The Lesson to Unlearn

> If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn't be on the test. It's not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class.

It is the professor's job to decide which parts of medieval history are the most important to learn. Therefore, those are what I need to study.

Maybe not all professors do this effectively—but as long as we're talking about ideals, this is how it should work.

We (Screenhero, W13) may well have been one of the many YC companies PG’s referring to! But instead of hoping there was some test to hack, we were worried that there was some unknown hack out there that we didn’t know. It was quite a huge relief when PG told us something to the effect of “all the successful startups have found their initial grown through just one thing: delighting their users with a great product”.

That realization / confirmation freed us four engineering cofounders from worrying about some “growth hack” we never learnt, and helped us focus on prioritizing our product development through talking to users. We then used Sean Ellis’ “very disappointed” survey methodology (which Rahul @ Superhman recently wrote about) and used it as our North Star to find the few features to focus on polishing.

We got acquired by Slack in 2015, and built out Slack Calls. I left last year, and I’m now in the final stages of launching a new product around super-charged meetings for remote teams (picking up where Screenhero / Slack Calls / Zoom left off), and am using the same principles again. No hacking of tests, just building a product that people want, and using their feedback as the only valuable bit of data in determining priorities. Thanks PG and YC (and Sean Ellis!) for startup principles and methodologies that have stood the test of time.

This makes me wonder if pg has ever read any of the writings of John Taylor Gatto?

Various quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/41319.John_Taylor_Ga...

Not sure I agree with this.

The real world is very much about optimizing for and beating tests.

It might be producing a specific CV or preparing for an interview whiteboard session to land a job.

It might be socializing and networking in a specific way in order to land funding.

The real world does not commonly reward just being really good at arbitrary things. It's almost always focused on meeting a need that someone else has defined, much like a test.

So while I agree with what he is saying directly, to me, testing is a function of filtering at large scale. To a secondary degree, measuring as feedback for that system.

Testing and grades in general are a society level filtering mechanism and is a measuring proxy for how the work force filters for candidates at the entry level. As most know, once you've got about 10 years, most of that is largely ignored at the bottom of your resume.

Entrepreneurs, in the eyes of this system, are deviants of sorts. Hacks who couldn't/didn't want to make it in the system, but turns out that system is not the only way. A non-western example of this are a lot of the families that came up in money in China the past few decades. They didn't make it in the rigor of Chinese school system, but when they said fuck-it, I'll survive by starting something, they were wildly successful.

Controversially there's evidence pointing to education doesn't help people at scale[1]. So that whole structure, debatably, has diminishing returns.

So, I agree with Paul Graham 100%, schooling isn't the only way, and I mean that by - if my children decide they do not want to attend school anymore because they have a plan that, while unconventional, can do great things; Support all the way.