SD#57: Education, habit trackers and change
March 5, 2023
Welcome to the 57 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Today’s newsletter has an increased focused on education and learning. Our education system has been long ripe for a transformation with our ways of learning not changing for decades. The 2000s technology behemoths transformed the way we shop, communicate, consume entertainment, eat, ride and many other aspects of our lives. Yet education remains untouched.
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. (Society) Higher education has turned into a luxury good: exclusive, scarce, expensive. In 2020, it looked as if an accelerant (the pandemic) and a disruptor (technology) would change this. It hasn’t The middle class and capitalism are the gears that turned back Hitler and AIDS, and the lubricant for the middle class is education. We are now throwing sand in the gears of upward mobility. For the first time, 30-year-olds are worse off than their parents were at 30. Kids aren’t getting into schools as prestigious as their parents’. For many families, this is the first encounter with Technicolor inequality, where being in any cohort other than the top 1% means the leaves of opportunity are shedding prematurely from your family tree. How many in our generation say, about the college we attended, “I couldn’t get in today”? From 2006 to 2018, the acceptance rate among the top 50 U.S. universities fell 36%, and it declined even more among the top 10 universities (60%). Stanford has an admissions rate of 4%; Harvard, 5%. 61% of high school graduates from families earning more than $100,000 a year attend a four-year university, compared to only 39% of students from families earning less than $30,000. However, the cost to attend a four-year university has increased eight times faster than wages in the U.S. What happened? How did the lubricant of our prosperity become the caste(ing) of our country? There are several macro factors, as pedestrian as population growth and the increase in the number of girls attending (70% of high school valedictorians are girls), that are raising demand. But the hard truth is that much of the sand in the gears comes from a seemingly more benign source. 👉 No Mercy / No Malice (Scott Galloway) |
2. (Productivity) There is evidence showing that tracking behaviour (habit tracking) can increase the likelihood that habits will become established, as establishing healthy habits makes it easier for us to repeatedly make the right choices Establishing habits can feel like a struggle, and there’s often a gap between intention and execution. This is why habit trackers are such popular tools to help us stick to our goals. One of the key advantages of using a habit tracker is that it allows you to visualise your progress and identify any recurrent setbacks. This form of metacognition can help you adapt your approach and keep on improving your habit formation strategies. One of the mechanisms through which habit tracking can benefit your mental health is by celebrating micro-wins throughout your personal growth journey. If your habit tracker shows that you have eaten healthily for a whole week or that you got eight hours of sleep for three nights in a row, you can experience some sense of accomplishment before the effects of such good habits start to show. Gradually, as the habit forms, the process will become automatic. However, not all is rosy in the world of habit trackers, and you should not blindly assume that tracking your habits using any method or app will necessarily help you stick to your goals. Some of the aspects that make habit trackers so powerful can also be detrimental to habit formation. The key to developing a habit is to find a way to ensure the desired behaviour becomes automatic. For habit tracking to be successful, it must therefore be simple and flexible, as well as encourage self-control and goal-directed behaviour. 👉 Ness Labs |
3. (Psychology) Was 2022 a much-needed correction to all the hype around crypto? Cryptocurrencies have had a calamitous year, littered with hacks, bankruptcies, and precipitously declining prices. Poor risk management practices and the incestuous nature of crypto trading meant the failure of a single entity (Three Arrows Capital) sent ripples through the entire crypto industry. The summer saw a series of crises, with crypto exchanges and lenders freezing withdrawals and companies filing for bankruptcy, most notably major crypto lender Celsius Network. Among all the doom and gloom, some are also saying that this year’s crypto crash was a much-needed corrective to all the hype that had built up around the industry, and could go a long way to weeding out speculators and charlatans. It’s also increased calls for regulation of the sector, which in the long run could help it become more sustainable. Ultimately, despite the depth of the crisis, many in traditional finance think cryptocurrencies are likely to rebound in 2023, although it may be a slow and gradual recovery. Tellingly, they are predicting that projects, like Ethereum, that can be used to support practical real-world applications, rather than just financial speculation, will be the drivers of growth in crypto’s next phase. 👉 Singularity Hub |
