algebraic equations side by side and intuitively decide which one is correct in the same way. To prove the point, let’s get started. See if you can decide which of the pictures below is the more accurate painting.

Pretty easy, right? Something is off on the picture on the left. Even if you don’t understand why, you know what is correct when you see it.

There is a reason the picture on the left looks odd though. It is because the artist painted the picture without the knowledge of the rules of linear perspective. Linear perspective is the theory and methods an artist uses to create a convincing three-dimensional illusion on a two-dimensional surface.

While there is a lot of detail to the theory to help with measuring, proportion, handling circles in space and the like, the basics are pretty easy to grasp. I’m going to give you the basics of one-point and two-point perspective for the purpose of this discussion.

The main principle that governs parallel lines in perspective is the principle of convergence. Essentially, parallel lines that go away from the viewer will always converge at a single point, called the vanishing point. In one-point and two-point perspective, any lines going away from the viewer will converge to a point on the horizon line.

In one-point perspective, this is usually demonstrated with the example of railroad tracks. If we use a transparent box, as in the example below, you will see that there are three line systems. One set of lines runs vertical, one set runs horizontal, and one set of lines converge at the vanishing point on the horizon. Because there is only one point of convergence — only one vanishing point — this is called one-point perspective.

Two-point perspective, as you would surmise, has two vanishing points. There are still three line systems, but if the box is tilted at an angle to the viewer, two sets of lines move away from the viewer. Each set of lines still converges to their own vanishing points, and the vanishing points are still located on the horizon line.

I hope you agree that this is relatively easy to understand. Even with my love of art, though, I didn’t know this until I was an adult. I wasn’t taught perspective in school, much to my artistic detriment, but when I was 23 I finally got a book on the subject and fixed the problem. It took three days of studying and experimenting to change my art ability forever. While I didn’t understand the finer details at the time, particularly with handling circles in perspective, I had the basics down pretty well.

It didn’t matter that I drew for years prior to reading the perspective book. Experimentation alone wasn’t enough. I’m confident that I would never have discovered the principles governing perspective on my own. But, you may think, “you’re just not that smart.” From me, you will get no argument on this point; however, even if I were that smart, I would have to be smarter than early Renaissance artists to figure perspective out on my own.

Getting from point 1 to point 2
Prior to the Renaissance, artists understood that objects appeared smaller the farther they were away from the viewer. Artists would often draw lines that converged, they just wouldn’t converge where and how they were supposed to. They would guess at the angles and would invariably be wrong, much like in the picture at the beginning of the lesson. Then an architect, Filippo Brunelleschi, in Florence, Italy noticed that receding, parallel lines of buildings from a certain angle would converge into one point. The word began to spread to other artists in Florence who started using one-point perspective in their paintings. It wasn’t spread through writing at first, but through collaboration.

Leon Battista Alberti was the first to write down the principles discovered by Brunelleschi in his book On Painting. It’s still in print today. Once in print, the idea of one-point perspective became common practice among artists everywhere forevermore.

Here is how this pertains to the difficulty of discovery: Even though one-point perspective was discovered, the principles of two-point perspective were not immediately obvious to artists of the Renaissance. As such, if you look at Renaissance art you will see the artists always working around the limitations of their knowledge. They did lots of paintings and drawings using one-point perspective, but never two-point perspective. Whenever they attempted something pictorially that SHOULD have used two-point perspective, they did it wrong.

Point in case: Below is Rafael’s painting, School of Athens. All the one-point perspective is very accurate, but look at how he couldn’t seem to handle the elements that should have been in two-point perspective. It seems that he didn’t realize that all the vanishing points should sit on a horizon line.

This says a lot about talent, how we learn, and the importance learning method. I’m not exactly sure when artists starting using two-point perspective, but from the paintings I’ve studied, it looks like it took nearly half a century. I’ve always taken it for granted that once one-point perspective was understood, it was immediately extrapolated out into two-point perspective. That didn’t happen. In thousands of pages of drawings, this discovery eluded no less than Leonardo da Vinci, who is considered by many to be one of the greatest geniuses of all time. It is important to note that he saw further, much for the same reasons Newton did nearly two centuries later. They both had their giants.

