Welcome to Think Piece, the podcast for founders, creators, coaches and curious minds building the future of online business. I’m your host, Sarah M. Chappell. It’s time to think deeper. Hello, hello. Thanks for tuning in. Welcome back. It’s Sarah. Today we’re going to go on a bit of a journey together, I’m going to take you a little bit behind the scenes of some of the thinking that I’m doing right now some of the curiosities that I am experiencing some of Yeah, some of the stuff that I’m trying to figure out specifically about online courses specifically about what’s not working right now, why we’re having so many problems in programs online. Last week, we talked a bit about the marketing lens of this, right, the lead generation, the really the collapse of lead generation online, and how a lot of these old ways of getting leads at scale are no longer working, you can check that out the episode called the future of online marketing, which was just the last one. Today, we’re gonna be talking about more about online digital products, right, and digital education. And I want to clarify, as I said, this is a little bit of a ride with, I’m just taking you along. As I work on thinking these things through. I am in the process right now of really clarifying my own pedagogical approach, what I think really matters and what I think is really important right now, especially for those of us that teach adults online, in specifically. And that means that I don’t have it all figured out, I’m in the process. This is something I’ve been working on actually is a bigger essay, and probably is a workshop that will teach this fall, I hope, or a course of some kind, but it is in process. So those of you that like it when I come in, and I have like the five steps this and the framework to that and that this may not be the episode for you. And it’s totally okay, you can skip it. Those of you just wait for the wait for the essay, wait for the course where the ideas are flushed out. Those of you that are curious about the questions, I’m asking the sources I’m pulling in the way that I am thinking through these things, I think you’ll enjoy just kind of following me through the thought process. I have notes, I’m not going totally without anything. But I’m gonna be trying to just take you along, as I think this through today. Quick sidenote, before we dive in, I just want to thank you all so much for your lovely feedback. On our relaunch, we’ve gotten really great feedback on the first couple of episodes, I so so I’m so grateful. And if you have enjoyed it, please go leave a review on iTunes or on the podcasting platform of your choice. I appreciate those of you that have left some reviews, they’re really helpful, especially as we kind of reinvigorate the show. It helps new people to find us helps us to get you know, boosted up the search algorithm, et cetera, et cetera. It also helps me feel better about myself. So thanks for that. I’m sure my therapist appreciates it. So let’s start talking about this right.
I’m probably going to title this, no one wants your online course. And that’s something I’ve been saying for years really through a sales communication lens. Nobody wants the thing. No one wants an online course no one wants to sit on zoom all day, right? No one has ever desired this. What we usually want, right is the experience of learning. Maybe if we’re people who love to learn which I am. But what people mostly want is the outcome, right? They want the thing that becomes possible, because they’ve learned something they want the skill to they want the want the skill, they want the outcome, they want the result. This is especially true for adult learners. And this is especially true of education at this moment in time when education has become especially higher education, a vocational training, that is extraordinarily expensive, but is deemed to be required to get a good job. Right education has not always been as directly linked to jobs in the way that it is now, especially at this kind of adult level of learning, of having skill development kind of outsourced to educational institutions, instead of being something you actually learn on the job. That is, that is a shift. That is something that I think has really become much worse over probably the past several decades. And it’s nothing we’re gonna get super into today. But it’s important to note that when we’re working with people who are coming to any education online, they’re steeped in this right in this belief that there has to be a clear ROI from learning. Conveniently, even though it’s a little bit of a devil’s deal, it’s much easier to sell stuff with a clear ROI. So these two things kind of become linked right the consumer expectation I mean, the word consumer here rather than student the consumer expectation of educational process is that they’re going to get something at the end. Again, I am I’m an intellectual over excitability. I do just genuinely love learning. I’m very good at it. I love it. It’s something that I just I’m one of those people. I’m a lifelong learner. So I like to learn, and I like the process of learning. But it’s not inherent right learning in love of learning is often something needs to be taught, it needs to be fostered, right? Even for folks who have a natural tendency towards that you can still not have it developed. And very reasonably, people approach education as consumers, that is how we have been trained, right, you go to the right school, you get a good job. That’s literally the the metric that we approach education with, rather than this idea of it being exploratory, a place for personal development, a place to learn how to think or things like that, this matters, because when we start to create online pedagogy, if we really want to do right, by our students we’re often doing so we’re often doing something that’s counter to what they think they want. And that tension, which I’m completely comfortable with, as you get to know me, if you don’t already, I’m often working in contradictions, I’m often working in tension, I’m always holding multiple truths, as as real at one time, you’re, you’re gonna have a very hard time pinning me down into anything, because I believe things are extremely situational, and change moment to moment. And I can also just, yeah, hold multiple truths at once. So I think it’s really true with online education, especially for adults, right, is that we have people who have this desire for learning, and I think they do I really just believe I actually believe everybody has a desire to learn, regardless of the categorizations I just think that’s a natural human thing. We are fingered outers, we are, we are makers of meaning. We are we are learners, inherently, I believe. But we also see right that if people were to spend money on education, they want it to create a certain result, especially for adult learners, especially adult learners who are busy, especially adult learners who have other responsibilities. So the kind of like go to pedagogy kind of focus for adult learners is this like, very clear ROI very step by step, and like this idea that it needs to be immediately applicable to their daily lives. In this kind of reductionist way. If you like go searching around like teaching adult learners, you’ll find this stuff that really talks about adults as if they’re stupid, like, it’s, it’s really kind of wild, this idea that people can’t understand why they would want to learn or can’t like, it’s just a good this extremely like reductionist approach to education. But it comes out of this place where to people being of being busy and overwhelmed. And so the idea that the only way for them to learn is to be very, very practical, right needs to be practically tied back to their immediate life. And I don’t inherently disagree with that a lot of the pedagogy that I draw on is in this very individual approach. We’re going to be talking about some of those people today. But John Dewey, in particular, you know, there is this individual level of approach, instead of this depositing of information that I think actually reflects some of how this like adult learning is approached. But there’s something in the way it’s talked about where it’s like extremely minimizing, and I think a little offensive to people’s abilities to engage with material. And that’s kind of where I’m coming at this today is I think that online education, treats students like they’re dumb. Like, I really think that so much of what we’re drawing on, is approaching people as if they are not smart enough to do this. Right. Now, I say that with this caveat, that if we look through this kind of like the impact of kind of the systemic influences of our time, it’s likely that people are actually having a harder time learning, right? We know that people are really overwhelmed, it would be a complete mistake to overlook the impact of, for example, inflationary pressures on financial stress, stress, being a known factor, I was just talking to my husband about this earlier, in, in actually making it harder for people to learn things, right, like kind of short circuiting your system, making it harder to take in information when you’re in that kind of fight or flight mode and panic mode. So there are these like very real impacts, but at the same time, talking to people like they are not smart enough to learn something is not a great place to begin an educational conversation. I think that online education doesn’t have a lot of faith in its students. And one of the ways this comes up is in this not only this dumbing down in terms of the learning process and what specifically we’re teaching, but also in the way that we do teach, for example, when we see that people are having a hard time with attention span things, and I’m gonna get into this a little bit more. But that especially kind of in this, you know, after the Zoom years, right, people are having a harder time focusing online, there are more and more demands on people’s time. And all that is to some extent real. But we also at this first sign of people having a hard time focus, give up the demand for focus, right, as teachers as educators, which by the way, if you have an online course you are I don’t care if you identify yourself as a creator or an influence or whatever. It’d be really powerful for you to actually recognize that you’re a teacher if you’re making online course. Since of some kind, I think it’s important to claim that role, it’s very easy to kind of like, get out of it. I wrote a whole essay about that at every promise and problems of online courses, where I talk a little bit more about like, kind of like psychology for creators making courses who don’t think of themselves as teachers. But we immediately go to this place of dumbing it down, right of kind of going to the lowest common denominator, okay, people are having a hard time focusing. We need to be more entertaining, right? Like, oh, people watch tick tock all day. That means