Deryk Makgill

Guest hosting Bitcoin.com Weekly in Barcelona!

I ran into Roger Ver today in Barcelona while I was grabbing a drink with the Bitcoin.com team and got to guest host the Bitcoin.com Weekly Show today with him and Mate Tokay off the coast before our cruise departed!

September 7th is a lucky day for me. Last year this exact day I ran into the writer of Braveheart in Hawaii and spent an hour talking to him about the creative process, apprenticeship instead of college, and the backstory of writing the film.

This year, I got invited to guest host last minute on a YouTube show I’ve watched every week since its launch.

My hobbyist involvement in Bitcoin (BCH) is the gift that keeps on giving. As I said on the show, don’t miss out. The space is still so new that the opportunities for everyday people to do big things is massive.

If we taught bike riding like we teach careers

What would happen if we tried to teach bike riding like we teach careers today.

If that were the case, you would go to school for bike riding, but instead of riding the bike:

  • You would study bike theory and mechanics.
  • You would study the history of biking.
  • You would study gender and biking.
  • You would study how the bike is a tool of capitalist oppression.

You’d do all this, but you’d graduate at the end of college and still be unable to ride a bike. As Isaac Morehouse writes:

We’d celebrate and buy them something (but not a bike). Then they’d go out and try to obtain a bike in a highly competitive market. If they were able to purchase one, they’d have to learn, for the first time after two decades of studying but never trying, to ride.

It sounds ridiculous, right? And yet that is exactly how we teach young people to prepare for careers today.

If you are a marketing student, you will study the history of marketing and marketing theory, but you will never do real marketing. If you’re a journalism student, you’ll study the ethics of journalism but you will never publish. And if you are a computer science student, you will study theory and code, but you probably won’t make anything. Predictably, this does not work well.

And yet we don’t need something new. The solution to the problems of higher education is not novel or radical. It is rediscovering the simple truth about learning that we grasp intuitively when we learn to ride a bike: start pedaling.

Full Talk

Atlas Shrugged Day

It’s September 2nd, the day Ayn Rand began writing Atlas Shrugged in 1946, and the first calendar day in the novel.

My grandma sent me a copy of the novel when I was in 8th grade with a note on the inside flap that it would be one of the best reads of my life. It was. More than any other fiction book than perhaps The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged has shaped my philosophy and the practical course of my life.

Since I’ve been writing a lot recently about college, here’s one quote from Rand on credentialism, or what I call “Keating-ization,” in Atlas Shrugged:

Wesley Mouch came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore, of despising men who were in business. The family’s diplomas had always hung on the wall in a manner of reproach to the world because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value.

…In high school, Wesley Mouch had been one of the worst students and had passionately envied those who were the best. College taught him that he did not have to envy them at all.

And here’s one more related passage from the novel:

Dan Conway was approaching fifty. He had the square, stolid, stubborn face of a tough freight engineer, rather than a company president; the face of a fighter, with a young, tanned skin and graying hair. He had taken over a shaky little railroad in Arizona…and he had built it into the best railroad in all of the Southwest.

He spoke little, seldom read books, had never gone to college. The whole sphere of human endeavors, with one exception, left him blankly indifferent; he had no touch of that which people called culture. But he knew railroads.

I like to think of Rand as the anti-academic. She was an intellectual of self-made soul and self-made body. Her “credential” was her mind and its practical application in writing some of the most influential novels in American history and the most important philosophical essays ever.

Do yourself a favor today and pick up a copy. You won’t regret it.

3 ways to show your work process

From Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work

 

There are only two things you need to do to build a great career. You need to create value and you need to signal your ability to create value. That’s it.

Everything else you’re told to do is just some variant of this or distraction. The former you get through study and experience that often takes time and lots of trial and error, but the latter you can start on right now by simply sharing publicly the processes behind you work.

As Austin Kleon writes in Show Your Work:

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share.

If you do that consistently, you’ll find yourself beginning to get opportunities you were certain were closed off to you. Here are three easy ways to show your work process now:

  1. Start recording your screen. 
    If you’re working on a project online, download Loom or another screen-share tool and make a short video recording the process, perhaps providing a bit of commentary along the way.
    For example, my friend Michael Mingnogna, made a video time-lapse of him rebuilding a WordPress site for a client of his marketing business.

    Compare “I am WordPress certified” to “here’s a video I made showing me build a WordPress site.” It doesn’t compare.

  2. Write a blog or social media post.
    Write something small about your work process. It could be a breakdown of the tools you used to complete the tasks, your workstation or work habits, screenshots of a work-in-progress, a tutorial, or some lessons you learned from whole process.
    I’ve gotten a number of offers throughout my career for jobs or client work because simply by sharing small “behind-the-scenes” bits of what I’m working on.

    My friend T.K. Coleman even coined the term “Hollywood technique.”Just like people enjoy seeing behind-the-scenes info on movies that are being produced, professionals and potential employers love seeing it in your work as well.

  3. Help your teachers teach others.
    There’s a reason “what books do you recommend” is always the most popular question interesting and successful people hear from their fans. People want to know what built them. You can do it too.

    Share the books you’ve read that helped you get better at your work, the podcasts you listen to, the courses you took, the events you attended, the tutorials you used, the videos you watched, and the people you talked to. Make the knowledge as public as possible and you’ll notice people start to associate you with that knowledge.

And when you’ve done this, do it all over again. Showing your work process never stops being valuable no matter what stage of your career you’re at.

College won’t make you earn more

I want to cross-pollinate this essay with a dialogue of sorts that I had on Facebook with a reader who argued that the current data shows that college graduates make more money than non-college graduates.

This is actually not something about which I disagree. I think the data does indeed show that college graduates make more money, but I think the interpretation of that data and the methodology of the studies is so flawed that we cannot conclude at all that graduating college generally causes you to make more money, only that it currently correlates to it.

What follows is a fairly short dialogue in which I make the case that claiming the data proves college helps you make more money is like claiming basketball helps you grow taller.

Derek: I’m not convinced there are wage premiums in general anyways. What they’re comparing now is apples to oranges. But regardless, yes only 54 percent graduate in 6 years or less, which is staggeringly dismal.

Protagoras: The literature among labor economics has been pretty clear about there being premiums. The the issues is that they have been flattening.

Derek: I think the data shows something else and their methodology is skewed.

Everybody who can read today is encouraged from a very early age to go to college. Over the last 20 or so years, most of the smartest people went to college whereas not going was often a pretty bad sign you had some issues.

It’s a difference of input and not output. People going to college were more likely to be successful before starting than people who didn’t.

An accurate study would have parallel universes where you take Derek A and put him through college and Derek B and have him not go. Then see what happens.

Protagoras: In other words “labor economics is wrong because I only accept facts in absolutes”.

Derek: It’s the total opposite. Data is open to interpretation. They’re making an absolutist claim from data that can have multiple valid interpretations.

All they’re measuring is “college grads vs non-college grads” If I strictly measured “basketball players vs non players” I could easily conclude basketball gives you a premium on height even though it doesn’t.

I also filmed a video version of this argument while I was in Poland last year.

Data-ism is not science

I think one of the unfortunate products of the Information Age is a sort of worship of data.

While data is indeed important, we fall into silly and often dangerous data-ism when we attempt to use data to make our case without reference to the methodology behind the collection of that data or an understanding of the important of the interpretive process. “Look at that data” becomes a cudgel to win an argument and not one tool among many to inform our understanding of the world around us.

Though my example in the dialogue — playing basketball makes you taller — is ridiculous, the data could suggest that until you interpret it for what it actually means, that taller people play basketball to begin with.

The studies about college graduate incomes that claim to “prove” they make more money are done with the exact same methodology as my fictional basketball study. We should be wary about concluding anything definitive that could inform our decisions about whether to go to college or not.

Does college cause you to make more money?

I don’t know whether college causes you to make more money or not, and nobody else does either. I do however think we can look at several points that suggest college does not have a serious impact on earnings, including the following:

  • Smarter people tend to go to college. Dumber people tend to not go to college. We all know this from experience.
  • It does not appear that most students show many measurable increases in learning or knowledge from their time college.
  • Surveys suggest the majority of employers regard their new hires as under qualified and in need of remedial training.
  • The data doesn’t take into account college debt and lost earnings of time in college (at least 6 years on average)
  • Skipping college gives you a 4-6 year head start on working, assuming other traits are equalized (a college-capable optout as opposed to a slacker or dummy who simply couldn’t get in)

Of course, I don’t think we can make a definitive conclusion, but I don’t think we need to.

Individuals, not averages

One of the things I realized when I was in college was that I didn’t care one way or another what the data ended up showing.

If you base your important life decisions around what “average people with average results” are doing, you’re probably going to end up average.

What proud defenders of the college income data are really doing is reducing individuals to statistic and arguing for being part of the middle, which is certainly better than being at the bottom, but it wasn’t enough for me.

And if being average isn’t enough for you, I suggest you stop obsessing over the data, stop following what everyone else is doing, and create your own path. Life is much more fun that way.

The Real Education Revolution

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on the future of higher education and career launch.

The real “revolution” in higher education is happening, but most of us are looking in the wrong direction at so-called “alternative” programs.

These “alternative” programs are popping up everywhere, often with a ton of media attention. Many of these are good, many not so good,  but none are revolutionary. The “programatic” model, the one that takes 1, 2, 4 years of your life, remains a carryover from the existing university system. They are at best halfway steps.

The real revolution is happening much more quietly. Rather than finding some other program to take the place of school, the people participating in this revolution are asking “why do I need a program at all? Why can’t I create my own program and build my own credential?”

They’re starting businesses, connecting with mentors, curating the best educational resources from all around the world, launching personal projects, getting apprenticeships, working for free, writing books, and developing themselves in novel ways at a much faster pace than a traditional university course or even one of these alternatives allows.

They aren’t shackled to one program, one community, and one syllabus. They have the whole world from which to choose. Instead of purchasing programs, they’re connecting directly directly to the people who are doing the kinds of things they want to do with their lives.

Not only are they getting a world class education at a fraction of the cost, but they’re accomplishing it at an earlier age than we’re typically taught is possible.

Programs of course will always exist, but they will become more and more a la carte over time as people wake up to the reality that they don’t need expensive, lengthy tracked systems to get where they want to go in life.

This is the real revolution and that’s what we’re creating at Pathly. Pathly wasn’t created as an “alternative” to college or any other program or credential.

We’re in an entirely different category altogether and don’t consider the other options “options” at all in most cases because they’re too similar to school.

Most people don’t need 1 or 2 years and a permission slip to start working nor do they need any other expensive and lengthy program that effectively serves as a gatekeeper.

They need highly specific advice and guidance at a few pivotal moments in their career and education, theory backed up by experience, and a creator’s mindset. Everything else is just some variant of the school model in better and worse degrees that costs more time and money than is necessary.

This is where the future of education and work is heading. Individuals, not programs. Don’t miss out.