Whose shoulders will hoist you? You get to choose. As I say often, 10,000 hours of effort is required to become an expert. The time requirement alone isn’t enough; it is critical how you spend your time and with whom. Experimentation, collaboration and reading are all required. In retrospect, this is one of those things that seem like common sense. For a long time, however, I didn’t understand how it all fit together. Now I do –” and so do you. Thanks for reading.

Correction

Many times we throw insults around without knowing what we’re saying. For instance, I was surprised to read in a book, Public Education in America that many insulting words are actually intended to be scientific measurements of intelligence. In the book mentioned, I found the following chart:

LEVEL……………..IQ INTERVAL
Idiot……………………….. 0-25
Imbecile……………………25-50
Moron………………………50-70
Borderline…………………70-80
Low normal……………….80-90
Normal…………………….90-110
Superior…………………..110-120
Very superior…………….120-140
Near genius……………..140 and over

All this time I’ve been calling politicians and steroid pumping athletes idiots, when in fact they’re just morons. My bad.

Shark Team

Here is another one Turner colored. I’ve officially been in this business long enough to watch both of the colorists get better than me at coloring. Rather than feeling envy, I find it exciting. When Kyle and Turner started working at OO-RAH.com I was doing the teaching; now I am the student.

Madam C. J. Walker

I was just made aware of another self-educated American that has piqued my interest. Madam C. J. Walker is credited with being the first woman to become a self-made millionaire. (link) Becoming a millionaire is an incredible accomplishment for anyone, but especially so for a black woman in the early 1900s. She must have been quite a woman.

The little I’ve found online is an incomplete portrait of her at best. I’m going to check out On Her Own Ground by A’Lelia Bundles to get a better understanding of her life. (link)

I did find a quote attributed to her in a couple of places that I love:

“There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it for if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard.”
— Madam C. J. Walker

Problem Solving

Consider this quote from “Public Education in America:”

Education is faced with challenging issues and problems.

Five major areas merit careful attention:
1. Problems of state-church relationships
2. Professional negotiations and collective bargaining
3. School desegregation
4. Education of the culturally disadvantaged
5. Dropouts

This list was published in 1966.

Is progress inherently slow? Are these problems just unsolvable? Or is there something else at work?

Outliers and The Exceptions

When I learned about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, I was a little apprehensive. He has built his argument about success at least partially around the notion that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at just about anything. The 10,000 hours principle is one of the cornerstones in the book I’m writing, Expert Power. I was worried that if Gladwell was looking at the same information I was looking at, he would have arrived at the same conclusions. Getting scooped wouldn’t have bothered me from a financial standpoint. Although I will put it in book form, all the information is on my blog for free. Getting the ideas out is more important than any financial reward. So if Gladwell came to the same conclusions, and the ideas got out, it would have made me happy.

Still, if Gladwell came to the same conclusions, I would not have had any contribution to make. That would have bothered me because I do want to make a contribution. As it turns out, Gladwell was looking at some of the same things I’ve been looking at but not all of them. Namely, he and I have been studying cognitive psychology, but most of the anecdotal evidence is different. Also our goals are not the same. Gladwell is studying what makes someone unusually successful, and I’ve been studying how those who did not achieve a college degree became educated. To the extent all the educated people I study have become successful, there is overlap. The key difference though, is Gladwell looks within and at systems to see how environments produce these unusually successful people as part of the explanation of success. I look at people who have been successful in spite of the fact that their environments were less than ideal.

Gladwell conveys how systems and environments favor certain people and not others. Hockey players born in January, an example Gladwell uses, are disproportionally represented among the professional hockey players because way back in little league the cut off date for all the leagues was January. This means that someone born on January 1st is likely to be one year more developed than the person born on December 31st in the same league. As a result, the child born in January would score more goals, receive more coaching, get sent to special camps and so forth. Over time, this small advantage not only persists, it snowballs. The child born on December 31st would have the disadvantage of being one of the least physically developed by virtue of age than everyone else in the league. He would not likely be singled out for all-star teams and would not receive the encouragement to continue. Eventually he quits. The hockey system, as Gladwell points out, allows one group of kids to amass the 10,000 hours of expertise required to become an expert more than it does another group of kids. This, in my view, is useful information; however, this belief in system favoritism can create a dependence on systems and a victim mentality for those not favored by the system.