all educational videos need to be 32 seconds with a dance to lip sync. Right? And there is of course very cool educational stuff happening on tick tock, I think of course of planet money guy, my favorite one there, right. There’s a lot of cool stuff happening there. But the idea that all education needs to fit within this edutainment. A word I’m going to be picking hate. I hate that. I was like, what just an embarrassment to both of those fields. That everything needs to be edutainment is this race to the bottom, where we actually are making it easier for people to no longer focus, right? We’re not asking people to show up with respect for themselves with respect to the process with respect to what they’re trying to learn with respect for their own fucking time that they’re dedicating. Instead, we’re saying, Oh, no, we think you can’t possibly do this. So here is the shortest sound bite. Here is the most simple version. Here is the game of five versions of iOS. I really loathe this like ping gamification, get a tag when you do this thing. If you’re also terminally online, and like I am, you probably saw the woman who went viral last week off of TikTok for being an NPC, a non player character and getting making bank when people are giving her like little like little bites of corn and shit on TikTok brilliant woman is the hero of the internet this week. But what we’re saying is we’re basically treating people like they’re that like, like, you’re a video game character, and you are not able to actually make your own decisions or take responsibility for what you choose. So we have this whole system right around like, okay, gamify it dopamine Hackett, like all these tips and tricks, and I think if you as an individual student want to use those things, you know, I know a lot of folks who are neurodivergent who have attention challenges have a lot of stuff that they do to help them focus when they choose to. But I think the choice is really important. And that can be a collaborative process between a teacher and a student, definitely. But this, this whole thing of Yeah, little bells and whistles and like, attention grabbing stuff.
It erodes education, because we’re starting from this baseline assumption that people are too stupid to learn. Like I really I fundamentally think there’s like a deep disrespect for students and for consumers in the online education space that I really want to interrogate in question. So we have this issue, right? Everything is being in this kind of like, dumbed down, and then maybe better language for this. Again, as I said, I’m working out these ideas, you’re watching me think it through real time. I don’t love that kind of language. I think it feels really harsh. But that’s what it feels like to me. And so we have these two things, right? We have this kind of gamification, ever no one, everyone’s attention span is terrible. So let’s just play into that which just, again, we don’t have to do that. We don’t have to encourage people to keep sliding down, the inability to focus. I would venture that education is actually a place where is a really powerful place to help people rebuild that skill, actually. But that might be something we need to work on more. In addition to that, right, a lot of online education do, perhaps just to these format issues, is essentially the banking model. So this is an idea that comes from Paulo Freire, who wrote pedagogy of the oppressed, I recommend reading it, it’s like not a hard reset the easiest read, but it’s not like hard, hard rated fairly short for kind of academic educational text. And he talked about the banking models, essentially, this idea of depositing information into students, right, there’s a very one way approach to education, where the teacher is just giving you stuff, stuffing you full of info. And if that if that resonates with you, right, it’s probably because you probably have that kind of education most people do. When we look at something like common core and testing in the kind of conservative approaches to education, especially in the United States with this dreary kind of metric rubric thing that we’re very into. That doesn’t give a lot of wiggle room for teachers to actually develop curriculum. I’m talking more now about like middle school, high school stuff. You will start to see that like this banking model, is this still the default model and Pharaoh was writing in the 60s? I could be mistaken about that it was a while ago. His work is also very similar in that sense to John Dewey, who was also saying that you need to take the student in Are there like situation into account right like that? These are not things that are fixed points. So when we look at online education, we can see how the banking model really is predominant, right? Even in educational situations that include the opportunity for dialogue, which is something that ferry really says is a requirement to education. And I tend to agree that really is I think, at my core, I am a, like a dialectical teacher. I teach through questions, I teach by opening doors that people have to walk through and figure out in my best in my best state, right, but I do fall into the banking model online, which is one of the reasons I’m so interested in this. But we look at this right? We see a lot of courses are step by step right how to do this very specific thing in this very narrow focus, how to set up a dashboard, how to use notion even how to launch a course, right, these things that can be formulaic. And