Student loans, failed interviews, regretful job experiences, attempts to measure creativity … they all can lead one to break down in tears. Certain other elements of social existence can add on to this, things you may not immediately consider: “friendships,” “experience,” and “growing up”. Personal conditions are the key here, and there is no one external factor that truly unlocks the potential one holds. The rise of the internet, and also its bubble, has enabled autodidacts to learn more than they ever could have in human history. And yes, this also applies to the have-to or technical degrees. Welcome to the era of cyber-education, an age where Youtube displays the best lectures that the best professors has ever given in a lifetime at the click of a button. The platform also offers knowledge freely to anyone in the world, just like Twitter offering free alpha to traders, investors, thinkers… In many ways, Vitalik was the exception that proved the rule, crypto is a savage space where young prodigies are likely to have similar issues to child actors. It is a controversial topic that should be brought to the public attention. Overall, it depends on maturity, personality, company ethos, expectations, internal vs external pressure… all of that leading to different outcomes. The recruitment process in Crypto is doomed, but there is no other way around it. Just a pinch of luck and you will find like-minded builders that will help you run away from the cage of “expertism”. In many ways, “expertism” is a disease that has already infected many corners of modern life, and traditional media sites are the best example. But the productivity game is way more involved than that. The know-all critics are also starving for knowledge in the information era, they just don’t have what it takes. Their self-proclaimed victory is far from being true. Nobody cares about the badge of authority, specially in an era where freedom-speech pitches for the most influential social media site are reprimanded after showing its own signs of decay and proving its owners wrong without fear of betrayal. Almost-never heard degrees perhaps don’t deserve a place when it comes to filling the gaps that we can detect in any given industry. Sometimes, it even appears that incompetence is shown on purpose. Maybe it all goes back to the fundamentals, to the shared common good of knowledge for the sake of curiosity satisfaction, regardless of observers and the image we portray for the sake of being observed. Job preparation, indeed, is just not viable when it comes to innovation and job roles that appear on the go. Coding is not innate, it is just a set of skills that leverage thinking with the goal of solving a certain problem. Yes, it is that simple. Education is not a numbers game, neither is it a chaotic environment of finger-pointing or blaming for the sake of having something to say. Work in silence, and let the drums be the whistle. Furthermore, there is a blurry difference between teaching online, learning in public, or being wrong in public. Not all of those are zero-sum games, and they share almost no yield among each other. Anyone can teach by learning in public, but at the same time, journals and impulsive note-taking can be a distraction for unconscious pattern recognition, which kills intuition and invalidates all binary decisions. Beware the man of one book. Beware the man on metrics and experts of statistics. As time moves on, one has to feel comfortable removing emotions from the way to make decisions in life and start thinking about the long-term consequences of decisions that were made unconsciously, whether in an intuitive or an impulsive manner. Excess data floods one’s own mind with noise. But there will also be a random noise caused by inevitable variation, that’s why the analogy between poker and trading only works for those who have never played poker seriously. That’s also the reason why most traders do well on their simulation accounts and then fail to execute when real money is at stake. In ‘fact,’ part-time traders could do better off not only in health but also in monetary terms compared to the mental pressure reflected by 10 monitors pointing at the tired eyes of a trader. Learning in public makes no sense when the audience does not have the full picture of the actual product/idea. It overlooks the achievements and progress of more advanced people while inducing newbies to become ambitious and compound their mistakes while being disoriented. Same for investing narratives. Take a simple idea and take it seriously. Taking this seriously means recognizing that edges are incredibly valuable. The edges and alphas require complex skills, such that the potential for progress can be not only accessible, but also learnable for anyone, regardless of their economic or socio-cultural conditions. Decentralized Education Confidence in public schools is at historic lows and new generations no longer trust the old antiquated system. Home-schooling is no longer in the lurks at a remote slacker’s house. Apprenticeship, indeed, is collaboration, aka a win-win and feedback-driven experience. Mentorship, in its own, is not an excuse for asking others to tell you what you have to do. Instead, it is full-blown alternative to the legacy learning methods eschewing media or influential corporations. Online first, and physical next. That’s the only way to leverage and scale the potential of network effects. Each individual goes straight and to the the point. If that’s the end of the rabbit hole, what is there for you to lose? Others missed it and will FOMO in later. Crypto and full-time don’t add up. It is not about time measurements, nor is it about timing. It is all about building a true inner metaverse inside our minds. I don’t know if it is one-dimensional, 3D, or 4K, I know that it comes from within and I want to be surrounded by like-minded people, whether they bought a house in their dream’s land, they are still at their parents’ place, or they are digital nomads. Full-time leads to misconceptions, it is time to move on and find apprenticeship in the small sprints that turn our lives into a marathon. One can target the maximalist social movement of the hodlers. Killing the software protocol that guides them seems unfeasible at this point in time.The cyberspace already has a digital currency, when decentralized education? When one-dimensional and transparent switch from work and life? Previously published here.