The whole premise of my writing is to find people who bucked the system. To do this I study those who have become successful without a college degree. The education system and our culture tell us that you need to have a college degree in order to be successful, so it stands to reason that those with a college degree are favored by the system. So those who have succeeded without the college degree are the exceptions. They are like professional hockey players born in December. Gladwell ignores the exceptions and just talks about the trends.

Ignoring the exceptions is a huge mistake. It’s like physicists saying that light always moves in a straight line and just ignoring the fact that it bends around the sun. If we ignore the exceptions we won’t truly understand the rules. When the rules are accurately discovered, there are no exceptions.

I’ve been looking at the exceptions to better understand the rules — the physics of learning — and success as it relates to learning. Gladwell is right: Systems do favor certain people. But I am also right in that this favoritism can be overcome.

As a parent, this is of primary importance to me. I have two daughters, Madison and Sienna. Madison, now seven years old, was born in November. The cut off age for kindergarten is in October. This means that Madison was nearly a year more developed than most of the kids in her class. We would have liked to put her in school a year early, but the school system wouldn’t allow it. We decided to home school her for a year because she was clearly ready to start to learn how to read and we didn’t see any reason not to teach her simply because she wasn’t in school. As a result, by the time she got to kindergarten she had a head start on all the other kids. Now in first grade, as Gladwell would predict, she is getting assigned extra homework and has been singled out as the “smart” kid. The distance between her academic achievement and that of others in her class is beginning to become more pronounced.

My youngest daughter, Sienna, was born in September. This means that she is going to just make the cutoff for the school system. Even though her cognitive development tracks about on line with what Madison’s did at the age of three, when Sienna gets to kindergarten, she will have had 15 percent less time to develop than Madison did. That means she will likely not stand out as much as Madison and will not receive the extra attention in school Madison is enjoying.

From Gladwell’s perspective, this is just the luck of the draw. He would use a situation like this to explain someone’s success and show that Madison is not a genius and Sienna is not an idiot. Madison is just lucky and Sienna is not. The system favors Madison and creates a disadvantage to Sienna. For someone who is system dependent, this is true.

From my perspective this creates two unique parenting challenges. In school, Madison is constantly being told how “talented” and “smart” she is. I avoid these words like the plague. Instead, I tell her how much I like how she approaches her studies, and I always link her successes with the time and effort she puts into it. The reason I do this is because she may eventually want to develop a skill that other kids do better than her — like in music or dance for instance — subjects she has spent virtually no time on. Compared to a kid from a musical family who has been pursuing these things for a while, Madison may be discouraged from trying if a trait of resiliency isn’t nurtured. Linking success to effort is helping her build that resiliency.

In Sienna’s case, the challenge is also to build resiliency in her but for different reasons. She is going to need more of it right off the bat. As parents, my wife and I need to recognize that the system does not favor her so we need to make sure that she gets the extra attention at home that she is not going to get at school. If she is resilient, she won’t quit even if she starts out in the middle of the pack.

I meet this parenting challenge with the study of learning. What I study, I study for my girls. What I write, I write for my girls. The knowledge contained in my writing holds the tools I’m arming them with. If no one else in the world reads it but them, it was time well spent.

The Magic of Merit
While it’s true, no one becomes successful by themselves, some people have their hands held the whole way, while some have just a push that carries them across chasms of neglect and setbacks that would consume those with the wrong psychology. Frederick Douglass developed his abilities outside of any education system at all. Still, his master and his wife created his learning inertia — Sofia Auld by beginning to teach him to read and Hugh Auld by forbidding it. Although he learned little directly from them in the way of academics, they cemented the will for him to learn. He self-directed his education after that, as he arduously and painstakingly figured out how to read. Lincoln had someone who instilled in him that learning was important. It could have been his step-mother, or a teacher. I’ve argued that his reading of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin had a lot to do with it although that is an educated guess on my part. He only had about a year and a half of formal schooling yet it gave him the learning inertia to carry him out of obscurity. There are people like Douglass and Lincoln that show us that once ignited properly, the desire to learn, an essential component of success, does not extinguish and can be self-generating thereafter. This is what I am trying to teach my daughters. Ironically, teachers should at every stage be communicating to their students that they don’t need teachers. If teachers did this, then when a student winds up later with a bad teacher, no teacher or even bad parents, they still have a shot. Their inner resources are sufficient if properly primed.

