Everyone is solving the wrong problem
You're trying to solve the visible one
Startups think people need to discover them. Schools think kids need more information. Language learners think they need more grammar. Voters think knowing about cognitive biases protects them. They’re all wrong in exactly the same way.
And until you see the pattern, you’ll keep making the same mistake too.
The error has a name. I call it the Awareness problem.
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Mark Zuckerberk. Bill Gates. Sam Altman. All inspirational and nearly nothing you can “copy” from them.
I don’t care what we’re supposed to follow. I care about results, and copying outlier figures leads to zero results.
I’ve heard about the marketing funnels for many years. Things like “Awareness → Consideration → Decision”. I don’t follow those frameworks, they’re useless.
Let me tell you, the fastest and easiest way to make money is to talk about how your audience can solve their problem, even without your product.
Can you do that?
Really, can you? Think about it for a second.
If you can, you have chances to make a million dollars in under a year.
Otherwise, you’re a homeless in the Awareness world.
And it can work, nonetheless. But most companies do it REALLY bad.
Same in education.
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We learn what happened, when it happened, who did it…
Once I asked a teacher why I had to learn physics, while I wanted to spend my time learning how to code products.
“To pass (the exams)”, he said without hesitation.
I knew I was in an ill, terminal system, full of cancer everywhere you looked at.
The only thing I cared about was ANALYZING and CREATING.
I failed several years of mandatory and post-mandatory education.
Why do countries approach education the same way individuals try to learn their first foreign language?
They try to fill your head with grammar and vocabulary.
THAT is, once more, Awareness.
But a language is not grammar and vocabulary.
If you simulate how natives pronounce a language, you can know almost no rules nor words and people will believe you speak really well (excuse me, Mr. Saussure).
I was required to learn English for 15 years, never learned to speak it. Then I drifted to another language, and studied grammar again.
For what?
Babies don’t study any grammar, and yet they speak.
Babies ARE your role model.
A friend started learning the same language, and he crushed me all because he was prioritizing speaking from the beginning. Then he stacked reading to skip the mid-level plateau.
I stole his system, and in one month I started speaking fluently.
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Everyone says politicians manipulate us. And yet, many people seem to forget their head at home when they go to vote.
You once discover there’s something called “cognitive biases”, “fallacies”, find a Wikipedia list.
That’s interesting.
And useless.
Great if you learn what a straw man argument is.
But that doesn’t mean you’ll see it in the future used against you.
If you want to protect yourself from manipulation, you must learn to manipulate. No exceptions.
If you’re unable to set up a straw man argument, you WILL BE manipulated.
There’s a reason why biases exist.
Prejudices are useful.
Yes, you heard that well.
But we all need to wire our reality with defenses.
It gets on my nerves when people say someone is too pretty to go to jail, or when I saw a relative voting for a president of a country based on physical traits and beauty standards (I asked, this is my translation in a more straightforward style).
People read the Wikipedia list about cognitive biases and believe they’re protected.
They’re not.
Indeed the perception of understanding makes people usually more stupid.
It’s similar to when you do social media and get many likes. You feel good about it, and even measure success based on that.
That’s vanity metrics.
Often public visibility leads to zero revenue.
I was talking a few weeks ago to a co-founder that raised over $15M, were making less than five thousand dollars in revenue per month, and was asking me why.
The pattern doesn't change. It just gets more expensive.
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But the real problem of the education system is it believes kids’ brains are empty, and they need to be filled, just like a water tank needs liquid to be useful.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
Intelligence is the ability to understand and create.
The education system has the goal to teach. But I never wanted to be taught. I wanted to create.
We were always misaligned.
That’s why I failed every single year of math in high school, and yet nowadays my job is a lot about logic.
Young people need a goal, not education. The goal itself doesn’t matter much. What matters is movement, and creating.
Can you tell me how many things you created during your regular hours of mandatory education that mattered to you?
Probably not many.
THAT is the problem.
Projects give us a goal.
And projects need to be chosen, even if among a reduced set of options.
I never liked to read, until a teacher told me: You need to read a book. It can be any book, but you need to choose it.
Then I discovered I actually liked to read, and that not all books are boring.
Sometimes people tell me my vision of the world would lead to individuals with limited perspective.
A friend once told me I have the Sherlock Holme’s syndrome. He coined this term, and his interpretation is something like: Having limited general culture and a massive deep knowledge about very specific topics.
That kinda suits me.
I’m the type of person who sees most Hollywood movies as boring, and rather consumes Indian and Turkish movies that none of my friends in Europe will ever watch (mostly due to misconceptions, if I have to confess).
My perception is most people are tied hand and foot because they prioritize belonging to a group. But at an early age, I discovered what it means.
In primary school, everybody was getting obsessed in break time about a small device called Tamagotchi. It displayed a pixel-based animal that you had to feed and so on.
Break time was boring because everyone was playing it. So I wanted one. But my mother didn’t allow me to spend money on stupid things.
A few days later, I finally got one, and went to try it in the break time, just to discover… it was boring AF. And a couple of days later, everbody had forgotten about it.
The thing everyone was chasing turned out to be nothing.
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The only thing that matters is the kind of questions you ask yourself.
Are you more like a “what, when” person, or a “why, how” one?