4. (Philosophy) The more comfortable you become in your skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort Cory Muscara meditated 15 hours a day for 6 months and wrote a list of 36 things he learned. Here are a couple I enjoyed: A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit. Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility. The moment before letting go is often when we grip the hardest. The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we’re in right now is why we miss our lives. Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness. There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story. You can’t life-hack wisdom. Do the work. |
5. (Society) There is no correlation between key skills of the future (risk-taking, coping with uncertainty, and empathy) and levels of education and outsider talent (the minorities, immigrants, disabled or anybody that doesn’t “fit the mould”) has been honing some of the most critical skills for the future of work For the last few centuries, “outsider talent” has been honing some of the most critical skills for the future of work. Unfortunately, our educational and corporate institutions still handicap talent with the skills of the past. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book “The Coddling of the America Mind” highlights the focus of elite parents on de-risking and micromanaging children’s experiences in the name of achievement. “Efforts to protect kids from risk prevent them from gaining experience. Such protections come with costs, as kids miss out on opportunities to learn skills, independence, and risk assessment.” This phenomenon is explored in a McKinsey study done last year that looked at the correlation between key skills of the future (risk-taking, coping with uncertainty, and empathy) and levels of education. It found that these skills are completely uncorrelated to education. In America, there are nearly two job openings for every candidate, and according to reports from companies like Manpower Group, the result is a significant talent shortfall. While this may be true, we are missing something else. Major employers continue to be distorted by credentialism and Ivy League education, while higher education continues to rely on outdated measures of success like test-taking skills. These all reveal very little about “soft skills.” 👉 The Hill |
6. (Psychology) All changes, even positive ones, come at a cost, we don’t simply observe change, we change ourselves in the process, and each change recruits our mental and physical adaptive systems All changes, even positive ones, come at a cost. Whether we deal with personal transitions — a new role, a newborn, a new city — or experience the wider societal shifts that impact our daily lives, each change forces our brain to adapt, altering its neural pathways to encode new patterns and reduce uncertainty. This is why change feels effortful: we don’t simply observe change, we change ourselves in the process, and each change recruits our mental and physical adaptive systems. This is why many of us currently feel so tired: these systems are mostly designed to deal with sudden change, not long, drawn-out periods of change. Change fatigue mostly arises when we feel like we’re not in control of the never-ending chaos that keeps on derailing our routines and forces us to constantly adapt. Very often, it is the case that change itself is unavoidable. What we have some control over, however, is how we react to change. Instead of resisting change, adding to the load we put on our adaptive systems, we can strive to accept, embrace, and even foster change in a way that leads to personal growth. 👉 Ness Labs |
7. (Society) Gamifying education could help bridge the gap for new generations to reach their potential Efficacious Edutainment is an emerging consumer category of learning products using best-in-class technology to help people learn skills, knowledge, and values. Technological and cultural change have melded both concepts into a powerful combination with huge potential to educate the next generation and build a massive new industry. Learning, while never easy, doesn’t need to feel impossibly hard and dull. The gap between the stagnant status quo in classrooms and the promise of an immersive future has never been more enormous. Kids spend seven hours a day on social media, and the trend continues to grow when gaming is added to the mix. Big media companies have seen the opportunity. #LearnOnTikTok has over 403 billion views. YouTube announced its Player for Education with two priorities that anticipate the future. They now have a distraction-free player for curated content. They added an authoring tool for creators to make courses. 👉 Obviously the future |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world, I’m saying it helps.””
Walter Mosley
🎁 Fun things to click on:
Get insights and inspiration from this film collection celebrating 5 storytellers who dug deep. Take the journey with them as they explore found footage and photos, cave drawings, pyrotechnics, and even bugs. Work from home desk inspiration. Kings of the underground: the last coal miners of Wales.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom