Postcard 24: Teaching
Hello from New York 👋
Two days ago, I heard from Greg Isenberg that he uses teaching as a way to learn faster and go deeper into a topic he wants to become an expert in. He said that by teaching others about community, he became an expert in community fast. He is now setting up a course on Web3 because he wants to become an expert in Web3.
Now the thing is, it's not like he was clueless about community, nor is he clueless about Web3. Greg has dabbled with NFTs and other crypto technology, but he is undoubtedly teaching long before being an expert. For students, the value is that it is much easier to learn from someone who just went through it than someone who is an expert and can no longer relate to their struggles.
In my own experience recently as a Write of Passage Mentor, I feel like I learned an immense amount about writing by teaching others. Also, the mentees tell me that they too gained value from seeing my story, my progress, and learning from someone one step ahead of them. My achievements seem doable to them.
I guess the lesson from all of this is to look behind you and start teaching long before you think you are ready.
A few ideas I've pondered about this week:
I recently went through some of Naval's tweets and noticed he has been iterating on the same stuff since he got on Twitter. Sharing the same ideas about leverage and compounding back in 2010 that he shares now. Back then he would get 10 likes instead of hundreds of thousands but it's worth seeing what the iterations did for him. It's worth going over his iconic thread and see how he has improved and also how he lives what he says.
I shared my story of how I grew up in poverty with my mentees in Write of Passage and how that has made me so risk-averse. Even the notion of putting myself out there used to scare me. I would think, what if I do something that sends me right back to poverty? Of course, this is just fear; nobody became poor from tweeting or writing blog posts. But still, it is not a fear that people who come from that easily get over; I am spending a lot of time helping others with this right now. This tweet by Fahd perfectly captures it.
Speaking of Fear, I have a meme for you this week:
And a photo of my brother and I off onto our entrepreneurship journey. Can't wait to share more with you in the coming months as we keep going down this path.
As always, my inbox is open; feel free to reply to this email if I can help in any way.
Have a great week,
Louie