as I said, at the beginning, we fall into this because first of all, it’s easier to sell. Second of all, that’s what consumers say they want at least right to have been trained to want, right? That that is an enculturated desire. It’s not inherent that we approach education that way easier to sell. It’s what people say they want. And it’s also easier to teach. Instead, if you can teach a step by step method, Do this, do this, do this, get this. Right, it’s far more replicable at scale, which is the key piece of online education, right online education, we are always talking about being at scale, helping as many people as possible as once this this kind of massive focus on volume, which as I spoke about last week, I think is going to become a really big issue due to the marketing and lead generation challenges of our time. I’ve also talked about this through some other lenses and other places. So if it sounds familiar to you, this is probably why. So I think that part of this challenge is that it does feel like students want to be deposited into life, but they’re actually having a hard time engaging more deeply and more actively engagement is a real challenge right now. And that might be to some extent, because of the passive training that we have in terms of how we interact with content online. You know, there’s something I don’t have kind of the, the, I don’t know, experienced a backup beyond my my observations. But I really do believe that there’s a passivity that the internet encourages, especially with the speed with which we consume this edutainment and other kind of social media style entertainment, or passive consumption becomes the default, that’s very hard to overcome when you get somebody into a classroom setting online. Because a lot of the mediums are the same video, audio written text on a screen. The medium is very similar to how people are consuming this other information in social media settings. And I think it encourages that passivity to continue. And I think that really, at the end of the day is the biggest challenge we have right now is right? How do we get dialogue back into education online? And there’s a few issues here. First of all, I’ve been talking about this with some of my clients, I’m not really sure that engagement isn’t necessarily the best metric for educational success online. I think when working with adults in particular, it’s really important. Anything’s proud. I mean, honestly, I think it’s true of children too. But that’s a whole other conversation kind of outside of my scope. I think it’s really important for the adults to say what success is to them. Right. Like as an educator, especially when we’re in this kind of consumer driven setting. I don’t think it’s up to me to tell you what you should get out of my program, what how you should deem success, I have my own things that I like to see in my programs, right. For example, when I run a cohort that teaches people how to launch, I want them to launch. Like, for me, if they don’t launch or they don’t do the thing, I don’t view that as a success. And that program tends to have the very successful high success rate by my own standards. Because it’s such a clear metric, there’s a binary you launch or you don’t right, which again, comes back to what I said earlier about kind of reduction is education, and how easy it is to sell things that have these clear results. But that piece of engagement, you know, that may not be really the best metric. But we have to then help our students create their own metrics. And this is a place where I often don’t think about it until later when I’m teaching. Because it’s not until I realized that no one’s doing what I want them to do that I’m like, Oh, I didn’t help them set their own success metrics that they could go towards. So we’re all kind of operating in this loose place where I’m assessing based off of something that they haven’t actually consented to be assessed on. So I also think that that piece of engagement is interesting because we have to look back at the passivity and how we’re increasing it. The place of online education as a scalable education model necessarily reduces face time with teachers. It’s impossible, essentially to scale an online education product without getting rid of it. do that without getting rid of feedback. If you are apparently scaling it, you’re not really you’re just hiring more teachers and more coaches, you’re just creating a school, right? I think most people who have scalable online programs really just have schools. But there is this kind of tendency towards a much lower interaction than you would have at a school, the course is reflected in the cost. But we lose this thorough really