What Gladwell missed in Outliers, and I believe willingly so, is the full link between success, opportunity and luck. Namely, he gives luck far more weight than it deserves. In the case of Bill Gates, Gladwell cites that Bill Gates’s school had a computer and other schools in the nation did not. This is true, however, many other students at that same school had access to the computer and didn’t become Bill Gates. Although Bill Gates did, most successful people don’t have such stark one in a million opportunities. It’s hard to look at someone like Benjamin Franklin and Frederick Douglass, for instance, and make the case that they were bestowed by birth with lucky circumstances that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other people didn’t have access to.

Gladwell dismisses this. He dismisses the biography of Benjamin Franklin by writing:

“Lift up your heads” Robert Winthrop told the crowd many years ago at the unveiling of a statue of that great hero of American independence Benjamin Franklin, “and look at the image of a man who rose from nothing, who owed nothing to parentage or patronage, who enjoyed no advantages of early education which are not open — a hundredfold open — to yourselves, who performed the most menial services in the businesses in which his early life was employed, but who lived to stand before Kings, and died to leave a name which the world will never forget.”

In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

This is a complicated couple of paragraphs to unravel but I’ll give it a try.

I agree with most of what Gladwell says here. I agree that the notion of the self-made man is a myth (link to previous post) — everybody has help. What I have a problem with is his notion of “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities.” I don’t believe that opportunity itself is rare. It may seem rare, because each opportunity or break is unique. In other words any specific occurrence that Bill Gates, or Benjamin Franklin benefited from was unique and therefore improbable. In hindsight it looks like a lucky break. That doesn’t make opportunities extraordinary though.

To paraphrase Einstein, the odds of any specific person coming into existence are so small that they are practically zero. But, he goes on to say, it’s best not to argue probability after the fact. I think Gladwell’s argument suffers from this after-the-fact mode of thinking. Just as the improbability of any individual does not make the existence of people rare, the improbability of any specific opportunity, by rule, does not make opportunities rare. Most people simply don’t recognize opportunities or act on them.

When talking about opportunity I think it’s helpful to put opportunities into two different categories so we know what to look for: 1.) Learning opportunities — opportunities to develop expertise and 2). Success opportunities — Opportunities to be successful with one’s expertise. Because expertise attracts success opportunities, these two kinds of opportunities are not only linked but are sequential.

Many people try to skip the learning opportunities and try to go directly to success opportunities. Success opportunities invariably pay well and learning opportunities generally do not. We’re on the lookout for success opportunities all the time while we often miss learning opportunities. The work/reward ratio between the two kinds of opportunities is inversed. When developing expertise there is a lot of work and little reward. When expertise is developed, the work itself is much easier, and the rewards far greater. Without taking advantage of learning opportunities, success opportunities never come.

System Dependence
System bias is the stone Gladwell saddled himself with when he dismissed Benjamin Franklin. I have come to many of the same conclusions Gladwell has, not by dismissing Franklin, but by studying him closely. In addition to the 10,000 principle (link to previous post), I also believe in the social nature of learning and collaborative nature of success.

Gladwell shows how certain systems favor certain individuals. This is true but it is only relevant in so much as you accept what the system gives you. If the challenge is to amass 10,000 hours in an area of expertise to become an expert, and the system won’t allow some to get the 10,000 hours, those not favored by the system need to find or create another way. Being born in December isn’t necessarily a career death sentence to a hockey player. The challenge isn’t to be born in January so the system favors you; the goal is to amass 10,000 hours to become an expert in hockey. Do you understand the distinction? If not my old friend Ben Franklin can help.

