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Paul Graham is a kind of teacher.
In his case, he's a partner in Y-Combinator, a finishing school for hackers developing web-based applications. In exchange for their guidance, and seed funding ('rarely more than $20,000'), Y-Combinator take a '2-10%' stake in founders' companies. They claim 'the money is by far the smaller component'. He also writes wonderful essays, some of which are designed to help start-ups.
The biggest difference between Paul Graham and a conventional teacher is that he's got skin in the game.
One of his recent essays is called What Startups Are Really Like. Here's how it starts:
I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months.
So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. This amounts to asking what I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them.(I wish more learning professionals would do this rather than give out Happy Sheets. Why do I hate Happy Sheets? The clue is in the name.)
He received over 100 responses detailing the surprises the founders encountered. And one reporting that 'everything was actually fairly predictable'. This is a fairly meagre success rate for the essays. He goes on to list 19 surprises he encountered again and again in the emails.
He also attempts to discover a Super-Pattern:
One's first thought when looking at them all is to ask if there's a super-pattern, a pattern to the patterns.
I saw it immediately, and so did a YC founder I read the list to. These are supposed to be the surprises, the things I didn't tell people. What do they all have in common? They're all things I tell people. If I wrote a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would say I'd run out of ideas and was just repeating myself.
What is going on here?
When I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup was like I said, but way more so. People just don't seem to get how different it is till they do it. Why? The key to that mystery is to ask, how different from what?Anybody who's helping people to learn at work (or if you're working in a school or university, helping improve students' meta-learning) should think about this. When we ask this question - different from what? - we tend to think in terms of skills or knowledge-gaps. Teaching skills or knowledge gaps is child's play.
Paul Graham identifies his founders' 'different from what?' as being 'different from a job':
Everyone's model of work is a job. It's completely pervasive. Even if you've never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you've met.
This isn't so much a skills gap as a 'model' gap. It's a Story Gap. Most everything that you teach will have an element of Story Gap. (If you think what you're teaching doesn't have a Story Gap element to it, let me know in the comments and I'll see if I agree.) Here's Paul Graham's conclusion:
You probably can't overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work you grew up with. So the best solution is to be consciously aware of that. As you go into a startup, you'll be thinking "everyone says it's really extreme." Your next thought will probably be "but I can't believe it will be that bad." If you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: "and the reason I can't believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a job."Image: idea nicked off Marty Neumeier. If you're reading this far you might like Up the Injunction, which is all about the competition that trainers face from real life. And zombies.
4 comments:
Your story vs. their story?
I used to teach project management to art students, some of them 17-18 colledge freshman. A friend used to refer to them as my "Ducks" because as I talked about things like scope control, there would be a lot of befuddled head bobbing. We did our best to ground the knowledge in real context (actual client projects they'd work on, scenario-based learning, etc.), but I'd always know that a fair amount of the material was still more abstract to them than they could or even wanted to process.
Any number of students have come up to me later over the years and said "OMG - you were so right about that!" or "I didn't think so at the time, but a lot of that has been really useful!"
I like the term Story Gap -- they just don't have that pattern to work with. Sometimes, all you can accomplish is making them intellectually aware, but it just won't be real until they find themselves elbow deep in it.
Made me think of "The Neuroscience of Leadership" by Rock & Schwartz -- have you read that one? I'm ambivalent about their neuroscience generalizations, but the gist of their argument is interesting (can only find this cruddy registration-required link http://www.strategy-business.com/webinars/webinar/webinar-neuro_lead).
Okay -- least favorite thing about posting on blogs is inability to fix typos...
Great link (and I was already registered, so that's cool).
And, I think, worth a post later - but I'll try to summarise what I'm thinking just in case. . .
"The role of leadership is to help others develop the most useful hardwiring." This is a bit like the idea of the Semantic Pause and a good deal of martial arts training. Not brainwashing but 'induction' (not to be confused with what we in the UK call 'organisational induction' - onboarding? - which takes the an employee at possibly their most heightened state of awareness and willingness and wastes it on fire drills and directions to the stationery cupboard).
All these roads lead to #attention and the difficulty/impossibility of teaching it.
I don't really have much to add to this (still thinking about it; what a great post. Made of meta.) but I just wanted to express mad love for these comments.
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