tangibility because so many things are recorded. It is all remote if we’re talking about online education. And again, it’s in these mediums that we’ve become accustomed to engaging with in this very passive way. I think I actually want to just pull in, you know, I am a big fan of the work of Byung-Chul Han, who is a German Korean philosopher, and there’s this great interview with him from a couple years ago at artreview.com. I definitely recommend just search beyond tool Han Art Review, you’ll find it. I really like it because it really synthesizes a lot of his philosophy. And his books are great. They’re only like 60 words. I mean, 60 words, 60 pages. They’re really short, but they’re super dense. And this is a really great way to kind of break into some of his philosophy. But one of the things he says in this that I really love is digitalization, D materializes, disembodied, and eventually strips away the substantiality of our world. It says, you know, it also eliminates memories. Rather than keeping track of memories, we amass data and information. We’ve all become info maniacs, this info mania makes objects disappear. Okay, so we started to talk about this difference between information and objects. And there’s a book that he wrote about that. And his dish digitalization of life essentially, you know, he really critiques through this lens of how it has become information and how it has become flattened in that sense. And I think that that applies here. Because so much of what education really is, is creating memory is creating context is essentially located in place and time. And online education necessarily strips the embodiment part of education. And this is the thing that people have been trying to solve for years. You know, if you go over to Udemy, or Coursera, and you look at some of the highest ranked courses, you see people like doing this song and dance, and they’re recorded, and they’re like, you know, they’re really, it’s like, they’re really there with you. Except they’re obviously not it’s so fake. It’s so curated. it on the opposite side, right? We see people launching courses that are not curated at all, to them, and a microphone, maybe a slide deck, maybe just their face, it’s essentially a really well organized podcast, and there’s value in that. But again, it’s dematerialized, right, there’s no material, there’s no they’re their recordings make this really clear. But even when we’re in a place, like a zoom call, or some other place where we have interaction, we’re still approaching it often through this D materialized D physicalized. lens. And it’s something that I’m really starting to, like hook into, is how much that I think education requires a certain level of embodiment. I think that the separation of information from the physical lived experience of how you get that information is a huge problem. No, the one of the issues we have, you know, is talking a little bit about kind of diverse learners and people who are challenged by, by FOCUS Online, which honestly is most of us, like, I’m not gonna be like, these are other people like, this includes me 100%. And one of the issues with it is that there’s this lack of accountability, right. And a lot of people do need accountability to do hard things, I think that’s fine. And developing that as like a personal skill to hold yourself accountable to your goals, and your vision is a great skill to develop. But it’s also okay to need external accountability. One of the problems is that, you know, accountability really comes from a spatial orientation. It comes from the space that you’re in, you’re accountable to your location, you’re accountable to where your body is, you’re accountable to time, essentially, it’s hard to be accountable to a recording, right? It’s hard to be accountable to a space that is transcending time, which as cool as it sounds, and it’s something I’ve often often really loved about working online is this fact that time is so fluid online, and so nonlinear. It’s hard to root into accountability in the absence of the body in the absence of space. So how do we create kind of this emergent and I think what I’m ultimately getting at, like autonomous education without the accountability of space. So I went to a high school that I learned much later was kind of radical and how it taught it was different than what I had experienced. But I didn’t realize until honestly, a couple years ago how radical it was. It’s at my school, we sat around these big wooden tables that were specifically designed so that you could see everybody’s face. So you could see their eyes and the teacher sat with you, everyone’s on the same level around this kind of oval table. The best ones, of course, had tons of great graffiti on them. Thank you, thank you to the past students who gave us something to look at during class, because this isn’t to say you couldn’t be bored even in even rooted in space and time. But you’re sitting there with people around the table. And all of our classes were discussion based. Now there were things we got up and did right. And science had labs, for example. But everything was discussion based, everything was emergent. We had homework we had reading, we got had math, these like horrific math problems, y’all. I’m actually not bad at math. But I love this teaching model. But for me for math, it was so hard. I did so poorly in math in high school. And then of course, went on to do very well in college, where the mortar war kind of like traditional educational approach there. But the the idea was very much that it was emergent, right, we would read something we’d come in, and we would talk about it, right, we would develop ideas. And the teacher did guide, a teacher would add a prompt, a teacher would redirect a teacher would facilitate, of course, and they of course chose the the material we were engaging with and framed, how we engaged with it, that everything emerged from our discussion. That was how we learned. That’s how we did history. That’s how we did science. That’s how we did we’d so little kind of straight like somebody at the blackboard teaching us in high school. And when I try to come online, I see myself try to replicate this, right, this sense of emergence and autonomy, the sense that the student actually has the inherent drive to move forward. And then if we can create the right environment, that they will do that. But the environmental creation online, that’s the place I keep getting stuck. That’s probably where I’m gonna leave off today, because honestly, I’ve been rambling for a while. But I think that’s really the question I wanted to dig into. You know, Dewey talks about that, about this careful curation of space. And I was reading this article. Honestly, not very good. A couple a couple articles and weren’t very good. This week. I had some interesting ideas. And what about Black Mountain School and the relationship between Black Mountain School and John Dewey Black Mountain School was an unaccredited kind of radical school in mountains of North Carolina in the 30s and 40s. Had a lot of artists come out of that space. It’s very famous. Quick sidenote, this is just me being snarky, but I saw someone say that essentially refer to I don’t know, Facebook and Twitter as being like, I don’t know, Harvard, or USC or something. And substack as being the Black Mountain College have said, I said black folks called Black Mountain College, Black Mountain College of like online spaces, I just have to be honest, y’all. substack is not the Black Mountain College of online spaces. It’s not the Black Mountain College of Social Media. I don’t understand how something rooted in critical pedagogy and that had no funding and was democratically organized. And yeah, anyway, just to continue my ongoing substack rant. Sidenote side note God, do I have to get on substack? Driving me nuts. I’m not I’m not I’m not above it. I’m not above using substack. But I really don’t want to, we’ll see if it becomes a requirement for online space, in the same way that social media has. So anyway, right? Black Mountain College. And it’s talking a little bit about like this, this curation of space and how important it is, and very talks about this as well. This is this idea of like, the space being important is something that I think people think a lot about for early childhood education, like, like, kids need these bright colors and easy places to explore or focus on many Montessori style where the space is really carefully curated in order to create these things. When it comes to adult education. Right? Often we’re just like in a classroom with like, like a shitty classroom somewhere, right? Or in a shitty online space. So that is ultimately the question I’m gonna kind of leave us with today, as one of these pieces I’m trying to figure out is how do we create the space online for that innate, if latent learning ability to emerge for our adult learners. And the places I’ve seen the most successful with us do a couple things that I think are actually a little radical and counter to how a lot of people are teaching online right now. First of all, often they do not have recordings of classes. Live events are not recorded. This is a tough one. I have often found that offering recordings is a great way to get higher conversions. Right. Again, we see that sales and pedagogy don’t necessarily link. It’s the easiest objection for somebody to not join a program is because they’re going to miss a session, right? So from a sales perspective, it makes a lot of sense to offer recordings. But from a learning perspective, I think it’s really a mistake, doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. But I can’t stop thinking about the fact that I think that’s a mistake, I think it is not actually increasing accessibility in the way people think it is. Now, if somebody has, for example, a learning disability, or an accessibility challenge, and they need recordings for that reason,
that’s a different situation. But the for the people who essentially are going to use that to not prioritize the class, because that’s what happens. I think we’re doing them a disservice and ourselves, right. And I’m also I’m a student, too, right. So I understand what I’m actually talking as a teacher, as a student, both I’m talking as both, I think we’re doing a disservice. I took a class A little while ago, where nothing was recorded, unless you had to miss part of the class, in which case, only the portion you missed was recorded, it was only available for maybe two days or something really, really brief. And nobody else got the recording, it was just the person who missed it. And I really loved that I didn’t miss a single class for an entire year, there were 12 sessions, I missed none of them. Right. And that piece of not having it available via recording is a forcing function for people to show up. And I don’t know that, again, that engagement, which whatever, whatever the fuck that means, is a great way for us to assess success. But I do think that showing up is probably helpful for learning. And one of the ways we can do that is to say this is live. That’s it. They’re not only there’s plenty situations where that’s not necessarily required. And I do think self study courses continue to have a role to play in the space. But being a lot of these kinds of cohorts, or the kind of hybrid models, where there is coaching or feedback or community building, and those things are happening live, but it’s deprioritize because of the recording. So I’m not I’m not saying I’m gonna stop offering recordings, I haven’t gotten to that place yet. But I’m kind of close. Again, unless there is a an accessibility issue. For somebody, like for an individual, I don’t think I’m gonna I like I really kind of want to pull the plug on him. And so there’s that sense of space, like we have to be in space together. And if, if it needs to be emergent, right, we also probably need to do more teaching on how to engage with the space. And this is a place where I often fall short, because it’s not until I’m in something that I see the particular problems that a particular group is having. But at the same time, if you kind of going into something halfway and saying, oh, no, we need to change how we engage. Of course, you can redesign a space, but it’s harder. So I think more about how do we set people up to use spaces appropriately? How do we set them up to be embodied in their space, even if we’re engaging online, and remote, I think is something that’s really exciting to think about. And I think that third thing I’m really excited to think about is how can we do more emergent education? And how can we make sure people get the information they need without anticipating the outcome, right, without dictating the outcome, it is very easy to teach that way online, because that’s what what it is what sells is way, way, way, way easier to sell something with specific outcome so much easier. And I also find just as a kind of a side note there, I also find that students kind of have a habit now of getting overwhelmed when there are options, that when when things are not fixed, I get a lot of a lot of anxiety back from people. And usually we can work through it. But if it’s an open door, an open loop, if it is a an open possibility, there’s a lot of anxiety that emerges. Your the indoctrination really screams that there’s one right answer one next step. But of course, there really is, especially in business where I help people, right, there’s like never a right answer. So I think that we can try to open loops for students minds and create questions. But they, I think that that anxiety is really, really hard. I think the last piece here really is how can we help people to rediscover their own curiosity. And I suspect this actually starts by challenging the assumption that I’ve had throughout this where I’ve said that the easiest thing to sell is something with a really clear outcome. If we start the conversation from this place, that in order to get sales, we have to have a distinct outcome. I think that that pre frames the educational experience in a way that closes it down, right that that reduces creativity and reduces curiosity. I’ve had the immense fortune in a lot of my programs, especially the longer ones to see people really flourish into curiosity and see students start to self organize, which is my absolute favorite like that’s truly My dream is to create the space where people still start to self organize. They You start to create groups for themselves, they start to create events together, they start to do all sorts of cool stuff that has literally has nothing to do with me. That was like my ultimate goal was like you guys go forth right there. They’re taking their agency, they’re taking their curiosity, and they’re growing with it. But if we start the process like the sales process from this place of fixity, of course, right, how can we expect the educational process to be different? So I guess it comes down to what’s the purpose of education? This is something we might disagree on. You might be somebody who says Actually, yes, right. Education needs to produce specific results. It needs to be quantifiable, it needs to have a demonstrable impact on somebody’s income, for example, in order for it to be valuable. To which I would say, Nope. I would say no, I don’t think that’s true. And I think the most powerful education experiences I’ve ever had, were ones with less fixed directionality, with more exploration. But bringing that online, I think, is really hard. And I think the people that are doing that well are very bold and brave, and I admire them. And that’s kind of what I want to figure out how to do more for myself. I don’t know if we got somewhere today, I warned you in advance. I warned you in advance that I was going to kind of ramble through some ideas, think out loud, help you see the different pieces that I’m pulling in, as I try to make sense of a lot of different experiences, a lot of opinions and a lot of fears. Ultimately, I do believe that we are at a really delightful reckoning point where we already know a lot of what doesn’t work, we already know that we can by charging a lot of money or having small groups or all these different things kind of force function, you know, engagement. But I don’t know if we know really how to be great teachers online, how to create curiosity online, how to encourage autonomy in our students and clients online, especially without the physicality of it in this disembodied information driven space. I’ll keep working on it. I hope you do too. And I hope if you teach online that maybe this will help you question something you’ve done. Question, something you’ve assumed has to be right. As I said, a lot of the stuff that I do, I’m not sure it’s right. A lot of that I think is actually kind of bad. And I’m really, really curious about what I can do differently. Especially now when we know people are busy, they’re overwhelmed. They’re tired, and they probably aren’t watching those fucking recordings. I’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening to think peace. You can read the newsletter, join the community and learn how to work with me at thinkpiece.fyi I’ll see you next time.