Benjamin Franklin had a scholarly bent as a child. He was an avid reader and he was slated to go to Harvard. Then, like now, Harvard was considered the place to go if you wanted to become among the highly educated. His father changed his mind about sending Benjamin to Harvard, citing the expense. Franklin ended up with about two years of formal schooling. The system ended up not favoring Franklin and he was pretty sore about it. When this happened, he didn’t throw up his arms in defeat and say, “Well, I guess I won’t become educated.” No, he found another way to gain 10,000 hours in multiple areas of expertise. Among other things, he created his own school, his Junto, to further his intellectual development. He became renowned as a businessman, writer, scientist, politician and diplomat. All this because he did not accept what the system gave him.

The problem with a system bias is that it forces those scripted in it to look for system solutions — which can create a system dependency. Improving systems should be a part of the solution but it is only a part. Take for instance the trend that Gladwell points out that children with advantages do better than children without the same advantages. This is leading, I believe, to systems approaches that may do harm while trying to do good. Take the Head Start program, which is a program intended to get kids acclimated to academics at an earlier age. Once in kindergarten, the kids from the Head Start program tend to do better than the kids who have not. The same snowballing effect is going to occur. More kids from the Head Start program will be labeled “smart” while the kids who did not get the advantage of the system will get labeled as “not smart.” Let the snowballing begin. If by some bureaucratic miracle we can get every student into a Head Start program the snowball effect will revert to being based on age, only this time, it will be more pronounced as the percentage of age related development gets larger the earlier you start. I’m not saying that Head Start is a bad program, by the way. I’m just saying you won’t likely fix disparities with it. One way or another, some children will get a better start than others. A system dependence can make these early disparities fixed. Children with a late start need to believe that they can develop as fully as any other child. They need to believe in their own merit.

Early development is overrated anyway. Frederick Douglass didn’t learn to read and write until he was around twelve and wrote better than just about any author I’ve ever read. It’s not when you start. It’s how long you keep at it.

10,000 hours
The antidote to the shortcomings of any system is to develop resiliency — to teach kids not just what to learn but HOW to learn. If we affix kids on the notion that 10,00 hours is the key, kids who start out behind know that, eventually, they can catch up and even surpass other students. They just can’t give up. What happens in any given system is that too many kids give up well before the 10,000 hours mark. If the system doesn’t favor them, as the logic goes, why try?

Outliers has author, Seth Godin, talking about the 10,000 hours principle as well. In a recent post (link) Seth states:

In some ways, this is a restatement of the Dip. Being the best in the world brings extraordinary benefits, but it’s not easy to get there.

For me, though, some of the 10k analysis doesn’t hold up. The Doors (or Devo or the Bee Gees) for example, didn’t play together for 10,000 hours before they invented a new kind of rock. If the Doors had encountered significantly more competition for their brand of music, it’s not clear that they could have gotten away with succeeding as quickly as they did. Hey, Miley Cyrus wasn’t even 10,000 hours awake before she became a hit.

Doc Searls and Scoble didn’t blog for 10,000 hours before they became the best, most important bloggers in the world. Molly Katzen didn’t work on her recipes for 10,000 hours before she wrote the Moosewood Cookbook either.

I half agree with Seth. The 10,000 hours principle is a restatement of the dip Seth talks about. I even said so a year and a half ago when I read Seth’s book The Dip (link). I disagree, however, with Seth’s characterization of the 10,000 hours principle. The research doesn’t say that it takes 10,000 hours to become successful. It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. Although expertise can’t guarantee success, it increases one’s chances.

Seth rightly points out that Doc Searls and Scoble didn’t have 10,000 of hours of blogging under their belts to become successful bloggers. To say that they didn’t have expertise that lead directly to their blogging success, however, is simply not true.

Here are links to Doc Searls’s biography (link) and to Scoble’s (link). According to Doc Searls’s “about” page on his blog, he states that in addition to being a marketing, PR and advertising veteran he is:

A lifelong writer whose byline has appeared in OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, The Globe & Mail, Release 1.0 and lots of other places, including (of course) Linux Journal. Some archives are collected at Reality 2.0, which is at my personal portal, Searls.com, which is also home to my consultancy, The Searls Group.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a lifelong writer and marketing guru would do well as a blogger. This, by the way, is a good description of why Seth himself is so successful at blogging. It’s not because he is a great blogger per se; it’s because he is a great writer — a skill he developed into expertise long before he started blogging.

Again, expertise doesn’t guarantee success, but it makes it a hell of a lot more likely. This is what Malcolm Gladwell asserts. I believe he is right. Still, Seth does bring up the point that 10,000 hours of practice does not guarantee expertise. Again, I agree and have written about it before in a post about learning traps (link). I’ll reiterate this point in an upcoming post using examples of Renaissance artists that makes a pretty compelling case.

I recommend Outliers (link) because it will make you think about systems, culture and how it relates to success. If you want to turn Gladwell’s food for thought into a feast, I recommend some additional reading. I suggest reading Seth Godin’s The Dip (link) to understand the role of focus and perseverance. If you’re feeling ambitious, I recommend Cognitive Psychology and Instruction (link), which is a college textbook about what psychologists know about learning. You can also read my musings on this if you like, as this study has been my hobby for the last few years:

Unchain Your Brain: A 5 part series about learning: Link
Open Source Education — Open Source Education — The Key to Meritocracy in America: Link
Your Education Plan: Link
Getting in the Game (this is about education reform): Link

I know that’s a lot of reading. This is exactly the kind of learning opportunity most people pass on — the kind that is a “hidden” advantage only because people refuse to notice it. But there it is. I leave it to you.

School Progress Report

My wife, Wanda, just handed me my oldest daughter’s progress report. Madison typically gets good marks and we are coming to expect them. Although I don’t put too much stock in grades, there is one mark she did well on that gives me the sense that she is on the right track. One portion of the report reads:

The student demonstrates persistent work on tasks even when setbacks occur.

She received the highest mark on this attribute. This is not an accident. Whenever Madison does well, my wife and I always point out how hard she has worked to achieve her goal, be it in reading or another activity. In this way her success is linked in her mind tacitly with her previous effort. We shy away from words like talent that imply innate ability, and show her that she is in control of her development. She can learn the things she wants to learn.

On the bottom of the report the teacher wrote, “HER ART ABILITY IS AMAZING.”

Again, this is not an accident: Link. It is also not something that comes naturally to her. She simply spends more time drawing, and studying drawing, than most other kids her age do. It helps that she has me to guide her, but I can’t make her put in the time — she does that on her own.

Squidoo Turns 3 Years Old

Seth Godin did a post this weekend on Squidoo’s third anniversary comparing the progress of the site to an albatross (in a good way): Link

In the post he writes:

Albatross businesses are great to have but not easy to launch. Rather that the excitement of the big time launch and then the constant promotion and high expense of a typical business, an albatross business mucks around for a while, but since it’s designed for effortless long flight, it gains steam and then keeps going.

I’ve been a big fan of Squidoo from the beginning. It aggregates various Internet technologies. This is important because it can help to make the disparate parts of the internet coherent in meaningful ways. I believe its full potential for education is not yet realized but is on its way.

I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect Seth’s comparison to an albatross is a jibe at an article Micheal Arrington wrote in 2006 predicting Squidoo’s inevitable demise (link). The title of the article is “Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross?” In the article, Arrington makes a play on Seth’s book the “Purple Cow” which is about becoming successful by being remarkable. I commented on the article back in 2006. So that you don’t have to scroll, here is what I said back then:

It’s hard to see the value of some innovations when they are first introduced. This was true even for something as useful as the telephone. People at the time thought it could be a nice novelty but nothing more. After all, there was no infrastructure set up, the invention needed improvement and no one knew anyone else that had a phone.

Then all that changed.

I think the same is true for Squidoo. Unlike the telephone though, which required lines to be run all across the country, Squidoo needs high quality lenses to be developed, which over time, I’m confident will happen.

Will people get rich doing Squidoo? I don’t know. Can Squidoo make a difference in people’s lives? I know it has that power if we use it right. Whether it’s a Purple Cow or not isn’t up to Seth. It’s up to us.

I still believe those words to be true. Even more so in fact. Road maps for education are important. I’ve been studying the resources of Bryan Engram’s lens on character animation for a while now (link). His road map made animation seem possible to me. It is what prompted me to take the 3D modeling course I just finished (link). All the while I have been studying the books Bryan recommended. It will take a long time to achieve the skill level I want, but the road map was the first step. It gave me a path to travel. I treat it like a college syllabus, and I’m grateful to Bryan for creating it. It was relatively easy for Bryan to do yet I don’t think he understands what a profound affect it has had on me and can have on others.

My current project on Squidoo is to create resources for the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) exams online. This is still in progress, but I’ll be linking to them as they become more developed.

My most popular lens is titled “Learn to be in Illustrator” (link). It contains all of the resources no one in my sphere could provide for me as I struggled to learn the craft of illustration. If you are serious about learning illustration, the resources here are a great place to start.

I actually found out about Squidoo from my friend Corey who helped launch Squidoo and still works there. I’ve met a lot of the Squidoo team, although I haven’t met Seth, and they are a great bunch of people. Most of what I know about running an Internet based business I learned from Corey. Here is a picture I did of the Squidoo team for Seth’s birthday at Corey’s request. As it’s Squidoo’s birthday, I thought it was appropriate to post it now:

Happy Birthday, Squidoo!

Book Progress

I’m very close to having a draft of my book done. Last night I met with my friend Corey, who gave me some feedback on the title of the book. Above is a draft cover. The title is a working title at this point. I like it but I’ll continue to think about it right up until I release it. I will most likely do caricatures of the non-degreed learners instead of pictures as well. I have a couple more essays to write and then it’s ready for editing. As a professional graphic designer, the layout and design parts are relatively easy. Learning to write is what I found most difficult. The whole thing is an experiment for me in self-publishing, and I’m learning as I go. Corey has been a great help through this whole process. I’ve benefited over the years from his mentoring and collaboration, and this project is just the latest example of his help. Corey, by the way, is also a non-degreed learner so he truly gets what I’m trying to convey. He is not as famous as Ben Franklin, but he is still an expert in his field. Seth Godin, in his book “The Dip” listed him as among “the best in the world.” Having worked with him, I would say that is an accurate assessment.

Below is the draft intro of the book. The title of the essay was the old title of the book. I think it works well here:

Don’t Need No College Degree

School is overrated.

You don’t need much of it to become educated. Maybe none at all. Yet, in this book I will make a case for learning. I believe such a case needs to be made because the focus in society has shifted from a reliance on the inner resources of the learner to a dependence on external resources of institutions. Such a dependence, which weds achievement to economics, is destructive to those without economic means. With such a world-view, it is inevitable that the poor will remain poor. Without sufficient access to the wealth to pay for access to the education system, especially the part deemed “higher” education, the poor can easily give up — and often do.

The challenge in making a case for education is to do so without making such a case reliant on money. If we spread the message that knowledge is power, and we make the accumulation of knowledge dependant on access to money, the real message becomes “money is power.” This belief is the root of the problem.

Those without money invariably feel trapped by happenstance of birth. Dropout rates among poor schools are at epidemic levels, sometimes over 50 percent. A lack of money, understandably, turns into a lack of hope. Lamenting the loss of financial backing for public schools, and elevating the importance of the vaunted degree as essential only makes the problem worse. A belief in the necessity of outer resources blinds a learner to the truth that the learner’s inner resources are more than sufficient to take him where he wants to go. But the learner’s inner resources have to be activated first. To do so he must believe that it is worthwhile to learn – that knowledge IS power — but more importantly that powerful knowledge can be gained by anyone regardless of income.

Luckily, such a belief is the truth.

Hope is not only here, but it’s been here all along, hiding in plain sight. Hope is in the biographies of those who have developed their intellect without a degree and in doing so achieved greatness. Many have made their way out of poverty and all have made their way out of obscurity. Moreover, they are not only great, but they are the very best of us. They are Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington. They are Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass. They are Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, and Walt Disney. They are Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs. All achieved great things. All are known for their intellects. None attained a four-year degree.

Uneducated and uncredentialed are not the same thing. Scholars can exist outside of the education system and often have. Understanding this distinction is the key to unlocking latent potential — the mission of this book.