I'm passionate about the intersection of education and technology and how together we can build learning communities that can have massive impact.
Original post here.
Absolutely fantastic post - there is no way to misread this. There are three things and three things only that matter. Every thing you do as a startup… every feature developed, every strategy, every initiative, every hire… needs to accomplish one of these outcomes.
Original post taken from Cult of Mac.
I find this slightly amusing.. There’s this moniker in warefare.. When a new war starts, the Generals have spent all their time perfecting how to fight the last war. That’s all I can think of when I read AT&T’s CEO’s comments…
Unlimited Data… iMessage… Seriously?
I’m sure that the CEO of a large, public company can’t go up infront of the press and lay out AT&T’s real problems to be dissected by analysts. He might as well have people focus on rather trivial problems.
So I’ll tell you what AT&T’s problem is. I’ll tell you what their CEO should be thinking about, the thing that Apple can do that will EAT AT&T’s lunch, and any of their other wireless carriers.
First, let’s deal with the obvious. No, I don’t think Apple is going to become a carrier. I just can’t see it. They can certainly finance it, but where is the value? So they can control the end to end experience? I think they want to be in the hardware business, not in the business of building out wireless infrastructure. And if Apple simply “rents” spectrum from AT&T or Verizon and simply becomes a carrier from an operating standpoint, Verizon and AT&T still do ok… Not as great, but they’ll still be around.
No, there’s another, larger, looming problem and the carriers don’t appear to see it. To see what I’m talking about, you just need to look at…
ebay… say, what? That’s right, ebay.. The online auction company? Yeah, maybe 5 years ago, but now it’s the online payments company. PayPal is driving all of ebay’s growth.
What AT&T should be worried about is that it’s next massive revenue generating opportunity is going to get eaten up by the Apple’s and the Google’s of the world. I’m talking about using your phone to make payments. Every mobile carrier already has an established billing relationship with each customer. They have payment information on file, their users are used to receiving monthly statements.
Guess who else has hundred’s of millions of credit cards on file now - Apple. And guess who wants millions of credit cards on file - Google. And guess who else has em - Amazon.
If AT&T isn’t careful, they will be entirely cut out of the transaction/payment revenue stream. The days of scarcity are over.. The days of milking every last doller out of an overpriced voice plan or overpriced texts or the new game in town, overpriced dataplans is over. The carriers simply need to innovate - they need to skate to where the puck IS going and if Square has proven anything, payments will be a growing (and very big) market.. perhaps not now, but in 5 years….
Credit for photo/article Audrey Watters from Hack Education via Inside Higher Ed
This will become an ongoing and persistent issue as more and more organizations “rush” to offer online learning resources. It’s what many people don’t realize when they first start an online course. The issue can be described as:
“It’s NOT the AVAILABILITY of online resources that is the limiting factor for most people learning on line. It is the ability for an online course to be STICKY. It’s ability to filter out effectively the people who should NOT be doing the course, the spectators, and out of the people who belong in that course, to create a learning environment that works towards positively impacting the finish rate for an online course.”
At a superficial level, the issue of course is one of accreditation. When you’re working towards college credit and a college degree, every class has external value (as opposed to intrinsic value). Even though you are getting a score and a grade, arguably there’s substantially less accreditation value. That means that you had better be motivated by intrinsic value and that likely requires a higher level of self awareness and self-discipline than most people have.
The world is full of people who want things and much fewer are the people who are willing to WORK to achieve the things they want. It might be a slightly pessimistic view, but I think the biggest challenge for online course platforms like Udacity and Udemy and Coursera isn’t necessarily one of the availability of academic material. After all, that’s a relatively known and quantifiable problem and has been solved many times over in the world.
The real value of an educational learning platform is going to be to what extent it actually can impact the finish value and filtering of students. Can it take transactional data gathered during one course and use it to recommend the next, best course that student should be taking? Not what the student “thinks” they should take, but what would really be useful on an individualized level.
These are the two problems that get me fired up and excited because I think for the large part, the learning platforms of this day and age are focusing entirely on the wrong problem (or at least the most important problem to a student, the problems that will have the most impact).
So when you read through Audrey’s account of what it’s like to take a course at Udacity, keep this in mind. Udacity is definitely a start… MOOC (massively online open courses) are definitely the future, but here are my questions for the people building the platforms for the future:
1) Is learning on your platform “fun”? This might be a taboo word in education, but people across ages have always been willing to put in effort to accomplish something when it was perceived as fun, or disguised as a game.
2) What is the average finish rate on your educational platform vs your competitors. The problems of a low finish rate are twofold. Do you have students in your course who shouldn’t have taken it? To what extent is your platform sticky that it encourages students who belong in the course, but need extra help or motivation?
I think these two problems are very exciting and frame the real problems that learning platforms should be trying to fix. I’ll post more in the future on what I think are the right approaches to solving these hard problems.
For the last year, I’ve had a new found appreciation for questions. More to the point, I’ve had a new found appreciation for asking the right question or at least seeking passionately what those “right” questions might be.
There is a person I know who was a great salesperson. That person became a great public speaker and they know how have a book. The person I speak of is Rory Vaden. He cut his teeth on both sales and motivational speaking at the Southwestern Company selling books door to door. His book is called “Take the Stairs” and it adequately describes the centrepiece of his strategy for success in life.
In a single word, it’s “discipline”. That’s the key. The reason some people succeed and the reason other people do not is it comes down to self-discipline.
I was thinking about this, and I agree self-discipline is important and in fact necessary, but I don’t think it’s the key. I don’t think it’s the trigger. I don’t think that to a person who lacks self-discipline the answer is more self-discipline.. at least not directly.
Because I knew another great salesperson as well. He might have been rough around the edges in the interpersonal skills, but he could sell.. And even better than being able to sell other people is that he made an even more important sale to himself - that he was a great salesperson. The reason that’s important is that he had to learn everything it took to be successful. He wasn’t a natural, at least not how you’d think of a natural in any case.
Now discipline was obviously a requirement, but it was something more. He was hungry. He was determined.. He was focused.
The key, if it was useful to think of there being a “key” to success, is focus. There’s a great movie that I like very much. It’s fanciful and unrealistic, but I like the ideas behind it.. what it represents. It’s called Limitless, and although it’s just a Hollywood movie, I think we can learn a thing or two.
The movie is about our anti-hero who is a self-defeating writer who cannot be describe as anything nicer than a deadbeat. However, due to some untested NZT, he is able to dramatically alter his life path… to live the “best” version of himself.
The key, again was focus. The reason I like focus a lot better than discipline is because one is constrained, limiting and controlling and the other is fluid, empowering and dynamic.
Discipline is always a necessary component of achievement, but I don’t think it should ever be the end goal. It’s a tool in the tool belt, but it’s not what determines what you should build. Focus, I think, has the best elements of discipline and a whole lot more.
Focus is when someone is passionately building something they just know needs to exist in this world… whether that’s a craftsman who is creating some work of art, or it’s an entrepreneur banging away on his keyboard building the next Facebook.
Focus is empowering because it’s motivating and inspiring. Focus (and all of those other things) can come as a RESULT of doing the right thing, of asking the right question. And in reality, I think helping people find FOCUS in their life (instead of self-discipline) would be a much more scalable and sticky way of approaching the problem of a lack of motivation and a lack of a drive for success.
This applies both to sales and career as much as to learning and self improvement.
So to answer the question what drives people to succeed.. I don’t think the goal is self-discipline and again, I don’t think the answer to a person who lacks self-discipline is MORE discipline (talk about compounding weakness on weakness). People on this planet earth have varying degrees of propensity for self-restraint and self motivation. However, I am an ardent believer that EVERYONE on this planet earth absolutely has at least one thing that they can get fired up about.. that when they talk about this thing, whatever it is, their eyes begin to sparkle and they can talk about whatever it is with conviction. Some call this passion, others inspiration. I think the key component here is a crystallizing focus which, when harnessed for good, can lead to not just inspired emotions and inspired speeches, but inspired action and inspired results.
