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How I Built a Six-Figure Business on the Back of Writing Online

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Creating my dream job while working four hours a day.

Speaking at LEAP23 in Riyadh (credits: Mohammad Al-Suraye)

Many online creators complain about how hard it is to make a living from writing online. But if you take a more strategic approach, it can become easier.

Back in 2020, I had a couple of +$5,000 months on this platform, primarily through shallow buzzword articles like this one:

Source: screenshot by the author

This article took me a bit under three hours to write.

Money printing, huh?

But the truth is most earnings from my articles on Medium look like the one below, or even worse.

Source: Screenshot by the author

If I had relied on making a living through this platform alone, I could have never made a living as a solopreneur.

In this story, I share how I built a six-figure business on the back of writing and what you can apply to your journey.

Master These Two Areas to Unlock the Rest

If you want to build a sustainable online business on the back of writing, there are two areas you want to pay attention to — learn how to write articles people want to read and become a subject expert.

Write articles people actually want to read

When you start writing online, you have no clue what you need to do so that people read your work. Many new writers start with an illusion of superiority. They expect their first article to be a hit (including me back in April 2020).

New writers know so little they fail to see what they don’t know. It’s not as simple as having an idea, writing it down, publishing it, and watching it reach millions of readers.

Moving from idea generation to a well-articulated article requires multiple sub-skills you must master. For example, idea generation and selection; headline, hook, and paragraph title writing; editing; reader-centricity; formatting; consistency; and more.

I invested in writing courses and spent hundreds of hours experimenting and learning. (I am now offering a live writing course myself, scholarship application here.)

By the end of May 2020, I had spent around 200 hours writing online, earning roughly $0.07 an hour. I kept going, although I had zero followers and was invisible online.

Becoming a decent writer requires discipline and constant improvement. It’s hard to keep going when no one would care if you stopped. So many writers don’t stick around for long enough.

But if you’re willing to put in the effort, keep learning, and consistently publish high-quality content (I published 176 articles in my first 13 months of writing), you will become a good writer.

But good writing isn’t enough. Most likely, this platform alone won’t generate enough of your income for you to stick around. That’s why you want to focus on a second area.

Become a subject expert

One side effect of writing many writers ignore is that when you share what you learn and know for long enough, people will recognize you as an expert.

My deep-dive articles on learning and education have attracted most of my ongoing clients (more on that in the next section).

So how do you become a subject expert? There are three repeatable steps:

  1. Pick a topic or area that you feel curious about
  2. Learn and read about the topic
  3. Synthesize what you learn in great articles (this requires you’ve mastered the first skill — writing articles people want to read)

When selecting a topic, don’t chase the next big trend. Focus on a topic you feel genuinely drawn to.

Pick a topic or industry that you could imagine working for. For example, I chose education and learning, and Julia Blum chose psychedelics.

Don’t pick your area of expertise before you have mastered writing. Practice the craft with whatever comes to your mind. You want to explore anything that potentially excites you.

In the first months, I wrote about nutrition, relationships, spirituality, and much more. Monitor what you enjoy writing and feel curious about exploring even further. As widely-read blogger Mark Manson says:

“Until you’ve written 100 posts, you generally have no clue what you enjoy writing about or what people enjoy reading from you.”

Diversifying your income streams

In 2020, when the first potential client asked me about my hourly rate, I replied with the only reference point I had — my last student job. (Yes, in 2020, I sold my first 100 hours of working as a writer and researcher for $20/hour).

Less than three years into my online writing journey, my day rate is $1,400 (with a discount for non-profit organizations).

How?

Five months into my online writing journey, I started to receive LinkedIn messages like this one 3 or 4 times every week.

Source: screenshot by the author

I didn’t have a homepage.

I didn’t advertise any services.

Hell, I didn’t even have a fixed day rate.

But the better I became at writing, and the more I published high-quality articles on my key subject area, the more requests filled my inbox. And this never stopped.

I still don’t have a proper homepage.

I still don’t do sales calls.

I publish only a couple of articles a month on Medium.

And yet, I have sold my available work days until the end of July. My projects vary — from writing and research to consulting, project management, public speaking, and advisory roles, but all within the realm of learning and education.

Naval Ravikant says: “You’re never going to get rich renting out your time. Earn with your mind, not your time.”

Online entrepreneurs can indeed become wealthy by establishing systems that make money independent from time. They build products without costs for selling additional units such as books, online courses, media, movies, and code.

But I realized I don’t care about this truth. Because my life became richer the day I stopped optimizing for passive income.

I am fully committed to a few projects aligned with my purpose and long-term goal of creating learning and education systems that allow all learners — independent of their socioeconomic background — to thrive.

Attracting clients through writing has been the key to unlocking this life. It created tremendous opportunities and helped me build income streams I couldn’t imagine when I started three years ago. And I am convinced it can do the same for you, even if your journey might look different.

Speaking at the European Education Summit in Brussels (Source: European Commission)

Final Words

Writing has become and will remain integral to my life. I’m deeply grateful for the insight, people, and projects writing has brought to me. I’ve created a life I enjoy living, and this reality wouldn’t have been possible without writing.

Most likely, writing alone won’t generate an income to live from, but it can open up incredible opportunities and help you create your dream life.

Whether searching for more purpose in what you’re doing, feel as if you have not yet unlocked your professional potential, or are looking for ways to have a higher income, know that writing can be the tool to help you get there.

Writing does not remove systemic barriers and privileges. Timing, luck, and other factors determine whether you can up-level your life through writing.

But when you consistently commit to writing and publishing online, you put yourself out there and showcase your work. If you stick with it long enough and become good along the way, people will recognize you as an expert, bringing new opportunities along your way.

Ready to fuel your career through writing?

Subscribe to the bi-weekly write letter to get inspired, or join the next cohort of my writing online accelerator (scholarship application here).

Here’s How Writing Unlocked a Life I Never Dared to Dream of

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And why I don’t want to live another day without it.

Eva Keiffenheim (Credits: Jana Hofmann)

When I wrote my first article three years ago, I had no idea how writing would change my life.

Here’s my most personal story on Medium so far. It’s a short but sharp snapshot of how I went from being depressed to a life I love living and the role writing continues to play in it.

How I hustled myself into depression

As a first-generation student from a middle-income family in rural Germany, hustle culture was in my blood, slowly pushing me into depression.

At age 16, I spent my summer holidays as a factory worker. (I bought a new phone with the money I earned, which I lost the first week after the holidays).

At age 18, I worked as a full-time postwoman, getting up at 4 AM to deliver parcels and letters.

Before turning 21, throughout my undergraduate degree, I worked my way “up” in part-time jobs — from a hostess to a sales agent in retail, to a FinTech human resource manager, to a prestigious internship on the 91st floor of Shanghai’s world financial center.

2015 at my internship in Shanghai (Source: Author)

At age 22, I hit rock bottom. I hoped to be sick forever, so I would never have to leave my bed again. I gained 10kg in two months. I felt depleted and empty. I entertained the idea of ending my life.

I won’t bore you with the details of the slow recovery (which involved pausing my studies, relying on financial support from my parents and emotional support from my school friends, therapy, and working in India).

But I will share one crucial lesson I learned very early in life: hustling doesn’t lead to happiness.

From the outside, it can seem as if someone has everything when on the inside, they have nothing.

My journey toward a life I never dreamed of

In my early twenties, I didn’t accept and like myself, so I focused all of my energy on excelling in a way validated by society.

I worked long hours not to face the emptiness and insecurity inside myself. Like many others, I used hustling to cope with unresolved trauma.

But thanks to winning the passport lottery and the privilege that goes along with it, I could use my remaining willpower and perseverance to do the inner work.

Facing and working through my trauma led to profound changes in how I work and who I work with.

I still approach work with ambition, and I strive for excellence. I deeply enjoy the work projects I commit to and receive feedback I am incredibly proud of.

But work is no longer the only cornerstone of my understanding of a successful life. I aim for four-hour laptop work days (which works nine out of ten times) to have enough capacity to care for myself and others. As a result, I can show up for projects as my most present, clear, and energized version.

I finally have time to do many of the “one day maybe” things. For example, I developed new skills and passions, such as DJing, delivering a TEDx talk, hosting a weekly podcast with my partner, and volunteering for a community project.

I feel more mental and physical strength than ever before. Not because I am a hyper-productive hustle machine but because I give myself enough space and time to live life at my pace.

My not-so-secret fuel for learning and growing

While writing has not pushed me out of depression, it has fueled my personal and professional development. Writing in public has helped me shape a life filled with flexibility and joy.

It all started in the earliest days of the first lockdown in 2020, when I saw a video on Facebook about a writing course.

A friend shared how she had made $7,000 from a single Medium article. Money was never my key motivation for changing careers, but I felt intrigued.

I took her and many other writing courses and started publishing consistently. From there, plenty of new opportunities and insights evolved, on which I will elaborate another time. But in short, writing online has helped me:

  • better understand my purpose in life.
  • unleash my inner voice.
  • organize my thinking.
  • connect with some of the most inspiring humans.
  • find an activity that brings me into blissful, creative flow states.
  • build a six-figure one-person business.
  • discover some of the most powerful tools and mindsets for living.

Writing has been the key to pushing me toward a life I never dared to dream of. I know my purpose in life. I have a full mind, body, and soul YES to the projects I committed to. I earn more than I have ever dreamed of. I have time and energy for the people I love. I know everything I want is available to me. I am calm and happy, connected with this present moment.

Final thoughts

Whether you are struggling to stay afloat in hustle culture, searching for your purpose in life, or feel as if you have not yet tapped into expressing your voice, know that you are not alone.

Writing won’t fix everything. But writing in public is a potent tool to gain clarity and insight toward a life you never dared to dream about.

Ready to start writing online?

Subscribe to the bi-weekly write letter to get inspired, or join the next cohort of my writing online accelerator.

Audre Lorde Completely Changed How I Relate to Pleasure and Sex

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These revolutionary ideas can rewire how you think about the erotic.

Created by the author via Canva.

When my tantra teacher read out a sentence, I didn’t anticipate how much the words would influence my life.

It was last August, and the sentence was one of those where you need to put in some mental effort to get it. I didn’t.

My brain was fogged from Vienna’s summer heat, and I only managed to save a link in my read-later app.

A week afterward, I read the entire essay. Again. And again. I have read it ten times since. And I discover new layers of meaning every single time.

Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ is one of those timeless essays with the power to change you. Below are some of her ideas that have transformed how I relate to pleasure and sex.

Tapping Into The Most Underrated Source of Power

I remember the moment I started to fear the yes within myself.

It was a week before I turned 13, in the bedroom of my then-best friend. We stroked our skin, and I felt an until-then-unknown heat arising from deep within.

It was in this moment of embodied desire towards another woman that my friend’s mum opened the door — eyes wide open, lips pressed together, her head shaking in disapproval.

I froze.

My deep-felt YES turned into something shameful to be ignored and avoided at all costs.

Audre Lorde writes, “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” She goes on to dismantle the oppression of the erotic in a patriarchal society.

Depending on where you live, there are implicit and explicit rules for acceptable behaviour in sex, pleasure, and desire.

Most societies are organized around patriarchy, with laws and media representation of practices that keep existing power dynamics in place (e.g. sex in a marriage between a cisman and ciswomen), and stigmatization, violence, or laws against practices that threaten them (e.g. free love of whoever they want, including other women and trans bodies).

Forty-five years after Lorde published her essay, cisgender women still learn to be submissive and obedient instead of being self-affirming, emotionally complex, and erotic powerhouses.

And while I feel troubled by the fact that Lorde’s text from 1978 applies almost half a century later, her words also make me feel hopeful.

Because as Lorde writes, “once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered.” Calling out dysfunctional structures and learned behaviour is empowering.

Despite global suppression, our deepest non-rational YES is still there.

“We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.”

— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Before, I was unaware of the erotic as a resource, a replenishing and guiding life force. But, since reading her essays, I started to prioritize pleasure.

Thanks to women who have done this for a much longer and are now sharing their tools, I learned to invite and embrace the DEEP YES within myself.

I am doing practices that teach my brain to connect power and pleasure. I am letting go of shame. I am uncovering what happens if I replace the roles patriarchy has scripted into me with actions guided by what I want to create instead.

I am learning my feelings are the most genuine path to knowledge. I am unlocking new levels of satisfaction, power, and completeness.

Eroticism is a source of female power — and power not meaning power over (as within our Western framework of individuality and independence) but power with others (self-actualization linked with the community).

Unlearning How Porn Fucked Up My Mind

Lorde writes how the erotic is a question of what we do and how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. She argues pornography isolates sex from feelings, thereby abusing the erotic.

In my first few reads, my mind objected. Porn can extend our spectrum of sexual imagination. Some films blend feelings, sensuality, and sex (see, for example, Getcheex or Erika Lust).

But most porn doesn’t.

I must have been around 14 when I watched my first YouPorn video. At that point, I had no sex education from school or my parents (beyond contraception and wrong depictions of female genitals).

I did not know almost all porn videos portray sex (seemingly) optimized for male pleasure, the male gaze. I did not sense that the sex I saw was only one very limited and female pleasure-ignoring form of sex created inside a mainstream paradigm stretching between rape culture and a culture of repression.

The most popular search terms on pornhub, a site people visit more often than Amazon or Netflix, revolve around racialized power dynamics, incest, or sexual encounters with women as objects.

Building upon Lorde’s essay, adrienne brown writes in her ‘Pleasure Activism’ “, While we didn’t create the water we are swimming in, it’s still poisoning us.”

“But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”

— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Lorde helped me investigate how porn has shaped sexual interests and behaviours.

The sexual scripts I learned from porn guided my sexual self-expectations and made me fake orgasms long into my twenties. I pretended to be satisfied, thinking this was normal, while now understanding, I followed scripts robbing any real sexual pleasure.

Lorde’s essay helped me understand how most porn was created from a patriarchal standpoint. These storylines wired my brain around fantasies and desires that are unhealthy for me. I also acknowledge the power of fantasies, as they can contribute to perpetuating existing inequalities.

I have started to retrain my brain around desires that stem from a new paradigm that centres around female pleasure, inclusivity, consensual non-monogamy, non-gender conforming roles, and a broader spectrum of beauty and attraction.

“I have been intentionally working on developing new fantasies. Fantasy is where I first explored the impossible idea that I am desirable. The improbable idea that fat bodies, brown and Black bodies, scarred and dimpled bodies, bodies that hurt and lurch and roll, bodies with hair and acne, bodies that sweat and make sounds and messes — that all of our bodies are desirable. This work has shifted my reality of lovers and my reality of how I see myself and let myself be treated.”

— Adrienne Marie Brown

Not Settling For Less Than Excellence in Life

Have you ever felt you are asking for too much?

Many women have been taught accommodation and obedience, with partners or families expecting them to sacrifice their desires for their partner’s or families’ greater good.

In her essay, Lorde encourages striving toward excellence in the erotic and not misconstructing it as demanding something impossible.

And this goes beyond intimate connections with ourselves or others. The erotic is a form of embodied energy that can inform many areas of our lives.

Lorde writes, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” She invites us to connect with our capacity for joy.

“It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Lorde made me realize that liberating pleasure is a precondition for satisfaction, joy, and excellence.

I don’t fear the yes inside myself, but I invite it. I dare to demand and aspire for what I truly want and not settle for less. I show up as the most empowered version that feels most like me in the context of the reality I was given.

Her words, and the interpretation of her words by brilliant minds such as adrienne brown, Minna Salami, and bell hooks, helped me understand that our power starts from within. Our pleasure and most non-rational knowledge can guide us to our most authentic desires.

I will continue to explore the erotic as power by sharing my deepest desires through my writing and the spoken word, engaging in more activities at a speed that allows me to feel fully (ecstatic dancing, self-pleasure practice and embodied awareness through breath, sound, feeling), and cultivating all my senses, and especially my felt-sense of touch (as opposed to my overdeveloped sense of sight).

Source: Created by author

Final Feelings

Every woman, cis or trans, experiences the erotic and discrimination against it. Yet, the ways of experience differ because of factors like race, class, disability, and gender presentation.

Lorde’s words still hold revolutionary power for all of us, as she shows how the erotic is a form of power that both reveals and endangers oppressive forces.

Organizing your life around pleasure is one of the most revolutionary things to do while nourishing our minds, bodies, and souls.

Ready to bring more pleasure into your life?

Sign-up free for the Pleasure Letter, a monthly newsletter where I share the best resources, reads, and tools for leading a more pleasurable life. If you want to become a fearless writer, sign-up for my free Write Letter.

A Reasonably Detailed Annual Review Guide for Better Health, Wealth, and Wellbeing

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A no-fluff template for living a more intentional life.

Los Muertos Crew on Pexels

I should not compare myself to others, but I do it anyway.

I browse social feeds and see acquaintances mastering the most challenging yoga pose or raising millions of venture capital. I then enter thought patterns of no being and doing enough.

At the turn of the year, it’s easy to get lost in thoughts about what you don’t have instead of focusing on all the things you do have. But not much good can grow from the feeling of insufficiency.

One tool that helps me overcome feelings of inadequacy and start the new year with a deep sense of trust and power is my annual review.

I have done the review for six years in a row, and it has been life-transforming, specifically through two side effects:

  • Boosting self-efficacy— you zoom out to take a more nuanced look at your progress, revealing the factors that contributed to your failures and successes, recognising patterns, learning from key insights, and integrating them into your next year.
  • Increasing intentional living — you develop an understanding of what matters to you; you can see whether what you’re doing with your life is what you actually want to direct your time and energy to.

For example, as a late millennial and first-gen student from a well-resourced country, I grew up in a society that equates hard work with success. I unconsciously learned what’s acceptable (attaching self-worth to productivity) and what’s not (embodying felt emotions). Reflecting on how I relate to work helped me see patterns and unlearn beliefs and habits I perceived as harmful to my well-being and relationships.

This article guides you through the process and questions I use to look at the past, the future, and distinct life areas — from health to work to relationships, wealth, and more.

“My Annual Review forces me to look at my actions over the past 12 months and ask, ‘Are my choices helping me live the life I want to live?’”

— James Clear

Before you start, keep this in mind

I review my review each year and look for ways to improve it. Over the years, different brilliant minds and resources have inspired my thinking, such as Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Sara Blakely, James Clear, Michael Simmons, the free YearCompass, and the book Designing Your Life.

There is no single right way to do it. The best way to complete it depends on how much time you have and what you want to focus on.

Take anything that feels helpful for you and ignore the rest. You might do the entire review or just answer one or two questions.

This is not a test you need to pass — it’s a framework intended to help you wherever you are. So treat it like a buffet, and just take what looks delicious and nurturing for you.

The review is split into three parts — your past, a deep dive into your life’s areas, and your future. The below screenshots are from a template I create (access it free here).

Doing such a review is intense — you’re revisiting your key emotions and lived experiences. It’s normal to feel resistance or tiredness. Take breaks whenever you need them. I like to spread my review over an entire week, completing it a couple of questions at a time. But again — you are the only one to judge how you want to do it. Ready? Let’s start.

1) Reflecting on the past

Starting with open-ended explorative questions allows your most memorable experiences to bubble up. How have you lived your life? What feelings remain? By beginning with an explorative investigation, you allow your

Start with recalling things from your memory. Once you’re done, look at journals, calendars, diaries, and your camera roll, and add anything note-worthy.

Access the entire template free here.

Once you feel your answers are more or less complete, you can stop. Then, if you feel like it, share your highlights and lowlights with a friend, or send kind messages to people that were part of your most memorable experiences.

2) Diving deep into your areas of life

In this part, you take a more in-depth look at each area of your life. If you don’t feel the six life areas apply to you, feel free to replace them with whatever seems more adequate for you.

I’m most happy when I put equal focus on all life areas. I can be in perfect health, but I might be unhappy if my relationships are loaded with unresolved conflict and a feeling of disconnection.

Source: Your Annual Review Template (get the full template free here).

When looking at each life area, it is most helpful to consider three prompts. When answering “What went well?” and “What could have gone better?” I focus on the things you had an influence on — something where my choices or behaviour made a difference.

“Next year’s goals, focus and action steps” implies the following sub-questions: What habits, behaviours, or attitudes will you need to develop or adopt next year? What things or habits do you need to stop doing? Have you developed any healthy habits you want to keep? What helped you learn them?

Look at your overall health and well-being in the past year — how were you physically, emotionally, and mentally?

Which activities left you feeling drained, and which activities gave you energy? Has your health improved, deteriorated, or remained constant? How do you feel about your levels of movement, sleep, stress, awareness, pleasure, and time with yourself? Did you move in ways that supported your strength, health, and energy levels?

It can be tempting to lose yourself in storylines — either on how great you are doing or on how much you fucked up. But neither is true. Try to let go of any judgment and take stock of what you did and didn’t do.

Think about the relationships in your life and the people you spend time with — your partner(s), friends, parents, siblings, and more.

Which relationships gave you energy? Which relationships drained your energy? With which people do you feel safe? Who can you be vulnerable with? When have you felt connected to your community? How have you supported the people you love? Which conversations moved you? What new relationships would you like to bring to your life in the next year?

Consider how you spend your time and energy on work. Use your work emails, your work calendar, or meeting notes as evidence to get a better picture of what you worked on this year.

How do you feel about the role work has in your life? What achievements and challenges are you most proud of? What were your favourite projects? What professional relationships impacted your trajectory? How have you supported fellow workers? When did you feel most and least productive?

Most people live from paycheck to paycheck. Don’t feel bad if you have neglected this part of your life so far. Financial literacy is inherited — if your parents aren’t smart about money, chances are high that you don’t know essential investing principles.

Your annual review is a chance to take stock of where you’re at. Are you happy with how much you earned, spent, saved, and invested? How did you develop your net worth (assets (what you own) minus liabilities (what you owe))?

Knowledge isn’t permanent. Most of what we consider truth today decays within a decade from now. Nothing will benefit you more than learning how to learn and becoming a lifelong learner.

When you look at your year, ask yourself what things you have learned, e.g. through online courses, books, podcasts, or formal training. What was the most helpful thing you learned this year? What skills have you developed, and how did you progress? What do you need to continue and accelerate your desired learning path(s)? What new skills do you want to develop?

Your purpose is a deep understanding of the impact you’d like to make on the world. It’s the fuel behind your efforts and where you spend your time and energy. I find this the most challenging part, and I never felt done.

What fills you with excitement and passion? What can you contribute to have a positive impact on the world and our interconnected beings? What makes your life meaningful? How are you useful to humanity?

Write down your best version of your purpose statement(s). Don’t stress about the perfect purpose(s); you can adapt and change them anytime. You can have as many purposes, statements, and goals as you like.

3) Looking into the future

In this last part of your annual review, you look into your next year. You write from your future self, involving all of your senses.

Where do you live? What do you smell, see, hear, or touch? How do you feel when you wake up? Which habits do you follow? What do you work on? Which projects have you committed to? What have you let go of? What people do you spend time with? What hobbies are you pursuing? What are you learning?

Don’t edit yourself while writing the story — it can be as long as you like. You can do it in your journal, on a piece of paper, in the template, or in a text file.

The more vividly you describe your future life, the more emotions will emerge. And your feelings can serve as a helpful primer for your unconsciousness. This narrative is no fixed roadmap; this prompt invites you to dream and think big. Don’t edit yourself while writing it; try to ignore your judgmental voice as much as possible.

Conclusion

Taking the time to do your review, one question at a time, will help you reveal life lessons and critical insights you can integrate into your next year.

Do it a couple of years in a row, and you self-witness the power of consistency over a long period. You can replace all-or-nothing sprints with a more sustainable marathon mentality.

Whether you have 15 minutes or 10 hours doesn’t matter — the most important part is that you do it. Save the template, schedule in a couple of minutes, and give yourself space for one of the most direction-setting activities you can do all year.

Want to get more helpful tools like this?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven resources that elevate your love for learning and help you live a happier and healthier life.

These 8 Unusual Strategies Helped Me Write Consistently For +2 Years

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And build a loyal online audience.

Photo lya Pavlov on Unsplash

Writing consistently is the most important yet hardest part of building an online audience.

If you’re starting out, you’re writing in the void. You feel as if nobody is interested in your work. You start to question why you’re even spending the time on it.

I’ve almost given up hundreds of times. I’ve spent months in the process, not knowing whether my writing will ever attract readers. I’ve written 40 articles before my first story went viral back in 2020.

Fast forward two years, and I have an email list of +4K subscribers and +27K followers on Medium.

Most writers give up when they don’t see much traction. If you really want to build an online audience, don’t be one of them.

If you can keep writing when no one seems to bother about your work, the odds are high that you’ll attract an online audience one day.

In the last 2 years, I’ve kept writing and improving. The strategies below are the ones that have helped me the most. They can help you stick to writing too.

1. Knowing that attracting an audience isn’t linear

Most writers hope that after they’ve published their first or second article, people will read it. For all of the about 50 successful online writers I’ve talked to in the past two years, this was not the case.

Sinem Günel helped me start with the right mindset — don’t expect anything all before I’ve written and published 100 articles.

I wanted to give myself that range to try, fail and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Because the thing is, success in writing isn’t linear. If you keep writing a lot, you’ll likely experience sudden growth. One of your articles will get traction and tens of thousands of people will read it.

Having the idea of exponential growth in the back of my mind saved me.

I know it feels lonesome to keep writing when nothing happens. You can get anxious, stressed, and desperate. All your feelings are valid.

But if you hang in there and keep up with a consistent writing practice long enough and keep learning and improving (with the strategies outlined below), more and more people will discover and read your work.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

2. Knowing your why

The second thing that helped me become a consistent writer was knowing why I write.

My why changed.

When I started, I wrote a very vague why in my bullet journal: “I want to be a writer. I’ll sit down and write every day.”

Some weeks in, I learned more about what really motivated me and added: “I write because it’s the best learning habit. I want to support others. I write because I want to make a full-time income through writing.”

It doesn’t matter why you start but knowing the reason why you want to spend time writing will help you stick with it in the long run.

You have a lot of competing priorities in your life — your job, hobbies, friends, and family. So why do you want to spend your precious time writing online?

3. Write what you’re curious about

Initially, I forced myself to write about topics that were popular on this platform at that time — productivity, finance advice, and relationship habits.

My writing motivation vanished. Sitting down to write became harder and harder. I almost stop.

It wasn’t until I allowed myself to follow my curiosity that writing became joyful again.

If you’re passionate about a topic, your readers will notice. Within the right framing (great headline, solid introduction, clear and reader-centric story structure), you can make even the most niche topic interesting.

For example, I was deeply fascinated by the Zettelkasten technique and how to apply it in RoamResearch. I wrote a guide about it. The article attracted +16K readers, led to 512$ earnings, and about ten clients that requested a 1-on-1 session to get coached on their knowledge management.

I would’ve never written that article if I hadn’t followed my curiosity.

I still stick to this principle. When I looked at my idea board on xTiles this morning, I thought, “What am I curious about? Which topic would I like to explore?” I then chose the metaverse and education.

Even though your niche isn’t among the popular topics, you can make it work by making it helpful for the reader.

If you want to write consistently, write about what you want to learn or think about.

4. Being your biggest cheerleader

Now, this advice might seem weird. But I’m sharing it because it’s one of the factors that has helped me a lot.

When I started writing, I prepared a motivational audio recording. I talked about why I want to be a writer and how it’ll feel once I’ve attracted an audience. I told myself what I must do daily to achieve this (sit down before work every morning for two hours no matter what).

In the first months of writing, I listened to that audio almost every day.

Self-recorded affirmations can become a powerful motivator. You don’t even have to believe in positive thinking, etc. Recording yourself can serve as a reminder, and anchor, to prioritize what you want to do.

5. Keep on learning

You can only improve your writing if you write. Don’t get lost in reading or learning about writing instead of doing the work.

But once you do have a regular writing habit, learning from the people who’ve already done it can level up your writing practice.

These are the most useful books I’ve read are about writing:

Taking writing courses can further accelerate your writing skills. I took courses by Tim Denning, Sinem Günel, Niklas Göke, and Tom Kuegler. And I’m glad I learned from the people who’ve walked the talk.

But the most important thing is to sit down and actually do the writing.

That’s why I created the outcome-focused online course where you learn and write. In the Writing Online Accelerator, you don’t only sit in front of pre-recorded videos. You’re part of a highly-motivated peer group.

I and two other editors will give you 1-on-1 feedback. By the end of the course, you’ll have 3 high-quality articles online. If you want a free sneak peek into the material, subscribe for my free workshop here.

6. Build support groups and learn from others

To make writing less lonesome, reach out to fellow writers and start a group where you exchange ideas, help each other with headline practice, or even edit each other’s articles.

I’ve relied on multiple slack groups in the last two years, which have been extremely helpful in my journey.

Whenever you read something from the writers you like, tell them. Comment on their articles and share what you love about their work. Connect on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, offer help, and ask for their advice.

7. Have a metalog

If I had to name one tool that has kept me going and improved my writing it’s the meta log. It will support you in establishing a deliberate, consistent writing practice that will make you a better writer.

I’ve invented this tool to improve my writing while keeping my motivation. The meta log is rooted in metacognition, a skill essential for learning, according to educational scientists.

According to research, three steps are necessary for unlocking your metacognition: planning, monitoring, and evaluating.

I’ve built the meta log with these principles in mind, which can help you build a consistent, deliberate writing practice.

Here’s my template:

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

Fill a line every time you finish your practice.

If you use it consistently, you’ll discover a pattern and see which topics flow well and which are the ones you don’t prefer that much.

Three principles for using the meta writing log:

  1. Write this for yourself. It can be messy.
  2. The longer you keep collecting data, the more useful it will be.
  3. Bold your key insights to highlight your critical lessons.
My meta log from April 2020 looked like this. Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

Remember the essence

It’s challenging to write consistently in the long run. But you can build up your unique support system to help.

The following things kept me on my journey:

  • Knowing writing is exponential
  • Being aware of why I write
  • Reading and listening to my affirmations
  • Continuously learning and improving
  • Reaching out to fellow writers
  • Relying on my support groups on slack
  • Having a meta-writing log

Take what feels right and ignore the rest. Not all these things will work. Experiment to find a way that supports you to write consistently.

Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

The Only 9 Tools I Use to Write Great Articles in Three Hours

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They will help you improve your writing process.

Eva Keiffenheim (Credit: Florentina Olareanu/Golden Hour Pictures).

When I started writing online, I thought you need the best equipment and tools to become a professional writer.

I got distracted by all the options for upgrading my work setup. I believed you would need to invest plenty of money to write great articles.

In the past two years, I experimented with all the popular options out there and settled for these ten. Most of them are free, and they help me craft an article in less than three hours. They can do the same for you.

1) This browser extension helps you not get distracted

Writing with full focus is a superpower many people lack. With distractions one browser window away, thinking and writing become a struggle.

In the beginning, whenever I didn’t know how to continue a story, I’d impulsively open a new tab with LinkedIn to distract myself. This wasn’t a conscious choice. Distraction just seemed to happen to me.

The following tool has been very helpful in overcoming the distraction habit. I searched for it after reading Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work,’ and I continue to use it every day.

BlockSite Extension disables websites at the time you want. There must be many similar alternatives, but I use the free version and I love it.

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

What are the websites or apps that distract you from writing? Add all sites that prevent you from doing the work.

I block the below sites 07:00 am — 10:30 am every day so I can focus on undistracted creation time.

Blocked sites from 07:00 am — 10:30 am (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of BlockSite)

Depending on your schedule and work, the sites and timing will look different for you. Once you’ve found the right settings for you, you don’t have to look at it again.

2) An easy way to retain focus and motivation

Do you know that satisfying feeling of completing a task in the allocated time?

With writing, this is tricky. Because unless you define what “completion” means, writing has no end. Similar to an artist painting a picture, you can always improve.

You often can’t anticipate how long it will take you to write an article. Some are more research and thought-heavy and require more time; some (like this one) are easy to write because you already know what you want to say.

A cornerstone habit in my writing process is defining “done” and sticking to it. If you always finish your writing time with the feeling of “I should write more,” it’s tough to keep coming back to it and stay consistent.

If you write too much, it can ruin your motivation. I finish writing before I’m exhausted. That way I’m quitting at a point of deep satisfaction (by flow state and deep work) and I’m excited to get back to my desk and write the next morning.

In my writing world, “done” is determined by undistracted writing time. While I can’t fully influence how many words I type in a given time, I can determine how much time I want to spend writing.

BeFocused is the tool that helps me keep track of it. In essence, it’s a free productivity timer. You have quick and easy access in the toolbar, can track how many sessions you completed, and time your pauses.

BeFocused productivity timer in my toolbar (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of BeFocused)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

How do you know you’ve achieved your writing goals for the day? Set a realistic writing time goal. Then, stick to it.

I write three times for fifty minutes. When I sit at my desk (mostly at 7 am) I open my Spotify writing playlist (more on that later) and click on “start” in BeFocused. This combination signals to my brain it’s time to get into writing mode.

After each 50-minute interval, I take a five-minute break. I make myself a tea or coffee, walk around in my apartment, do some stretches, look outside the window, or clean some stuff.

If you can, don’t check your phone during breaks, but put it into flight mode in a different room.

3) What I do to get into a writing flow

Flow states are your sweet spot of peak performance. It’s where your writing magic happens.

And yet, I used to find it difficult to get into “the zone.” And once I was in there, it was a fragile state. I was annoyed by every distraction. I snapped at my partner when he asked me a question, I was angry at the postman when the doorbell rang so he delivered a parcel, I was even annoyed by birds.

It wasn’t until I bought noise-canceling headphones that my flow states became the new normal.

I got these ones from Bose. I know how privileged I am to be able to spend money on optimizing noise. Likely there are cheaper noise-canceling alternatives that do the same.

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

A steady noise input can help you ease into a flow state. I put them on whenever I start to write. I then choose one song from my Spotify writing playlist and put it on repeat.

Since I use these headphones I get into flow states wherever I am, even in the backseat of a car during a 3-hour drive or in a public park. They help me be in fully focused writing mode whenever I want to.

4) Collect and manage ideas with xTiles

When I started writing, I felt I had nothing worthy to say. I thought I’d soon run out of article ideas. Two years and 300 articles later, I know I was wrong about both.

If you don’t kill your baby ideas but capture them, you never run out of writing ideas. To capture and manage my ideas I use xTiles. It’s a merge of Notion and Miro that helps you keep a visual overview.

xTiles for managing my ideas (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of xTiles)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Collect every idea you have. This will help you save time in your writing process. You don’t start with a blank page but can choose out of an abundance of ideas.

I have a bookmark in my browser reading bar. Whenever an idea crosses my mind while writing, I type it down and add context or links. If I’m on the go, I do the same from my phone.

Your best ideas arise when you don’t expect them. The most important part is to have a capturing tool. With the right system, you’ll always have enough ideas.

5) The lifesaver for non-native English speakers to publish with confidence

“But what if my English isn’t good enough?” is something I often hear from students in my writing course.

I shared the fear. Growing up in rural Germany I never felt comfortable talking in English. But the thing is: many of your readers aren’t English natives as well. For them, it will be easier to understand your articles.

But if you’re still feeling insecure (which I definitely did), the following tool can have your back.

Grammarly suggests corrections for your grammar and word mistakes, helping you communicate effectively and as you intend.

Grammarly’s suggestions for this article (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of Grammarly)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Use Grammarly once your article is ready to be edited. It will improve your articles and ease you from language worries.

I write my articles in Roam and paste them into a language formatting tool and into Medium drafts. I format my article in Medium (headline, subheadline, section headings, correct image attribution, spacing, and a call to action at the end) and then run a Grammarly check. I include all “correctness” suggestions and see whether there are useful hints for clarity, delivery, and engagement.

6) The power engine behind my idea-to-paper process

There are five steps to my creative workflow: seek, consume, capture, connect, and write. Readwise and Roam help me optimize the capturing and connecting process.

Readwise is an online service that imports all your article and book highlights into other software. You can do a ton of things with Readwise, but I mainly use it for importing my kindle highlights into my Roam database. Roam is an online workspace for organizing and evaluating your knowledge.

I used to have an entire workflow around Zettelkasten and Roam system and I still do.

How these tools help you write great articles fast:

I see the Readwise and Roam combination as my curated google. When I write an article about creativity I type # howtobecreative or # creativity I find any related book highlight, article, or personal thought. I tried Obsidian for a couple of weeks but switched back to Roam.

Once you have a clear idea-to-paper process you can write and create faster. You no longer waste time searching for sources. Instead of using my brain to browse through books and digital bookmark notes, you have everything in one place.

7) Increasing word variety with this free extension

Ever found yourself repeating the same word thrice? Especially as a non-native speaker it can be tough to come up with synonyms.

Power Thesaurus helps you expand your vocabulary and increase your word choice. It’s a fast, convenient and free online word bank.

Power Thesaurus helps you find synonyms (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of Power Thesaurus)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Whenever I’m editing an article and feel as if I’ve repeated the same word too often, I highlight the word, click on the powerthesaurus icon and check for synonyms. If there’s a word I like, I use it.

8) Write powerful headlines with the free headline analyzer

Composing great headlines is the most underrated writing skill. You can have the most amazing story. But if your headline sucks, nobody will read your work.

The following tool won’t magically make your headlines click-worthy. And yet, CoSchedule can turn good headlines into great ones. The tool checks your word balance, clarity, reading grade level, and many other factors to calculate a headline score.

Coming up with a headline for this article (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of HeadlineStudio)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

After you’ve written a couple of headline variations, paste your favourite one inside the tool and start to experiment. You can use powerthesaurus (the tool from above) to come up with better words.

Once I have a +70 score and feel confident, I paste the headline into my Roam and start writing. I do this before I write an article as the headline will determine the structure.

9) Format your titles in the right way

Title case is the correct style for article headlines. You capitalize every word except articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, on, for, up, …), and coordinating conjunctions (and, or, but, …).

There are some rule exceptions and luckily, you don’t need to memorize them.

For correct title case creation, I rely on the free Title Case Converter.

Title Case Converter for correct spelling (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of Title Case Converter)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Editing can become a never-ending process. This tool is one step inside my efficient five-step editing process. All you need to do is copy and paste the title to get the correct spelling.

In Summary

While these tools won’t turn you into a professional writer overnight, they will help you write better articles in a shorter time.

BlockSite, BeFocused, and noise-cancelling headphones help you stay productive and ease into flow. Software such as xTiles, Readwise, and Roam, optimize your idea-to-paper process. And lastly, Grammarly, CoSchedule, Title Case Converter, and Power Thesaurus improve your editing process.

But most importantly, use this article as inspiration, not as a blueprint. Pick the tools that seem helpful and ignore the rest. The quintessence to becoming a better writer is to write.

Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

I Used to Run out of Writing Ideas. This Repeatable 3-Step Process Helped.

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A straightforward approach to ideation so you never start with a blank page.

Eva Keiffenheim (Credits: Florentina Olareanu/Golden Hour Pictures)

Every great article starts with an idea. But while ideas are your entry ticket to writing, they can also be a barrier.

Lucky people feel overwhelmed by their abundance of ideas. Others find themselves uninspired, staring at the blank screen.

I was among the latter.

When I started writing online I was sure I’d soon run out of ideas. I feared I’d quickly use up the good ones. I felt uncreative and as if I had not much worth sharing.

It took me months to understand how wrong I was.

Creativity is practice. With the right process in place, you’ll never have to run out of ideas.

The following three-step process is my writing fuel. It has helped me publish more than 300 articles, and reach over two million readers. This structure can help you never again struggle with ideas.

1) What goes in will come out

Most writing consists of living your life and consuming content. Only some part of the process is actually sitting down, writing, and editing your work.

And most importantly, the former determines the latter. How you live your life informs your writing.

Most people mindlessly consume content. They scroll through the jungle of ever-growing content. Occasionally they’ll stumble upon interesting ideas, but mostly they consume trash.

On the internet, consuming trash content is the default option. Unless you work against it, you’ll find yourself in the doom of social media and daily news cycles.

A couple of years ago, I spent two hours a day scrolling through Facebook, reading through newspapers, or listening to news podcasts. It wasn’t until a smart friend told me to replace news consumption with reading books, that things changed.

Digging deeper than the often superficial social media posts will increase your understanding of the world. And it will also help you become a better writer.

By avoiding mediocre content and consuming the greatest inspirational resources, you’ll find yourself writing better articles. Because what goes in will come out.

How to apply this:

Which content are you regularly consuming that’s not adding value to your life? Replace it with better stuff.

Go beyond the content everyone else is reading. There are Goodreads, Gatesnotes, and so many other best-selling lists that suggest what you should be reading. Most of these lists contain books from authors with the best marketing strategy or the broadest social media reach.

If you look at human history, the chances are small that the greatest books were created in the past decade. The fundamental human problems seem to be the same in all ages: Justice, love, virtue, stability, and change itself.

Search, for example, through the appendix of Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a book. Alternatively, ask the smartest and most inspiring people you know which type of newsletters, books, or online articles they read and listen to.

I asked my students at the Writing Online Accelerator to add their most-inspiring resources to an inspiration board. (Click here to get the full board free).

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

2) How to program your mind to come up with ideas

There’s a crucial thing to keep in mind when it comes to ideas: Don’t scare them away.

Be gentle on how you treat your ideas and monitor your thoughts.

If you label your ideas as ‘bad’ without noting them down, you hinder your ideation process. You don’t give your mind the safe space for the ‘good’ ideas to arise.

There’s no such thing as a ‘bad idea’. Here’s how to transform your thinking.

My idea is worthless =► Every idea is valuable.

Don’t judge your ideas while writing them down. Ideas are like raw diamonds, and you don’t know how they’ll turn out until you’ve written the article.

This has been written before. =► This has not been done by me.

Yes, your idea exists in some form on the internet. Unless you’re doing ground-breaking scientific research, many people have written about your idea. But don’t let that hold you back. You’re the best at living your life. You can add your unique perspective to the conversation.

I don’t have enough ideas. =► I have plenty of ideas.

In the beginning, you won’t have an abundance of ideas. But if you let yourself be inspired and treat your ideas well, they’ll arise. The more you create, the more creative you become. The best ideas and connections will arise once you flow into the writing process.

How to apply this:

Say yes to any idea that strikes your mind. Stop worrying whether other people have written about a topic.

You’ve not written about it yet, and that’s the only thing that matters. Don’t be scared to write about the same idea twice or thrice.

You’ll become more specific every time you write about it. Lastly, trust the process. You’ll have more ideas with every article you write.

“Most things have been done, but they have not yet been done by you.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

3) Have one tool to capture your ideas

Once you’re aware of the ideation process, it’s time to capture and store your ideas.

There’s an insane amount of tools you can choose from. At the beginning of my journey, I used Trello. Then I switched to Notion and I experimented with an excel sheet. For a while, I settled for Milanote. Milanote was visually appealing to me, I could use it via my phone as well, and it is searchable.

In April 2022 I discovered xTiles. The platform combines all features I was looking for. It’s a mixture of note-taking and a whiteboard — as if Milanote and Notion had a baby.

My current idea board xTiles (Screenshot by author).

How to apply this:

Experiment, and choose a tool that feels good to you, and where you really going to capture all the ideas. It can be a google sheet, a journal, xTiles, Notion, or any other tool you like.

When choosing your tool, think about: Do you know how to use it? Do you like how it looks and feels? Will you use it every day?”

When you write down your ideas you communicate to your brain that it’s worthy to generate more ideas. If you have ideas and don’t follow them, you teach your brain you’re not doing anything with them. You’ll doubt your ideas more and more. So say yes to all ideas that come to my mind and capture them in a single place

Remember the essence

To never run out of ideas, you’ll need to:

  • Consume inspirational content
  • Treat your ideas well: there aren’t any bad ideas
  • Capture your thoughts: every time an idea comes to your mind, save it on your idea board

Ideas are the magical place where your writing starts. Steal my three-step process to always start in idea abundance.

Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

How Change Starts Within Yourself

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Personal transformation is systemic transformation.

Eva Keiffenheim and Romana Shaikh / Credits: Dominic Regester

Last month, I had the privilege to interview Romana Shaikh at Salzburg Global Seminar — Education Futures: Shaping A New Education Story.

Romana Shaikh is the Chief Programming Officer for Kizazi, which partners with local NGOs who work with government schools to design, implement, and codify breakthrough school models for a deeper purpose of education. Romana is committed to creating and enabling a thriving life for every child.

My questions build upon insights from the global research A New Education Story — Three Drivers to Transform Education Systems. Romana’s perspective connects to the three drivers, purpose, power, and practice, and sheds light on the mindset shifts and actions needed so that all children can thrive.

In your work as an educator and leadership developer, what have you learned about power as a lever for system change?

All systemic oppressions that exist on the outside have an impact on each of us on the inside. Even though I was a speaker at this global conference, able to talk about what I wanted to talk about, I am aware of being the minority in the room — as an Indian Muslim Woman.

A few months ago, at home, in India, “indianmuslimgenocide” was a trending hashtag on Twitter. The increasing violence against Muslims, the increasing felt sense of hate and otherness, has created a sense of powerlessness, of feeling like a victim. There is a fear in my mind, in my body. If I express my voice, what is going to be at stake? Am I going to get attacked for this? Will my family get attacked? Will I lose friends?

Even though my work has afforded me many privileges and so much power, there is this part that continues to feel powerless. Do I really have power and agency in a system that sees me through a single lens of being Muslim? A system that discriminates against this one part of my identity? That fails to see me in my wholeness.

Whatever you do in life, if some parts of your identity are those that are not the majority, you are always looked at differently. The system treats you differently.

That’s why to understand power; you need to understand identity. I saw all these different identities or parts inside me and how different identities shape my experience of the world in a particular way. Many systemic challenges stem from how we perceive our own identity. And more so from the way, others perceive us, which gets shaped by social norms and the access we have in the system we grow up in. The personal exploration of my identities, and the impact that they’ve had on me, helped me begin to see these patterns in the world more clearly.

Before, it always felt like, “oh, this is just something that happened to me”. But what I’m experiencing is not just my experience. Every other person who shares some shades of my identity, some intersections, is probably experiencing the same thing. So, “This is not just my problem. I’m not the only one who’s gone through this” was a big insight. I’m not the only one who has to fight this fight. There are other women and Muslims who’ve experienced the world the same way i have, many have experienced worse. There’s a pattern there.

And then, once you recognise this, acknowledge this, and understand this pattern exists, you begin to question, “why is it?”

When you begin to really drill it down, at one point, you will come to more universal constructs of our identity — gender, race, religion, caste, class, and sexuality. In different parts of the world, there are different constructs. Seeing these in daily interactions in life gave me a lens that helped me to see patterns in the inequity in education.

The question is, what is the rest of the world doing about it?

Can you share an example of this shift in perception?

When I was at Teach for India, I was leading our program. I saw classrooms across urban cities in India and later some rural parts of India as well. Over the years of visiting government and low-cost private schools that were all providing an English medium instruction, I recognised patterns that enable real progress for children. But there were also some schools and classrooms that were just not making the same progress. Academically these classrooms started lower than others; there was more dysregulation or ‘acting out’ of children in the classrooms. Different teachers tried and tried but still failed.

When we started looking outside the classroom, outside the school, we began to see more patterns. The poverty was more extreme, the exposure to violence was higher, the sanitation was poorer, and often there was a larger Muslim population. All this information painted a complete picture of how things are today.

As I’ve looked at data across the country, specifically for Muslims in India, I’ve begun to understand that Muslims in India have been systematically oppressed — Only 17% of Muslims complete Grade 10 compared to a 26% national average, almost one-third (31%) of the Indian Muslims are living below the poverty line, till date, Muslims are denied housing in many parts of the country furthering the geographical segregation which in turn, leads to Muslim ghettos that then continue to have limited access to healthcare, education, or government subsidy.

More recent studies have shown that the Muslim child is most marginalised because of the added political marginalisation the community experiences. So as a Muslim child, there are fewer people around you that have benefitted from education, there is more discrimination you face on a daily basis, and more of your family has been in multi-generational poverty.

You can’t just say ‘it’s a poor person’s problem. The system has made them poor and the system is maintaining that poverty.

With this acknowledgement that so much is at play when you work with children from marginalised backgrounds, the narrative about high expectations in education is one I find quite unfair today. We’re saying to children, “I have high expectations of you; you need to get here.” But then, we’re not giving children any chance to get there. And it’s not just language, it’s the way we see the world, we keep seeing the need for students to work harder than their privileged counterparts.

Anyone who is growing up marginalised knows they have to work harder. The question is, what is the rest of the world doing about it?

Romana Shaikh — Credits: Salzburg Global Seminar/Katrin Kerschbaumer

Romana, you said acknowledging the shared parts of identity started within yourself and continued through a sense of shared experience.

When you talk about ghettoised Muslim communities, it sounds as if starting on an individual level is insufficient because of a larger systemic injustice. What do you think is needed from a systems perspective to be fairer to children in these contexts?

Yes absolutely. Rising from the personal to the systemic is very important. But you can’t have systemic change without a personal change. We have to acknowledge that it’s not right to demand and expect the same things from all children. Because no child starts at the same point.

Before you replicate any school or education system, you have to contextualise. At a systemic level, we need to ask, “What’s needed here? And how does my system need to change to serve that?” And since I’m part of the system, I would need to change for my system to change.

What’s needed here? And how does my system need to change to serve that?

So let’s ask what is needed here. Let’s acknowledge that a child brings into the school and classroom their experience of marginalisation, of poverty, of oppression. A child who works to support their family needs something different from school than a child who is bullied because of her religious identity. A child who is growing up in a single-parent household has different needs from the adults in school than a child who is raising their siblings. All the intersectionalities of their identity are part of their experience which they bring into class.

Then let’s ask how my system needs to change to serve these needs. Our education system has for far too long been a “one size fits all” that focuses very narrowly on a cognitive kind of education — one that’s all about knowledge acquisition and retention. Our children need and deserve more than that. They deserve to be seen and responded to as whole human beings. So when a child doesn’t complete their homework or falls asleep in class or struggles to retain information or doesn’t believe education is important for them, we have to pause and remember everything that contributes to the life this child experiences.

And then, we will realise how the design of schools with their grading systems, their rules of discipline, the rigidity of curriculum and their notion of success need to shift to truly honour and empower each child. This requires us, as adults in the system today, to redefine the values and structures of the school system itself.

It’s acknowledging that an education system is not separate from other systems; we are human, we are whole, and we carry our whole experience with us everywhere. We learn what’s socially acceptable and how to express ourselves in school. So even education needs to see itself in relation to the whole system, in relation to the social system and to the economic system. Then you begin to see the bigger picture and what needs to shift. But this process is not easy.

It’s acknowledging that an education system is not separate from other systems, we are human, we are whole, we carry our whole experience with us everywhere.

Apart from your experience in teaching and school development, you’re also a trained psychotherapist. Based on your insights in trauma work, where do you see the need for a shift on a practice level in the classroom?

My biggest realization during trauma work is that if there’s one thing that’s universal, it’s trauma. It needs the least contextualization. I get goosebumps thinking about it.

The events that traumatize us are different across cultures — but we’re all human and how we experience trauma is very similar. What makes you sad and what makes me sad, maybe different. But sadness for you and sadness for me, feels the same. Because that’s how the body works. And the body is, again, something that’s so fundamental, which none of us learn to take care of. In most education systems — and in what I’ve seen across Africa, Armenia, and India, — you’re taught biology, but you’re not actually learning your own biology.

Our education systems need to create space for us to learn about our own human-ness. How our body works, how our mind works and how we can take care of ourselves and each other.

Trauma happens inside our bodies. It stays there and gets triggered by different incidents in our daily life. We see it playing out in our classrooms every day in the bodies and faces of teachers and children. Every time a child (or an adult) reacts in a way that feels disproportionate, or gets too confused or too scared, that is a sign for us to know there’s more going on in the body-mind than what we can see.

The high-stakes nature of examinations, the achievement orientation, the vast syllabi — we all have a childhood memory of school that has shaped some belief in our personality. At a fundamental level, the way we see children and in turn, treat children needs to shift. We need to see them as whole human beings, each unique in how they will grow and each bringing in a unique story of stress, strength and resilience. And this work needs to start with the adults in the system. They too, carry their own intersectionalities and stress, strength and resilience into the school.

Trauma is a much more prevalent experience than we’ve acknowledged in education.

Our education systems need to create space for us to learn about our own human-ness. How our body works, how our mind works and how we can take care of ourselves and each other.

So would you say a shift in practice towards more social-emotional learning can be a way to bring this knowledge about our own biology into classrooms?

Yes, and no. Much of our systemic injustice is rooted in a lack of social and emotional capacities. And while it’s great that social-emotional learning is becoming the new big thing, I worry it will be compromised into our existing assessment and curriculum structure.

Our generation today and our elders had so much trauma. They didn’t learn to love, to live, and to be healthy — They experienced war, conflict, fights for independence, fights for social justice. And those fights have not ended. We’ve inherited that trauma, it’s in our collective consciousness. There’s a reason we are so scared to share, to trust, to love freely. There’s a reason we’re asking about the cost of returns on feeding a child. No parent would do that. We are biologically wired to nurture. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Social-emotional learning and trauma informed teaching can be a part of healing and working with it. But we have to be mindful of how to integrate it.

How can we meaningfully integrate social-emotional learning into practice?

We must recognize social-emotional learning is not a subject, but a way of life. It’s not a means to an end. Education is about the present and it’s about all of us, young people and adults.

If I’m a teacher, coming to school in the morning, and having a fight with my family at home, and carrying that with me, do I have to pretend everything is fine or do I get a morning meeting to check-in?

In Seroond schools in Armenia, we’ve seen how conversations have changed. There’s no pretending anymore. Teachers take 15 minutes in the morning and start their day with a check-in: “Hey, how’s everyone doing? Let’s check in with each other and with ourselves.” We need to give ourselves that permission to be human.

To include social-emotional learning in pedagogy and practice, it has to be done together and for everyone. In India, the Simple Education Foundation learned this quickly during the pandemic. They started wellbeing circles for their teachers and their families. In a regular virtual gathering, each person shared how they are and give and receive support from each other. The teachers didn’t need training on how to care for children. They needed the space to receive care for themselves.

In Sierra Leone, one of the most important things our local partner National Youth Awareness Forum has done is bringing families to the school. There are school management committees with families to co-determine the purpose and practice of schools. They’ve asked families “What do you want the school to do?”They’ve shared responsibilities of managing the school with families.

Initiating a dialogue within communities is a powerful lever for change. Because we’re in this together. We’re all doing this for our space. This is our planet, our country, whatever that unit is. And so social-emotional learning is about really integrating it into the way we live, into the way we relate.

You’re the chief program officer at Kizazi and you work with local partners around the world to catalyze innovation in school design to increase opportunities for all children. In addition to India, Armenia and Sierra Leone, where do you see community-inclusive education transformation?

One really good example is the Aspire Connect Transform microschools from Egypt. The school’s founders created a network of microschools that strives to create young ACTors throughout the continent who transform their communities for the better.

They have a very strong inclusion policy. Moreover, they’ve broken age barriers and taught in a small group, multi-age, and in multigrade settings. Curriculums are designed around cultural and national identities and a sense of belonging. Another example in this school in the US that has redesigned itself around the whole child. –

Another excellent example is Dream a Dream, an organisation that empowers children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and thrive in a fast-changing world.

In India, an organisation that focuses on social — emotional learning in government schools — Apni Shaala and supports teachers, families as well as children in developing practices that support wellbeing. There is a school network — Akanksha Schools that has a holistic vision for children, it puts values and character education at the heart of their work.

There’s work that I haven’t seen myself, but I’m aware of through the trauma studies that can be a real resource for us to begin to integrate into our work with teachers and families — Some excellent networks offer resources and trainings for parents & educators — The Attachment and Trauma Network, for example, places a great focus on the role of attachment and the quality of relationships a child experiences with the adults in their lives.

Touch the future, though created for parents, has great resources and insights for educators. Especially the resources that talk about the critical role of play in a child’s development.

Thank you, Romana, for taking the time and for sharing your perspective.

How You Can Write with the Right Mindset to Fuel Sustainable Growth

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And create a solid base for your online writing journey

Credits: Salzburg Global Seminar/Katrin Kerschbaumer

When I started writing in March 2020, I felt like quitting all the time.

I had no idea how to write stuff people want to read. I didn’t know how to write articles on a consistent basis, and I tried and tested a lot before I got into a solid writing habit. It was a real roller-coaster ride.

The reason why I still pushed through when nothing seemed to work was my mindset. In the following lines, I’ll share every thought that can help you stick through on your creative journey.

Since March 2020, more than 2M people have read my work and I’ve supported more than 40 people in my learner-centric, cohort-based writing courses, the Writing Online Accelerator.

This is how my mindset created a solid base for my writing journey. And how to make it work for you as well.

Why do you write?

To build a consistent writing habit you want to know your why. What’s the reason for your becoming a writer?

Do you write to make more money? To learn something new every day? To have a hobby you enjoy? For growing an audience and building an online business? Is it making an impact on people’s lives by sharing what you know?

While there are no wrong answers, knowing your why can be your fuel.

When I started, I had several whys. I wanted to learn a new skill. I wanted to clarify my thinking. And I wanted to have a voice. My whys changed during the years. Now I write because I love to learn. I love the fuzzy feeling I get when I enter the writing flow states. I love the freedom to work from anywhere. And I love the opportunities writing has created for me.

Now you

What are your best answers to the questions below?

  • Why do you write?
  • What’s the underlying reason for your journey?
  • How does writing fit into your life?
  • What’s your long-term goal with writing?

Your why will likely change. But knowing the reason why you want to take the time to write can be your biggest asset.

Success in writing isn’t linear

I worked with Sinem Günel as a writing coach and one of the most helpful lessons she shared with me was the following: Success in writing isn’t linear but exponential. You have to write up to 100 articles without expecting anything in return.

Most writers give up too early before they experience exponential growth.

Don’t expect to go viral after your third article. It took me 40 pieces to reach 100,000 people. Exponential growth will surprise you when you keep improving. Writing isn’t a sprint: it’s a marathon. Don’t expect overnight success, but build a solid habit you can stick with.

I feel you.

It’s soul-draining to write in the void until you experience exponential growth.

You’ll feel lonesome in the vastness of the online world. You won’t get any external feedback because no one will care about your writing. For a while, no one will even click on your work. You’ll be one more person who creates noise in the already crowded parts of the internet.

Then very slowly, people will start to come. They’ll comment and reach out to you and actually read your words.

But until then, writing online is damn difficult.

Hang in there. If you’re committed to writing consistently, readers will notice you.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

Now you

A specific, measurable, time-bound, and realistic plan can help you stick through.

To create a plan, answer the following questions:

  • How many articles will you publish in the next 6 weeks?
  • When and where will you write?
  • When do you enjoy writing the most?
  • When are you most productive? What might prevent you from publishing consistently?
  • What are your strategies to overcome your barriers?
  • If you stop publishing consistently, what will you do to get back to the habit quickly?

Prepare for an emotional roller-coaster ride

The journey of writing can feel like riding an emotional roller coaster.

Sometimes your writing flows; sometimes it flops. Sometimes your best articles won’t get any traction, and your worst pieces will be read by thousands of people. Sometimes you’ll be able to finish an article in one sit, while other times, you’ll struggle to put a single paragraph onto your screen.

You’ll feel your ideas are great. Then you’ll think they’re terrible. It’s all part of the journey. Your feelings are valid.

Make peace with the hard times and have a clear goal that keeps you on track when writing doesn’t feel easy.

What to Keep in Mind

90% of the people don’t stick to writing. They give up too early and expect overnight success when in reality, writing isn’t a sprint but a marathon.

To stick through until you’ve achieved your personal “why”, these are the four mindset snippets that can keep you on track

  • Know your why
  • Make a plan to stick through until you’ve reached exponential success
  • Know that all creators go through a shared emotional roller-coaster ride
Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

A Powerful Mental Shift to Lead a Happier Life

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How you can overcome confirmation bias and make better choices.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995,” psychology professor Adam Grant writes.

Cognitive scientists call this thinking pattern confirmation bias. Once you form a belief, you rarely question it again.

A 2016 study published by Cambridge University Press suggests the more intelligent you are (with intelligence equated to quantitative reasoning capacity), the harder you struggle to change your opinion.

Human brains love shortcuts to save mental energy. Evaluating disconfirming evidence takes up a lot of energy. So most people don’t do it.

And worse, most of the time, they don’t even realize their close-mindedness. As a result, they make important life choices based on outdated beliefs.

Why is it that most of us are bad at updating our worldview? And how can we overcome the psychological bias most people remain unaware of?

This bias lets you see what you expect to see

It’s a summer evening in 2017, and the first time I enter a yoga studio. The air smells woody, and the dimmed lights make the room look cosy.

Yet, my inner world is as far from cosy as it can get.

I look at the other model-esque people on their mats. With matching outfits and perfect bodies, they look freshly printed from an Instagram feed.

I feel uncomfortable and insecure. My downward facing dog must look like a crumpled grasshopper. The teacher glances at me, and I can tell he’s hiding a smirk. The hour-long class becomes inner torture.

I step out of the studio, deciding that was my first and last yoga experience.

I knew it! You are lucky to have a flexible body, or you aren’t.

What I didn’t realize back then is how confirmation bias tricked my mind.

I looked for evidence that confirmed my insecurities and beliefs about yoga.

I filtered out any information that contradicted my worldview.

I didn’t notice other people’s imperfections, their struggles, or the teacher’s supportive glance.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for, interpret, and favour information that is aligned with our pre-existing beliefs.

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

— Robertson Davies

How confirmation bias affects your life

A person feels lazy during a home office day. He opens his LinkedIn, sees everyone else’s work achievement posts, and thinks, “I knew it. I’m such a lazy loser.”

Another person is on the train home from a day hike with her mum. She opens LinkedIn, sees the same posts, and thinks, “I can tell these people are not happy. I’m so grateful I chose to work less and spend more time with my family.”

Confirmation bias means we look at the same information and perceive it differently. We interpret facts, so it fits into our current understanding of the world.

“Whether you go through life believing that people are inherently good or people are inherently bad, you will find daily proof to support your case,” Rolf Dobelli writes in The Art of Thinking Clearly.

Confirmation bias affects your perception of reality, most of the time without you noticing it.

“The confirmation bias is so fundamental to your development and your reality that you might not even realize it is happening. We look for evidence that supports our beliefs and opinions about the world but excludes those that run contrary to our own.”

— Sia Mohajer

How you can overcome confirmation bias to make better choices

No single magic formula can uncloud your perception. But the following tools can help you overcome confirmation bias.

Build a challenge network

Connect with people you disagree with. Adam Grant says you should build a “challenge network” rather than a support network.

You do need both. Keep cheerleaders in your network, but also look for thoughtful critics. Tell your coworkers and friends you value honesty over consent.

You can also build a virtual challenge network, for example, through Allsides, a website that features information from all sides of the political spectrum.

Ask the right questions

Don’t ask questions to get validation, but ask questions you have no answers to. Dare to ask the questions that reveal your knowledge gaps.

If a person’s opinion doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because you’ve not understood the root of their belief. Keep on asking to get the full context.

While ego-boosting questions feel more comfortable, learner’s questions help you expand your understanding.

Foster intellectual humility

Remain aware of what you don’t know. What are your areas of ignorance and fixed beliefs your hold?

When you read a book or an article, ask yourself: “Which sections did I automatically agree with? Which parts did I ignore? What if I thought the opposite?”

Build your identity through character traits rather than opinions

Value personal character traits, not opinions. Label yourself as a curious, humble learner searching for knowledge instead of labelling yourself as an expert in a specific topic.

This mindset shift gives you the freedom to disagree with your former self.

Changing your opinion when presented with evidence or arguments is one of the most valuable skills you can have in the 21st century.

Confirmation bias is a natural part of how our brain works, and the goal isn’t to completely overcome it. And yet, being aware of it will help you make better life choices.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to the Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

How to Never Run Out of Writing Ideas

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Creativity is a choice once you manage your ideas.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

When I started writing, I felt I had nothing worthy to say and that I’d soon run out of ideas. Two years and 300 articles later, I know I was wrong about both.

Everybody has something worthy to share.

And creativity is a choice.

The following lines reveal how you can have endless ideas and what to do with them.

“Most things have been done, but they have not yet been done by you.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

How to Train Your Brain to Have Endless Ideas

After I had published my first three articles, I had no ideas left. I faced most writers’ biggest fear — a blank page.

Luckily, I soon learned how to always have ideas at your fingertips. These are the two creativity principles I’ve used ever since.

Don’t kill your baby ideas…

In the beginning, almost all ideas are shit. They lack substance, examples, research, or anecdotes.

That’s why new writers judge and discard their ideas very early. In fact, too early. Ideas need time to mature.

If you kill your ideas when they’re still at the baby stage, you’ll never know how they might have turned out.

And, even worse: you tell your brain your ideas are worthless. It will soon stop generating new ones.

What you want to do is to be neutral towards any idea that crosses your mind. Acknowledge it’s too early to know whether the idea is good and continue with step two.

…but capture them.

Every idea is worth capturing. Because you’re now telling your brain, it’s worth generating new ones. Your brain will become your best idea supplier.

The challenge?

Ideas come when you don’t expect them.

Most of my ideas come while I write another article, meditate, go for a run, or have a conversation with friends. That’s why you want to have a clear workflow for idea capturing.

How to Pick Your Idea Management Tool

When you look for a tool to capture your ideas, you want it to fulfil three key criteria: Do you know how to use it? Do you like how it looks and feels? Will you use it every day?

Source: Writing Online Accelerator

In the beginning, I spent hours looking for the best tool. But comparing tools can distract you from actually doing the work.

Let me save you some time by demonstrating what worked and what didn’t work for me. My idea boards evolved from an unhandy Trello to a still unhandy Notion, to a more flexible Milanote, to xTiles.

My idea board on Trello: March 2020 — July 2020. With every new idea, it felt more chaotic. (Screenshot by author).
My idea board on Notion: August 2020 — December 2020. I had the same “growth” problem as with Trello: endless vertical scrolling. (Screenshot by author).
My idea board on Milanote: Jan 2021 — March 2022. I loved the flexible organization. But the search function was painful, and I missed Notion’s formatting tools (Screenshot by author).
My current idea board xTiles (Screenshot by author).

xTiles combines all features I was looking for. It’s a mixture of note-taking and a whiteboard — as if Milanote and Notion had a baby.

It’s not as rigid as Notion and Trello, I can visually organize information. And yet, it has a level of organization I missed in Milanote. Here are two examples:

You can add new cards anywhere and move the content around. (Screen recording by author).
You can expand and close cards as you need them so things don’t get messy. (Screen recording by author).

What to Keep in Mind

Your life is full of inspiration once you start looking for it. You can find ideas in conversations, books, movies, podcasts, and even in architecture or relationships.

But ideas arise when you don’t expect them. So the most important part is to have a tool to store them.

Once something strikes your mind, add the idea to your idea board. Add any helpful context, such as videos or next steps, to explore the concept even further:

Add to-dos and video links

Once you capture every idea, you’ll swim in a sea of idea abundance. And the more you create, the more creative you become.

3 Things I Learned from the Country with Europe’s Best Schools

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You’ll marvel at Estonia’s education system.

Tallinn, Estonia’s capital. (Source: Jaanus Jagomägi on Unsplash)

“At our schools, we don’t have homework,” 11-year old Ulvar told me during a school visit to Tallinn. I chuckled.

Estonian students outperform all other European countries in PISA results — by not having homework?

Ulvar wasn’t joking.

Compared to other PISA participating countries, Estonian students have short school days and spend little time on homework or 1-on-1 tutoring.

While many other high-performing PISA countries, like Singapore or Korea, achieve high learning outcomes through volume, Estonian students learn a lot in little time.

Productivity = Learning gains per hour of instruction. (Source: Andreas Schleicher, OECD)

And learning productivity is just one of the impressive things about Estonian schools.

Thanks to Teach For Austria alumni and very welcoming Teach For Estonia staff, I spent four days in Tallinn to learn more about the Estonian education system.

This article distils the key lessons I learned from students, teachers, school principals, Teach For Estonia, the University of Tallinn, NGOs, and the Estonian Ministry of Education.

After reading this article, you’ll have a system overview and know what contributes to Estonia’s education excellence.

Estonia’s Education System at a Glance

“Estonia has become a successful role model in education worldwide. According to PISA 2018 Estonian general education is 1st in Europe and among the best in the world.”

— Government of Estonia

Three-year-old children can attend pre-school. At age seven, children start basic school and finish at age 16. Students then take a standardised examination and choose between high school and vocational school.

What’s interesting: While early childhood education is not compulsory, 95% of three to seven-year-olds attend it. Parents have the right to affordable childcare and education starting at three years old. There’s a national curriculum for early childhood education that includes reading, mathematical, and motor skills.

How education is organised in Estonia. (Source: Education Estonia)

Estonia’s education system is known for its excellent PISA scores: 1st in the world of financial literacy, 1st in digital learning, 4th in science, 5th in reading, and 8th in Math.

And when you dive deeper into OECD’s report, you find more exciting facts:

  1. Educational equity: Students’ socio-economic background has the lowest impact on reading performance in the OECD.
  2. System efficiency: Estonia outperforms other countries in overall PISA performance despite relatively low expenditure on education.
  3. Mindset: Estonian students rank first in growth mindset — the belief that success comes from effort instead of inherited intelligence.

But what contributes to these outcomes? Let’s take a look at three powerful factors of high-performing education systems.

1) Data Transparency and Feedback Loops

“Missing feedback is one of the most common causes of a system malfunction.”

— Donella Meadows

Data is power. Who does and who doesn’t have access to it makes all the difference. Neither parents nor teachers nor policymakers can make well-informed decisions without data.

Yet, most countries don’t offer access to education data. System thinker Donella Meadows reveals why:

“There is a systematic tendency on the part of human beings to avoid accountability for their own decisions. That’s why there are so many missing feedback loops — and why this kind of leverage point is so often popular with the masses, unpopular with the powers that be, and effective if you can get the powers that be to permit it to happen (or go around them and make it happen anyway).”

Estonian power-holders embrace transparency and accountability.

The state uses internal and external evaluations to offer the publically available Education Statistics Portal, which compiles information on basic, general, secondary, vocational and higher education.

For each school, you can find data about student satisfaction, bullying rates, sick days, high-stakes testing results, government spending per student, and much more.

Example of Estonia’s data transparency: Government spending per student from 2015 to 2022. (Source: Education Statistics Portal)

In addition to this dashboard, the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research publishes an annual review.

The government uses the analysis for developing policies through an evidence-based approach (something even enshrined in their 2035 strategy).

But what happens to low-performing schools?

Neither finger-pointing nor closure.

The Ministry of Education and schools collaborate for improvement.

Specific support programs offer guidance, chief analyst Sandra Fomotškin from the Education Ministry of Education told us. And as the next section will reveal, principals have a scope of action to transform their schools.

2) Agency for Teachers and School Principals

“Agency is defined as the capacity to set a goal, reflect and act responsibly to effect change. It is about acting rather than being acted upon; shaping rather than being shaped; and making responsible decisions and choices rather than accepting those determined by others.”

— OECD

Agency for learners and educators is the greatest opportunity to transform learning institutions. And Estonian schools have the autonomy to affect change.

For example, school principals have decision-power about:

  • Assessments (many schools don’t grade their students until the age of 12 but provide qualitative feedback as a guide and motivational tool for learning).
  • Staffing decisions (headteachers can hire and fire teachers).
  • The school’s curriculum (within the learning goals of a national curriculum).
  • Teacher’s role and salary (while there is a fixed based, there’s to up it by 17% depending on teachers’ responsibility, e.g. as math coordinator or school developer).
  • The lesson length (e.g., having fewer but longer lessons).
  • The distribution between presence and home learning (e.g. kids spend four days at school and have one independent learning day at home).

We witnessed in two schools how these levels of autonomy translate into action.

At Pelgulinna Gümnaasium the school initiated and implemented a CBAM change process for implementing a learner-centric approach. Teachers see themselves as lifelong learners. “Students are not learning” translates to teachers being required (and supported) to improve their teaching.

Another example of autonomy is Avatud Kool, which was founded to bring the best pedagogical practices, such as language immersion, into schools. The school accepts 50% Russian-Speaking and 50% Estonian-speaking students, and both groups are taught in Russian, Estonian, and English.

“It is imperative to allow autonomy at every level in the education system to change it from an administrative institution to a learning institution.”

— Nadiem Makarim

3) Evidence-based Teaching and Learning

“When one looks at the scientific evidence about how the brain learns and at the design of our education system, one is forced to conclude that the system actively retards education”

— Daisy Christodoulou

Most teachers nor students across the globe know how to learn. While learning science offers clear guidance, people continue to use ineffective teaching and learning techniques.

For example, students often continue to reread or highlight, even though we know it’s a fruitless strategy.

The problem? A missing link between research and teaching practice. Most teacher-training programs are not informed by evidence.

And if teachers don’t learn how to learn, how can we expect them to teach it to their students?

Estonia has recognised the potential of integrating learning science for a long time. As a result, metacognition and learning are enshrined in teaching curricula and applied in praxis.

For example, Pelgulinna Gümnaasium’s key goal is that every student becomes a self-directed learner. There’s a subject called “learning how to learn”, where students learn how to set goals, plan time, as well as strategies for reading, memorising, and writing.

Learning about Estonia’s education system. (Source: Mona Mägi Soomer)

Key Challenges & Caveats

While Estonia does a lot of things right, some challenges remain:

  • Teacher recruitment and retention. There’s a teacher shortage, and every fourth teacher quits school after the first year.
  • Segregation between Russian- and Estonian-speaking schools. Russian-speaking students are often disadvantaged compared to their peers.
  • Drop-out rates. 17% drop out of the system after nine years of compulsory education.

Moreover, there are two important caveats to keep in mind.

Estonia is a small country with 1.33 inhabitants. In one of the conversations, I heard the Minister of Education is Facebook friends with most school principals — which decreases friction and enables direct and open communication but is challenging to scale.

Plus, Estonia has a relatively homogenous student body. For example, in 2017, there were only 59 refugees in Estonia. In contrast, in my class as a middle school teacher in Vienna, there were 25 students from 13 different nationalities (and mother tongues).

Final Thoughts

Education is the most powerful tool to change our societies for the better, something Estonia has realised for a very long time.

The country is a forerunner on the students, institution and system level by enabling data-driven decision making, equipping educators with agency, and including science-based principles in teaching and learning.

If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that education systems are not fixed. They can be redesigned and transformed for the better by all of us.

Sign up for my free weekly Learn Letter to receive inspiring, applicable, science-based content about education and learning.

I Analyzed 13 TED Talks on Improving Your Memory— Here’s the Quintessence

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How you can make the most out of your brain.

Created by the author on Canva.

Meta-learning is one of the most powerful tools you can acquire.

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning effectively — you’ll need less time and energy to master any topic you want.

I spent the last years exploring the intersections between neuroscience, brain research, and cognitive psychology. I’ve shared my book recommendations on learning how to learn and how-to guides for applying the strategies to writing, reading, online courses, EdTech software and knowledge management.

In the last week, I watched and summarized 13 TED talks on memory, brain enhancement, and learning how to learn. The most insightful made it into this article.

By reading, you will learn how to best use your brain to get the result you want. You can read the article in one go or jump to the sections that are most interesting for you.

Here are the best ones I watched and the key messages so you can apply them to your life.

You’ll understand how neuroplasticity works (1), how you can actually change your brain (2), and acquire skills rapidly (3). You will then learn how specific strategies can improve (4) and increase (5) your memory function (4) and techniques to triple your memory (6) so you can remember everything you want with ease (7).

Table of Contents
1) After Reading This Your Brain Will Not Be the Same
2) Learn How to Learn From Somebody Who Has Transformed Her Brain
3) How to Learn Anything Fast in 20 Hours (Rapid Skill Akquisition)
4) Techniques to Improve Your Memory Function
5) The Most Transformative Thing to Improve Brain Function
6) Here’s How You Can Triple Your Memory
7) Supercharge Your Learning Practice With This Technique

1) After Reading This Your Brain Will Not Be the Same

How does your brain change throughout life based on what you think, do, and experience?

In her talk, brain researcher and professor Lara Boyds explains what science currently knows about neuroplasticity. In essence, your brain can change in three ways.

Change 1 — Increase chemical signalling

Your brain works by sending chemicals signals from cell to cell, so-called neurons. This transfer triggers actions and reactions. To support learning your brain can increase the concentration of these signals between your neurons. Chemical signalling is related to your short-term memory.

Change 2 — Alter the physical structure

During learning, the connections between neurons change. In the first change, your brain’s structure stays the same. Here, your brain’s physical structure changes — which takes more time. That’s why altering the physical structure influences your long-term memory.

For example, research shows that London taxi cab drivers who actually have to memorize a map of London to get their taxicab license have larger brain regions devoted to spatial or mapping memories.

Change 3 — Alter brain function

This one is crucial (and will also be mentioned in the following talks). When you use a brain region, it becomes more and more accessible. Whenever you access a specific memory, it becomes easier and easier to use again.

But Boyd’s talk doesn’t stop here. She further explores what limits or facilitates neuroplasticity. She researches how people can recover from brain damages such as a stroke and developed therapies that prime or prepare the brain to learn — including simulation, exercise and robotics.

Her research is also helpful for healthy brains — here are the two most important lessons:

The primary driver of change in your brain is your behaviour.

Repeated practice is the most effective way to reprogram your mind.

In line with other research on a concept called the desired difficulty, her research has shown that increased struggle during practice leads to both more learning and greater structural change in the brain.

This is counterintuitive yet super powerful, so let me rephrase it: Learning works best when it feels hard. You want to struggle while learning.

The opposite the “fluency illusion” while, e.g. rereading material, can give you a false illusion of competence. A helpful antidote is self-testing.

There is no one size fits all approach to learning.

The 10,000-hour rule is overly simplified. No single intervention is going to work for all of us in the same way. Lara Boyd makes a call for personalized learning.

She then continues with something I don’t agree with: “The uniqueness of your brain will affect you both as a learner and also as a teacher. And now this idea helps us to understand why some children can thrive in traditional education settings and others don’t.”

It’s not your brain’s uniqueness that determines whether you thrive or barely survive in traditional education settings.

She neglects socio-economical factors such as emotional support or a family’s income level. Moreover, there are actually evidence-based techniques that seem to work for almost all of our brains, see (2), (5), and (7).

The most powerful lesson to remember from her talk is the following: You’re never too old to stop learning. Because of neuroplasticity, you can build the brain you want.

2) Learn How to Learn From Somebody Who Has Transformed Her Brain

It hadn’t always been clear that Barbara Oakley would become a professor of engineering. She fell off the “math bandwagon” early on and flunked her way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science.

At age 26, during her military job, calculus and physics looked like hieroglyphics to her. But she didn’t settle with the status quo. She asked herself:

“What if I could get those ideas? What if I could learn that weird math language?”

So she set on a journey to change her brain — a journey that would ultimately influence many other learners as well.

Dr Oakley reached out to top neuroscience and cognitive psychology professors around the world. She asked them:

“How did you learn? And how do you teach, so others could learn?”

One of the key answers she got was the distinction between two brain modes: the focused and the diffused mode.

For optimal learning, you need the focused and the diffused mode.

In focused mode, you think based on prior knowledge and rely on often used neural connections associated with problem-solving on familiar tasks.

The diffused mode, on the other hand, feels like daydreaming and enables unpredictable, new neural connections.

When you let your mind wander without actively thinking about the problem, you likely come up with a solution you hadn’t thought about. It’s the state where creativity flows freely.

To learn, you need both.

Many people optimize their days for focused mode thinking — through deep work, flow states, and other work sessions. Learning can happen during focused attention.

But the diffused mode is equally important. Diffused thinking only occurs when our minds can wander, for example, during a shower or while going for a walk. While this feels like taking a brain break, our mind continues to work for us.

A famous example for this is Dali’s and Edison’s napping time, as Dr Oakley shares in her TED talk. To access their diffused thinking mode, they looked at a problem and took a nap to come up with a solution.

To integrate the two thinking modes into your daily schedule (and to beat procrastination), you can use the Pomodoro technique — focusing for 25 minutes and giving yourself a pleasurable 5-minute brain break afterwards.

How to learn most effectively

Lastly, she gives a couple of applicable knowledge nuggets on how to learn most effectively.

  1. Exercise can increase your ability to both learn and to remember (also see 5).
  2. Testing yourself, e.g. through flashcards, until the solution flows like a song from your mind.
  3. Instead of rereading and highlighting, recall something from your memory. Look at a page, look away, and see what you can remember from the top of your mind.
  4. Understanding is not enough to build mastery of new material. Instead, you want to combine it with practice and repetition in different circumstances.

Now let’s look at a concrete example of how you can acquire new skills rapidly.

3) How to Learn Anything Fast in 20 Hours

What if you’d only need 45 minutes a day for a month to get decently good at skills such as language learning, coding, or arts?

Out of necessity (his newborn child minimized his free time), Josh Kaufman explored how to learn new things really fast. As a result, he developed the most efficient practice method.

The 4-step process to learn any skill fast

The 10,000-hour rule is a myth — instead, there are four steps neccessary for rapid skill acquisition:

  1. Deconstruct a skill by breaking it down into smaller pieces. The more you can break it apart, the better you can learn. For example, learning to write online becomes idea-collection, headline practice, introduction writing, editing, and distribution.
  2. Learn just enough to self-correct. Books, courses, etc. are often a way to procrastinate on the practice itself. Use resources to learn enough to know when you make a mistake. Then practice.
  3. Remove any distractions that keep you from practising. This aligns with what many smart people such as Clear or Thaler preach. Self-control and self-discipline depend much more on your environment than on your willpower. Ban your phone and TV from your practice.
  4. Really practice for the full 20 hours. You have to do the work and overcome initial frustration barriers. The greatest barrier to learning something is emotional, not intellectual. So, push through the initial “feeling stupid” phase and learn for 20 hours before your stop.

4) Techniques to Improve Your Memory Function

Memory works in three stages: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval.

Nancy Chiaravalotti’s research focuses on the first part — remembering new information such as names of people you meet or items from your to-do list.

To enhance how you encode two very effective techniques:

Use imagery

Attach an image or picture to visualize the information. For example, if you want to remember the word ‘house’, picture your house. Thereby, you encode new information in two ways (verbal and visual), which increases brain activity.

A very effective way to remember things better is to combine unrelated ideas into a single image. The best image for any given word, is the one you associate with the strongest memory.

For example, “mum at the beach” for you would look completely different from me (because your picture would be your mum and a beach would be the most vivid beach you can bring to your mind).

Make it even more robust through context

What comes before or after a word by providing more semantic meaning. For example, instead of just a house, you can say the old house on the hill. Invent a mini-story around new information.

The best way is to combine both techniques. Chiaravalloti tested this with people who have memory injuries and found significant improvements after ten sessions.

Increased brain function through imagery and context practice. Source: Nancy Chiaravalotti.

You are able to change your brain. Start to visualize things and add a story to better remember what you want to learn.

5) The Most Transformative Thing to Improve Brain Function

Neuroscientist Dr Wendy Suzuki used to sit, read, and study for hours. She published well-respected articles and was on her way to becoming a renowned memory researcher.

Still, she felt something was off. It wasn’t until she started regular exercise that she felt better.

“After every sweat-inducing workout that I tried, I had this great mood boost and this great energy boost. And that’s what kept me going back to the gym,” she says in her TED talk. “I was able to focus and maintain my attention for longer than I had before. “

Because of the benefits she felt, Dr Suzuki did something unusual for researchers. She changed her research field — from memory pioneer to exercise explorer.

Exercise changes your brain in three main ways

And that’s how she came to the hypothesis that exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do to your brain: “Moving your body has immediate, long-lasting and protective benefits for your brain. And that can last for the rest of your life.”

Immediate attention increase. A single workout will immediately increase your levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. This, in turn, improves your ability to shift and focus attention for at least two hours following your workout.

Memory enhancement. Long-term exercise changes the hippocampus (critical for your capability to form and absorb new long-term memories). You produce new brain cells that improve your long-term memory.

Protective brain effects. Your brain is like a muscle. The more you’re exercising, the bigger and stronger your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (critical for attention, decision-making, and focus) gets. The two areas will grow and slow down the effects of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer and dementia.

A single researcher’s team discoveries aren’t enough to confirm her hypothesis. But there’s a canon of research that attests to the brain-altering effects of exercise.

Researchers from Harvard have shown that exercise boosts verbal memory, thinking and learning. Plus, moving your body supports your ability to learn a new language by enhancing your ability to remember, recall and understand new vocabulary.​

You don’t need to become a marathon runner to unlock the benefits of exercise. As a rule of thumb, you want to exercise three to four times a week for at least 30 minutes.

6) Here’s How You Can Triple Your Memory

What’s the best way to memorize things?

Ricardo Lieuw On, the founder of remind learning, walks the audience through a memory palace to make them remember the first ten presidents of the United States.

He makes the case why creating bizarre images in a place you know helps you memorize things in order.

Yet, he doesn’t mention how to build a memory palace. Here’s my brief explanation if you want to learn the so-called “method of loci”:

How to develop your personal memory palace

There are five steps you can use to create your personal memory place.

  1. Pick a place. Choose a space you remember vividly, e.g., your childhood home or your workplace. Close your eyes and picture the floor plan. Now take a mental walk inside the location.​
  2. Identify specific features. Remember distinctive features about your space. If you use your childhood bedroom, for example, you can include your bed, shelf, closet, lamp, window, door, and carpet. These features will serve as memory slots.​
  3. Repeat the walk. ​Once you’ve identified a couple of objects, repeat the mental walk three times. Always use the same direction. Visualization can feel tough first, but it’ll become easier with practice. ​​
  4. Fill the spots with things you want to remember. ​Once you’ve established your memory palace, you can imprint it. Say you’re trying to memorize the planets in their distance to earth. All you need to do is take the known object (e.g. your bed), and visually place Mercury on it. You continue with the other planets on your other memory slots.​
  5. Revisit your memory palace from time to time. Repetition strengthens your neural representations. That’s why you want to visit your memory places once in a while. You can build as many places as you like because your brain capacity is unlimited.
How to build a memory palace (Source: WikiHow licensed under CC 2.0).

7) Supercharge Your Learning Practice With This Technique

Brain athletes can memorize a card deck within 12 seconds — TEDx speaker Boris Nikolai Konrad can do it in 30.

Boris also completed two master studies (physics and computer science) in the time of one and holds a PhD in psychology. He is fluent in English and Dutch and speaks decent Mandarin and Spanish.

Yet, he wasn’t born with a better brain than yours.

Building better memory is a skill you can learn.

These people (including Boris’s) don’t have a better memory than you do. Brains of memory athletes do not look different from yours.

In his talk, he shares a manual on how to develop a superbrain.

Just as Lieuw On (6) made his audience memorize 10 presidents, Konrad made his audience remember physics through a visual story.

And on top of these two memory experts, Jonathan Levi explores the same accelerated learning technique in his talk.

A picture is worth more than a thousand words.

In quintessence, all three share the idea that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. Instead of remembering verbal facts, your brain is more likely to remember the information if you picture it (this is also in line with (4)).

Let’s say you want to remember China’s 14 neighbouring countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Myanmar, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Vietnam.

Instead of rereading the list, again and again, a much more effective technique is to visualize an image for each of the countries. Here’s his example — but remember that yours can look completely different (as its dependent on your strongest association with a word).

Source: Jonathan Lewi’s TED TALK

In Conclusion

Some themes reoccur in all talks, such as your innate ability to change your brain whenever you want, the power of visualization, and adding context and stories to remember new information better.

Once you get better at the process of learning, you can apply it anywhere to your life — hobbies, jobs, or relationships. In Dr Oakley words:

“Learning how to learn is the most powerful tool you can ever grasp. Don’t follow your passions, but broaden your passions and your life will be enriched beyond measure.”

May you enjoy your learning journey.

My free weekly Learn Letter will give you tools and resources to accelerate your learning. If you’d like to accelerate your online writing, register here.

A Podcast Listening Strategy for Learning

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Three steps to make the most of your podcast time

Source: Canva

Podcasts are an excellent way to acquire new knowledge. Hosts boil hours of research down to digestible content.

Yet, while podcasts are growing into one of the largest knowledge libraries on our planet, many people are not as strategic about their listening practice.

Listening to podcasts doesn’t make you smarter per se — it’s what you pick and do with it that will make all the difference.

The following lines will give you three quick ways to make the most of any value-packed podcast you listen to.

1) Find high quality podcasts

The friction to publishing podcasts is lower than it is for publishing books. You don’t need a publisher. Anyone with a phone and internet connection can become a podcast host.

Hence the quality of podcasts varies, and most podcasts are not worth your time. But some are. Instead of choosing a podcast based on the thumbnail and title, make a short effort to find the best one for you.

You can check out charts in the category “education,” search by keyword and podcast (e.g., best podcasts for language learning), or look at a podcast curation site.

Here are three of my favorite value-packed podcasts for learning:

Huberman Lab
Dr. Andrew Huberman, a tenured professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, discusses science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Philosophize This!
Stephen West shares ideas that shaped our world. It’s for anyone interested in an educational podcast about philosophy where you don’t need to be a graduate-level philosopher to understand it.

NPR: It’s an independent, nonprofit media organization founded on a mission to create a more informed public. NPR has many great podcasts, but my favorites are Radio Ambulante (in Spanish) and TED Radio Hour.

2) Use apps that help you remember more

You won’t remember much from a podcast if you only listen to it. Your brain needs repetition and elaboration to make new knowledge stick.

Unlike books, you can’t highlight audio — or can you?

I listen to my podcasts while biking or walking. Hence, an extremely uncomfortable situation to open a notepad or Roam Research whenever I hear an interesting idea.

But two applications have transformed how I listen to podcasts: Snipd and Airr. Both are audio highlighting tools.

When you hear something you want to remember, you tap a button. In Snipd, this creates a snippet that includes a descriptive title with optimized start- and end-points to capture the context, a summary of your snip, and the full transcript.

Source: Snipd

Airr is very similar to Snipd. The app allows me to tap on my AirPod and pin a conversation so that I can reread it whenever I need it. I no longer need to scan back through an entire episode to find a snippet or thought I can’t quite remember.

I sync Airr with a service called Readwise, which extracts all my audio snippets to Roam and Obsidian.

Source: Airr on the App Store

I haven’t fully tried Snipd yet, but I like Airr (mainly because of the AirPod feature). However, an advantage of Snipd is that it works for Android as well as iOS. Snipd also offers you a direct integration to Obsidian, which makes the monthly Readwise subscription obsolete. You should be able to export markdown with Airr as well, but I haven’t managed to do this.

3) Become a teacher by learning in public

Have you ever read a book only to forget the quintessence three weeks later?

You don’t have a bad memory. Forgetting is natural and actually even essential for learning.

But to make information stick, you’ll want to interrupt this forgetting, ideally, through a meaningful learning practice.

All great books on learning that I have read agree on the effectiveness of teaching newly learned things to others.

In ‘How We Learn’, Benedict Carey writes,

“Many teachers have said that you don’t really know a topic until you have to teach it, until you have to make it clear to someone else.”

The attempt to communicate what you’ve learned to your family, friends or any online audience is a very effective learning technique. Carey again:

“These apparently simple attempts to communicate what you’ve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studying — the high-octane kind, 20 to 30 per cent more powerful than if you continue sitting on your butt, staring at that outline. Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, and what you’ve forgotten — and fast.”

Carey is not the only one who recommends teaching what you’ve learned to other people. In ‘A Mind for Numbers’, Dr. Barbara Oakley provides another powerful example:

“The legendary Charles Darwin would do much the same thing. When trying to explain a concept, he imagined someone had just walked into his study. He would put his pen down and try to explain the idea in the simplest terms. That helped him figure out how he would describe the concept in print. Along those lines, the website Reddit.com has a section called ‘Explain Like I’m 5’ where anyone can make a post asking for a simple explanation of a complex topic.”

You don’t have to be an expert on the topic you just listened to on the podcast. Having some knowledge gaps can even benefit your learning practice.

Oakley again:

“You may think you really have to understand something in order to explain it. But observe what happens when you are talking to other people about what you are studying. You’ll be surprised to see how often understanding arises as a consequence of attempts to explain to others and yourself, rather than the explanation arising out of your previous understanding. This is why teachers often say that the first time they ever really understood the material was when they had to teach it.”

So the next time you listen to an episode you want to remember, explain it to your flatmate in a blog post or a short video clip. You will be surprised by how much this practice improves your learning.

My free weekly Learn Letter will give you tools and resources to accelerate your learning. If you’d like to accelerate your online writing, register here.

You Want to Write Online in 2022? Publish Your Articles Here

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Where you start makes all the difference.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Where will you publish your writing?

You face ever-growing options —Medium, Substack, your own website, and LinkedIn, and other publications.

This guide will help you make the right choice on where to start publishing your writing. The choice depends on your context. Some platforms might be more suitable for you than the other ones.

After reading this article, you’ll know the key factors for decision-making, and you’ll feel confident about your choice.

The key question to ask yourself

The most important thing you should look out for is to get sufficient data on your writing because this is what will help you improve.

You want to know which of your posts perform best and how much time people spend on your articles. Comments underneath your posts to learn about your readers’ needs and interests.

Through data, you can analyze your writing and create more from what works well. You can push the topics your readers are genuinely interested in and steadily attract more people.

But to get this kind of data, you need an initial audience of people reading your posts. That’s why the core question you should be asking yourself is: Do I have an existing +10K follower base on any social media platform or +2K newsletter subscribers?

In essence, you can break down all the existing options into this formula: They either distribute your content to their existing audience, or you have to bring in your own people.

You can write the best content in the world, but if nobody discovers your work, it will be worthless. So unless you have an existing audience, the key metric for your decision-making should be whether the platform you choose can help you grow your audience.

Writing on your personal blog

James Clear, Farnam Street, and many other successful writers post their writing on their blogs.

The key advantage of your own blog is that you own your audience. You can do with your blog traffic whatever you like: share affiliate links, advertise brands or sell your own products.

Another argument for blogs is your independence from algorithms. You’re not dependent on platforms to show your work to the readers. And you can design the website in your personal style.

You don’t need to be a programmer to publish your articles online. Content management systems like WordPress, Ghost, or Wix make website building easy.

Yet, unless you have an existing follower base, you’ll need to have a plan to drive people towards your blog. Are you good at SEO or plan to learn it? Can you spare +$2000 dollars and hire freelancers for sustainable traffic strategies? And is your writing good enough so that people will actually read your post once they find them?

When you’re starting out, you don’t know which articles people want to read from you. You might begin with a food blog and realize only later on that you’re not really into the topic. If you write on a blog and change your mind regarding your niche, you might have to start everything again from scratch.

That’s why — unless you have solid data on your niche and some 100 articles in your backlog — I advise against starting on a blog/website.

Writing on Substack

Newsletters are tempting. Platforms such as Substack, a platform for newsletters where subscribers have to pay for the creator if they wish to receive the recurring content, are on the rise.

Substack has grown from 0 to 1,000,000 paying subscribers within its first 4 years on the market. According to Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, the top 10 publications of the platform together bring in more than $20 million per year.

“When you look at the economics of newsletters… If you can find 10,000 people to pay you $100 a year, you’re making $1 million a year. No one in media is going to pay you that.”

— Casey Newton, Platformer

Other success stories include Scott Hines, who grew his email list to 1,000 in less than a year. He writes personal essays about life, parenting, sports, and architecture. Scott says he started from scratch.

Yet, substack doesn’t help you gain an audience. You’ll have to bring in people on your own.

One of the most common Substack advice is to reach out to your family members, friends, colleagues and ask them to subscribe (out of solidarity).

Many of the people who experienced rapid growth on Substack, had an existing audience when they started their newsletter. So unless you can bring an audience from another platform, I’d advise against starting on Substack.

Writing on Linkedin

LinkedIn has 774,61 million active users and the platform is expected to reach 1,034.56 million by 2025. LinkedIn is the go-to platform for networking in the business world, and it can offer a large audience.

There’re two ways to write on LinkedIn in 2021. You can either publish articles or posts. Articles are in-depth pieces, while posts are quick ideas.

LinkedIn articles can be an option for you if you have an existing audience within your niche and you know which content works well for them. With that, you can get initial traction of people commenting and being interested in your content.

Yet, long-form articles mostly don’t perform well on LinkedIn even for people with a large follower base. You also won’t get paid anything on LinkedIn for writing, regardless of how many people have read your work.

Short-form posts can help you gain followers if you go viral or semi-viral. Yet, short writing mostly lacks in-depth information and expertise. To build authentic relationships and a loyal follower base, you’ll have to provide more valuable content to your audience than ‘few hundred words long’ social media posts. As on most social media platforms, creators fight for the attention of the users on LinkedIn as well.

Source: Wes Kao

If you want to build a loyal audience that values depth and clarity, I don’t recommend starting writing on LinkedIn. While the platform can be a growth tool to drive traffic towards your content, it’s not the best place to practice your craft.

Writing on Medium

Founded in 2012 by Ev Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, Medium users have grown steadily. The platform has gone through several changes through the years, including the introduction of the Partner Program, which allows writers to earn money based on members’ reading time.

In 2021, Medium proportionally reduced its paid journalists and started to support independent writers.

On Medium, publishing is frictionless. You tap into an existing audience of people interested in long-form content— unlike LinkedIn, where people mainly go to network and scroll. Through publications, comments, and curation, you receive feedback on your writing. Data on reading time, views, and the reading ratio will help you improve.

Plus, you don’t have to spend time building your website, doing SEO, and finding sponsorships or affiliates for your website. You get paid based on the user’s reading time on your articles.

Many creators complain their earnings aren’t in alignment with their time and energy investment. Indeed, only the top 10% of the writers regularly earn more than $100.

My income on Medium varies from $1,500 to $5,000 — but even if Medium wouldn’t pay me a single cent, I’d write on the platform. I get thoughtful comments and 10 to 25 e-mail subscribers a day.

I see the platform as a tool for testing and improving my writing and building an audience. The income is a nice side effect. If you’re starting out, the platform can offer you many growth and learning opportunities.

Conclusion

To make the best decision on where to publish online, you’ll have to consider the size of your audience.

While it makes sense to redistribute your 10k+ social media following to a paid newsletter subscription or to a blog filled with ads and affiliates, if you’re starting from scratch, it’s easier to tap into the audience of already flourishing platforms.

Do you want to build a consistent writing habit?

Pre-register for the next cohort of my writing online accelerator. You will transform into a consistent writer to attract an audience, create career opportunities, and become a better person. Find more details about the next launch date here.

This Trap Prevents Most People From Clear Thinking

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How to stop clouding your judgment.

Photo by Niloofar Kanani on Unsplash

In his book ‘Stillness is Key,’ Ryan Holiday wrote:

“Wisdom is […] the ability to rise above the biases, the traps that catch lazier thinkers.”

I disagree.

Mental traps not only catch the lazy thinkers — they snag all of us. Because cognitive laziness is how our brains save energy.

Among the most common pitfalls is our tendency to stick to what we believe. Warren Buffett said:

“What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

Cognitive psychologists call this confirmation bias. It means we select and favor information aligned with our beliefs and values.

We can’t eradicate this thinking trap. But this article will equip you with tools that help you think better.

The Bias That Clouds Your Thinking

“Many startups fail because founders disagree,” my professor said. It was June 2017, and I listened to one of my last business lectures.

He continued explaining the specifics, but I had already stopped listening.

I just founded my first company and thought, “This doesn’t apply to us. We chose the right people.” I continued daydreaming.

Little did I know that wishful thinking would cost me loads of money and energy. Yet, I’m not alone in this. Many others tend to ignore disconfirming evidence.

In 1979, three researchers at Standford divided study participants based on their opinion on death penalties. One group included all believers, the other all skeptics.

Both groups read articles with evidence on death penalties. Half of the people in both groups read studies that disproved the death penalty efficiency. The other half read conforming studies.

Did the evidence influence the participants thinking?

It did. But not in the way you might imagine.

Evidence reinforced preexisting beliefs. No matter which of the two studies they read — both groups were more convinced of their initial opinion.

We do not change our opinion based on research. Instead, we interpret the facts in a way to supports our values and beliefs.

“ In an attempt to simplify the world and make it conform to our expectations, we have been blessed with the gift of cognitive biases.” — Sia Mohajer

How to Rise Above the Confirmation Bias

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson stated in 1789. But he was wrong.

Facts don’t make humans better thinkers or citizens. Often, they make us more ignorant.

“What we believe depends on what we want to believe,” Adam Grant said. “We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt.”

Here are four strategies that help you see what you don’t want to see so you can think clearer.

1) Seek Contradicting Evidence

Test your hypothesis. If you read a book, use red post-its to highlight contradictions to your worldview.

Juvoni Beckford says: “If you read a book and there are very few red flags, then there’s no real reason to keep on reading the book. If you understand everything, why are you reading the book?”

2) Dare to be wrong

The enemy of learning is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge — the things you think you know.

When you’re convinced to know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind. Overcoming your ego is one of the big challenges for better thinking.

The further you’re in your career, the stronger you’re desire to be right. But this desire prevents you from seeing the truth. Embrace intellectual humility. Dare to be wrong.

3) Ask open-ended questions

If you google “Is Green tea better for my body than coffee?” you will see results that highlight the advantages of yoga. If you phrase the question in the other way, “Is coffee better for my body than green tea?” you will see the opposite tendency.

The search engine will show you what you asked for. By using open-ended questions (“Which beverage is best for my body?”), you’ll get closer to an objective answer.

4) Become a critical thinker

At age 21, Franklin gathered smart people in his city to form a mutual improvement club. Each Friday evening, the club’s members brought an interesting conversation topic. Once every three months, the members wrote essays on the topics they discussed.

Learning researcher Anders Ericsson writes about it: “By creating the club Franklin not only ensured himself regular access to some of the most interesting people in the city, but he was giving himself extra motivation (as if he needed any) to delve into these topics himself.”

As research shows, accountability increases your motivation to think critically. If people around you ask you to justify your thinking, you’re likelier to overcome confirmation bias.

Evaluating your worldview is exhausting. It requires mental energy. Even if you’re not lazy, your brain likes to take shortcuts.

Yet, confirmation biases can harm us in the form of misjudgments and bad decision-making.

The best recipe against unconscious biases is self-awareness. Now that you’re aware of our collective mental laziness, you’ll have an easier time overcoming the mental trap. Step by step, you’ll be able to think better.

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Understand This Rarely Mentioned Concept and You Will Never Stop Learning

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Everything you know has an expiration date.

An old advertisement showing a doctor recommending cigarettes.
Country Gentleman, 1946 (Source)

From the 1930s to the 1950s, doctors recommended smoking.

People who believed cigarettes were good for you weren’t stupid. They followed the tenor of their times.

Much of what we believe today will be wrong 50 years from now. Here’s the reason why and what you can do about it. Knowing the following concept will help you keep an open mind so you can become a lifelong learner.

The Half-Life of Knowledge

Half-life is the time it takes for a certain quantity to halve in value. Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford discovered the concept in his work on radioactivity, but it also applies to everyday life.

The biological half-life of caffeine is around 6 hours. So when you drink a cup of coffee with 200 mg caffeine at 6 AM, you’ll still have 100 mg in your system around lunchtime. Another six hours later, and you’ll have 50 mg in your blood (which is why sleep scientists recommend not drinking coffee after lunch).

The half-life of knowledge works similarly: it measures the amount of time before half of the knowledge in one area is outdated or proven untrue.

As a med student, my fiancé takes hour-long multiple-choice exams every year. Yet, the box marked correct in the last year might not be correct in the next.

The half-life of medical knowledge is 18–24 months. Half of what doctors believe to be true today will be outdated in less than two years from now.

This iteration is not only true in medicine but in other academic disciplines.

Scientist Rong Tang explored 750 scholarly monographs to determine the half-life of knowledge. Here’s what he found:

Adapted by Eva Keiffenheim based on Rong Tang (2008).

Can we derive history has a knowledge half-life of 7 years? No. Tang’s research hasn’t been replicated, and he solely focused on books.

But there’s one thing to learn here: knowledge isn’t permanent. Most of what we consider truth today decays within a decade from now.

“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995.”

— Adam Grant

What Most People Ignore For Too Long

Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote almost a century ago, “the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Changing your opinion when presented with conflicting evidence is one of the most valuable skills of the 21st century.

Psychologist and researcher Adam Grant dedicated an entire book to rethinking. One line stayed with me long after reading: “The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.”

If Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz read this statement, she would agree.

In ‘Being Wrong,’ she writes: “This is the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new insights and discoveries. In this model of progress, errors do not lead us away from the truth. Instead, they edge us incrementally toward it.”

Everything you know has an expiration date. But this change is nothing to be afraid of — it’s how you learn and progress.

Smoke a fresh cigarette. R.J. Reynolds, 1931, SRITA. (Source)

“Facts change in regular and mathematically understandable ways.”

― Samuel Arbesman

How You Can Benefit from This Concept

In 470 B.C. Philosopher Anaxagoras said, “Thunder was produced by the collision of the clouds, and lightning by the rubbing together of the clouds.”

We might laugh about ancient philosophers’ theories as they attempted to make sense of their world — but what are some of our current beliefs that will seem crazy in 50 years’ time?

Understanding that facts have a half-life helps you on many levels:

  • You don’t cling to outdated beliefs. You keep an open mind and can make better sense of the world.
  • You understand truth as an asymptote. We can never reach the absolute truth. But constant questioning and a curious mind lead to better approximations.
  • You ask yourself: What do I believe that might be proven wrong soon? Looking for evidence that contradicts your worldview is how you become a lifelong learner.

In Summary

Just because you read something in a study doesn’t mean it remains true. Many scientific studies are cited long after they’ve been proven wrong.

Consider Howard Gardner’s ‘Theory of Multiple Intelligences.’ According to it, all students have learning styles: linguistic, musical, kinaesthetic, and spatial. The theory was published in the 80s, proven wrong in the 90s, and, as Alex Beard writes, “enshrined in teacher-training syllabuses in the 2010s.”

Question what you read. Change is the only constant in knowledge.

It’s impossible to know everything. Even if you do nothing but reading tons of papers on your subject, you can barely keep up with new knowledge.

Here’s what to keep in mind:

  • update your beliefs when presented with evidence and new arguments
  • remain aware of what you don’t know
  • never stop learning

Because learning is the most valuable skill of our time.

“If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.”

— Adam Grant

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

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3 Specific Ways to Benefit from the Zeigarnik Effect

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How interrupting your tasks can boost your creativity.

Photo by Robert Katzki on Unsplash

Have you ever felt guilty about not finishing a task?

My parents used to tell me “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” (German: Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen.)

I grew up in the mindset believing anything that can be done today should be done today. Whenever I procrastinated on a thing, I felt bad.

But not finishing can be a good thing. Here’s a brief explanation of the Zeigarnik effect and four ways to reap the benefits in everyday life.

A brief explanation of the Zeigarnik effect

In the 1920s, soviet researcher Bluma Zeigarnik discovered people remember interrupted or uncompleted activities better than completed ones.

She observed the effect in waiters. They remembered orders only so long as the order was open and forgot it as soon as it was served.

As a scientist, Zeigarnik started experiments to test her observation. She asked probands to complete 15 to 22 tasks such as solving a puzzle, stringing beads, folding paper, or counting backward.

She let half of the participants complete all of their tasks while she interrupted the other half before they finished.

Zeigarnik then tested how many unfinished tasks the participants would remember. The experiment’s results were significant. Participants were twice as likely to remember incomplete tasks than complete ones.

You likely know this effect from earworms. When you stop listening to a song halfway through, your brain will start the song repeatedly to complete it. The music will be stuck in your head.

The Zeigarnik effect has also been explored more recently by two researchers from Florida State University. Baumeister and Masicampo discovered people did worse on a task when they were interrupted finishing a warm-up activity — because it is still stuck in their working memory.

created by Eva Keiffenheim vie Canva

How to use the Zeigarnik effect for you

Luckily, the Zeigarnik effect also comes with upsides. You can use it to improve your creativity, memory, and much more.

1) Better recall through interleaving

Learning scientists agree unfinished things stay longer in your memory. If you interrupt a learning session and resume later, you’ll likely remember more of the content.

Researchers call this learning strategy interleaving: “In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete. If learners spread out their study of a topic, returning to it periodically over time, they remember it better.”

So the next time you’re trying to remember information, schedule strategic breaks in the middle of your learning session.

2) Boost your creativity with this trick

Creativity doesn’t work with willpower. You can’t sit down and force your best ideas to come to your consciousness. Creativity works better in your brain’s diffused mode.

This mode feels like daydreaming and enables new neural connections. When you let your mind wander without actively thinking about the problem, you likely come up with a solution you hadn’t thought about.

Adam Grant writes in his book Originals: “When you’re generating new ideas, deliberately stop when your progress is incomplete. By taking a break in the middle of the process, you’re more likely to engage in divergent thinking and give ideas time to incubate.”

The Zeigarnik effect can help unlock your best ideas. Start thinking about a topic or an unsolved problem. Write the question down and bring it to your mind. But then, do something unrelated where you can let your mind wander, e.g., washing the dishes, cleaning the apartment, going for a phone-free walk.

“These were all situations which occurred to me-while showering, while driving, while taking my daily walk and which I eventually turned into books.”

— Steven King

3) Get people’s attention with cliffhangers

Ever binge-watched a series? Likely, every episode finished unfinished with a story thread that hadn’t been resolved.

But even if you don’t write a playscript, you can increase people’s interest with informational teasers.

When you give presentations, for example, the Zeigarnik effect can help you retain your audience’s attention. Tease a piece of important information early on, but don’t reveal it until the end.

The next time you feel guilty about not finishing a task, remember the Zeigarnik effect — a strategic break can actually help you be more creative, improve your recall, or get people’s attention.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

Top 3 Ways to Discover Inspiring Content as a Creator

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All of them are free.

Source: Created by the author via Canva

With fluff-flooded feeds, finding unique content can be tricky. As a creator, you probably know how difficult that can be.

When I started writing, I wasted much research time on social platforms. In the end, I was rarely satisfied with the results.

But discovering inspiring resources doesn’t need to be complicated. There are reliable, free platforms designed for online creators.

Here are my top three sources for content inspiration. Every single one can improve your creative process.

1) Refind — the 5 most relevant links.

The site helps you find the best from all around the web, tailored to your interests, curated by experts and algorithms.

You follow your favorite topics, sites, thought leaders, and friends, and Refind puts together the most relevant new links and key takeaways for you. Every day you see 5–10 new content pieces. I use Refind as a key inspiration for my weekly newsletter.

In addition, you can also subscribe to Deep Dives. Dozens of experts introduce you to the best articles and videos from their field of expertise.

For example, I created a deep dive on ‘How to build a writing habit’ with ten time-tested articles and videos from around the web. Any creator can curate a deep dive and get boosted to an audience who would otherwise not have found them.

How you can use it:

Sign up for free here and select your favorite creators and industries. Once the platform knows your preferences, you’ll receive 5–10 relevant links each day.

Whenever you find something valuable, you can organize your links within your collections— for yourself or the web.

Screenshot of Refind.

2) Bookshlf —curation by humans.

Bookshlf is a place designed for curious learners who share their knowledge in public.

So-called shelves are curated link collections. A single Shelf can be organized by topic, mood, category, or media type, or in any other way that makes sense to you. As a result, the platform is filled with diverse content across industries.

Most curators post 20% self-created content, like their podcasts, videos, articles, and 80% resources. You can find things that alter your mindset, your understanding or get you to look at the world from a new angle.

I’ve used the platform since January 2020 to discover and organize content. I created shelves around my writing topics. On my profile, you’ll find shelves for education & learning, entrepreneurship, and creativity.

How you can use it:

You can sign up free here. Browse the Shelves and communities that trigger your interest. Subscribe to Shelves and follow your favorite curators to access exciting and relevant content easily.

You can also create your Shelves and get tipped by other users.

Screenshot of Bookshlf.

3) Feedly — smarter news reader.

Feedly is an online service that uses artificial intelligence to cut through the noise and flag specific topics and trends you care about from all the sources you trust. In essence, it’s an RSS feed aggregator.

While Refind and Bookshlf started recently, Feedly has been around since 2006. The platform is used by +15 million curious minds.

I started with Feedly in 2014 and upgraded to the premium version four months ago. For $99/year, I have all newsletters, favorite Twitter feeds, and blogs in one place.

How you can use it:

You can sign up free here. Just like Refind and Bookshlf, Feedly is free — and if you’re happy with limited functionality, it can stay free forever.

Feedly is less intuitive than Refind or Bookshlf. First, you want to find and organize the right sources. Second, train the AI assistant Leo to filter out the noise (which I haven’t managed to do yet). Then, you can read through your curated feed.

Screenshot of Feedly.

In Conclusion

Managing and discovering content doesn’t need to feel difficult. These three tools help you organize, curate, and find the content you love:

  • Refind — the 5–10 most relevant links tailored to your interest.
  • Bookshlf — a digital library from curators for curators.
  • Feedly — an RSS feed aggregator to have everything in a single place.

I rely on all three content discovery tools, but right now, Refind is my favorite (it’s free, but I like it even better than my paid Feedly).

Instead of feeling discouraged by all these ways to find new content, experiment at your own pace. Try the platforms that resonate with you, and screw the rest.

Choose one or two new content resources until you find a pattern that helps you to become a better content creator.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

3 Promising Opportunities to Teach Your Kids From Home

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These organizations innovate homeschooling.

Photo by Marga Santoso on Unsplash

“What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools,” educational theorist John Holt said, “but that it isn’t a school at all.”

Holt argued schools work as oppressive environments and turned kids into compliant employees. And that’s how in the 1970s, the modern homeschooling movement began.

The debate is still ongoing, and many people argue schools enforce and prioritize compliance and consumption over critical thinking and creativity.

Learning in home education is often less formal and more personalized than school education — ranging from traditional school lessons to free forms such as unschooling.

Reasons for homeschooling vary from better educational opportunities, a healthier learning environment, special needs, or being the only option in remote areas.

Homeschooling is legal in many countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States) but outlawed by others (e.g., Germany, Japan, Brazil).

Homeschooling legality Source: Fobos92 and Svenskbygderna

What follows are three organizations that rethink the way children learn from home.

1) Primer — A home for ambitious kids.

Primer is the world’s first community built for curious and ambitious kids to find and explore their interests together. Their goal is to “free the next generation of kids to be more ambitious, more creative, and to think for themselves.”

Unlike connected learning networks that replace core curricula, Primer is supplemental. To foster kid’s curiosity, the team offers various learning formats:

  • Clubs. Students collaborate on projects such as writing, storytelling, coding, inventing machines, music, or nature.
  • Rooms. Live audio chat spaces allow students to experiment with new ideas, solve problems, and tap into their interests (e.g., debating, writing, puzzling, coding, starting a business).
  • Journals. In journals, kids can document their projects by creating and organizing blocks of text, images, videos, and links.

There is no set schedule for a day with Primer, as all their activities happen in addition to set curricula.

After a free trial month, Primer is $49 a month for the first child and $19 a month for each additional child.

Primer was founded by Ryan Delk and Maksim Stepanenko, who both have been homeschooled. Previously, they helped build companies like SpaceX, Square, Gumroad, Lyft, and Coinbase.

“We studied the American Revolution by driving to historic locations in the original 13 colonies and crawled through cardboard tubes to learn how the digestive system works.”

— Ryan Delk, Co-Founder of Primer

Screenshot of Primer Landing Page

2) Outschool — Where kids love learning.

Outschool online marketplace of virtual classes for children aged 3–18. Outschool’s goal is to engage and inspire learning through various classes and subjects.

The platform offers kids the opportunity to explore their interests in-depth with interactive classes taught via live video by experienced, independent teachers.

Like Primer, Outschool doesn’t suggest a fully-fledged curriculum. Instead, the platform offers more than 100,000 live lessons to more than 900,000 learners in 174 countries.

Pricing starts with $10 a course, and the most expensive multi-week course I found on the platform costs about $75.

The platform was founded by Amir Nathoo, who is a former investor and holds various patents.

“If we just stick to the core curriculum, then it is very difficult for kids to develop differentiated skills. More of the school day needs to be spent on kids pursuing their interests with the benefit of increased autonomy and self-direction — with this, kids’ motivation to learn can increase. There’s going to be so much change in technology and society in the next 10 years, I think we will head in a direction of hybrid core + self-directed.”

— Amir Nathoo, Founder of Outschool

Screenshot of Outschool Landing Page

3) Synthesis — Where kids become
problem-solvers.

Synthesis started as a school spin-off from Elon Musk’s AdAstra school. As of now, it’s a weekly, 1-hour enrichment program for students who want to learn how to build the future.

They offer a simulation-based learning experience built around complex team games. Students work through case studies, simulations, and game-based challenges.

Synthesis doesn’t design simulations for content but the experience. Simulations are complex and have no right answers. For example, 18–20 kids work in groups with one facilitator. But facilitators don’t lecture. Instead, the student groups explore and learn game rules on their own.

The idea of the simulations is to change the way kids approach real-life problems and prepare them to navigate the complexity and chaos that comes with life.

While playing, kids teach themselves how to win. In the process, they learn new problem-solving skills. Here are two game examples:

  • Art for All. Students compete in an auction game for the best art exhibits. The simulation covers negotiation and covers mental models such as auction theory and the winner’s curse.
  • Fire! In this collaborative game, students fight forest fires with varying conditions. It covers mental models such as positive-sum vs. zero-sum games.

Pricing is $180 per month, and a sibling discount is available.

Synthesis is led by Chrisman Frank. On a visit to Elon Musk’s AdAstra school, he fell in love with Synthesis.

In 2020, Frank convinced the AdAstra principal and his former colleague Josh Dahn to spin-off Synthesis as a for-profit company. Frank’s vision was to scale the learning software and develop a generation of super thinkers.

“When mistakes are not penalized, people are more likely to just keep trying. And if you keep trying, then naturally, you have more chances of eventually succeeding.”

— Ana Fabrega, Chief Evangelist at Synthesis

Screenshot of Synthesis Landing Page

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

5 Quick Fixes for a Calmer, More Focused Life

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How to *not* be distracted all the time.

Image created by the author via Canva.

Do you ever feel time runs like sand through your fingers?

If you’re struggling to live a more present life, you likely focus on the wrong things. Improving your inner peace is about what you do less of, not more of.

Taking a moment to integrate these quick fixes can help you find an inner state of calm while staying on top of things.

None of these suggestions should take you more than three minutes to set up, but every single one will help you reach more focus and presence.

1) Change Your Social Media Passwords

Without your active consent, social media’s persuasive design tricks you into screen time with severe consequences.

Different research attests to a relation between social media usage and mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and even suicide-related thoughts.

Not knowing your password is one of the most effective ways to spend less time on social media. I follow this technique since 2017, and it has given me weeks of time. I created a threshold that prevents me from impulsive social media checks.

How to do it:

Go to all social media you use regularly and change your password to a random combination you can’t remember.

Don’t save the new password in your browser. Instead, write it on a piece of paper. Then log off your social media platforms and place the paper in some drawer.

2) Don’t Consolidate Messaging Apps

Self-labeled productivity apps like Shift or Franz sound tempting. It seems convenient to aggregate all communication channels in one place.

Yet, these apps lead to context switching and thereby destroy your focus.

Cal Newport says: “Switching your attention — even if only for a minute or two — can significantly impede your cognitive function for a long time to follow.”

Once I deleted Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, and Franz from my desktop, I focused better on one project at a time.

How to do it:

Delete all messaging aggregators from your computer. Anytime you need a specific communication channel, open it in your browser.

Instead of being surprised by new messages, you actively decide when to open and read the messages.

3) Delete Mail from Your Phone

I used to check my email when walking up the stairs and while waiting in a line. My mind revolved around work even while I wasn’t at my desk.

But our brains need off-time. To get maximum focus during working hours, we need enough time away from work. Plus, boredom brings benefits.

How to do it:

Pick your phone and delete your Mail app. Nothing is so urgent it can’t wait until you’re back at your desk.

“Are you distracted by breaking news? Then take some leisure time to learn something good, and stop bouncing around.”

— Marcus Aurelius

4) Use Site-Blockers

Compulsive social media checks will make your thoughts bounce around like a ping-pong ball. A study from Irvine University found it takes 20 minutes to refocus after distractions.

Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook executive, says: “We were not evolved to get social approval being dosed upon us every 5 minutes.”

For better productivity, fix your environment. If you don’t want to get distractions, use a site-blocker.

How to do it:

I use this free chrome extension to block LinkedIn, Facebook, and Mail from 9 PM to noon.

Block all sites that dilute your focus. You’ll be surprised how much more you can achieve in less time.

5) Charge Your Phone Outside Your Bedroom

If you charge your phone in your bedroom, you’re likely poisoning your mind with trash at the most important times of your day — before you sleep and after you wake up.

Here are the three of the most damaging effects of using your smartphone in your bedroom:

  • You lose time
  • You lose focus
  • Your sleep quantity and quality drops

By abandoning your phone from your bedroom, you can implement new bedtime and morning rituals such as reading, meditating, journaling, or letting your mind wander.

Keeping my phone out of my bedroom was the single most effective habit to read more books. Since I managed my phone habits, I have read one book a week for almost three years.

How to do it:

Get an alarm clock and stop waking up to your smartphone’s alarm. When you sleep with your phone in another room, you don’t need to exert your willpower first thing in the morning. Instead, you’ll start your days with a clear mind and ease into a distraction-free morning.

Often, anxiety and hurry are caused by distraction. These quick fixes help me live a calmer life that’s full of focus. I hope they do the same for you.

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

9 Influencers Worth Following That Tweet About the Future of Learning

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A curated list of inspiring edupreneurs.

Created by the author via Canva.

Anything you read, watch or listen to shapes your thoughts. Hence, it’s worth paying attention to what you consume online.

I left teaching in Summer 2020 to make education fairer and better for as many learners as possible. Parts of what I do now includes connecting and reporting about education transformation.

Here’s a selection of thinkers who inspire me through their thoughts and projects on the future of learning.

1) Salman Khan

Salman Khan is the American educator who founded Khan Academy. His online education videos have been viewed more than 1.8 billion times. On Twitter, he shares ideas about bridging the digital divide and education transformation.

“Shying away from something where you are well suited to make a positive impact — especially because it is risky or can draw criticism or unwanted attention — is just as damaging as not realizing areas where your actions are counterproductive.”

— Salman Khan

2) Alain Chuard

Alain is the Founder & CEO of Prisma, a connected learning network that fully replaces regular school. Prisma didn’t transfer the core curriculum to the online world but created its own learning framework. On Twitter, Alain shares ideas on how to create learner-centric online schools./media/4dc1ab9cd7b5e747464e2f6d1a17abea

3) Richard Culatta

Richard is the CEO of ISTE — a community of global educators who believe in the power of technology to transform teaching & learning. He recently published the book ‘Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World’ and is a popular speaker on EdTech and innovation. On Twitter, he shares opinions on the digital divine and responsible device usage.

4) Ana Lorena Fabrega

Ana Lorena left teaching in 2019 to explore alternatives to traditional education. She’s now the Chief Evangelist at Synthesis, an online program partly initiated by Elon Musk. I love her Fab Friday newsletter, where she explores the future of education./media/57742cf1e5f6d6fdf684a7ed93cf0da0

5) Jelmer Evers

Jelmer is a history teacher, author and was nominated twice for the Global Teacher Prize. He is currently building an international teacher leadership network. If you understand Dutch, you can follow him on Twitter. Alternatively, watch his TEDx talk on flipping the education system.

6) Vlad Stan

Vlad is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Galileo — a global learning community for 8 to 18-year-olds. At its core, Galileo strives for self-directed (the freedom to choose what you want to learn) and self-organized (the freedom to design your daily schedule) education. Vlad tweets about homeschooling and EdTech./media/90cc016a4213594bfd498a8af5345e52

7) Saku Tuominen

Saku is the founder of HundrED — a not-for-profit organization that seeks and shares innovations in K12 education. I love to be inspired through their yearly global collection. Saku isn’t very active on Twitter, so instead, you might want to explore innovations curated by his company.

8) Wes Kao

Wes co-founded Maven, a platform for cohort-based courses. While MOOCs completion rate is just 3 to 6 percent, CBCs aim to improve completion rates through active, synchronous, hands-on learning. Wes published an excellent article on a16z and tweets about learning and thinking./media/98a3c16f3957046274b53bcbe649d16d

9) Jo Boaler

Jo is a professor of Mathematics education at the Standford Graduate School of Education and co-founder of youcubed. During my two years as a full-time Math teacher, her books drastically improved my teaching. On Twitter Jo shares insights on the growth mindset and mathematics.

“A lot of scientific evidence suggests that the difference between those who succeed and those who don’t is not the brains they were born with, but their approach to life, the messages they receive about their potential, and the opportunities they have to learn.”

— Jo Boaler

Want to feel inspired and improve your learning?

Subscribe free to The Learn Letter. I read a book and 50 articles a week, and each Wednesday, you’ll receive the best in your inbox. This newsletter will make you find tools and resources that help you on your path to health, wealth, and wisdom.

How Connected Learning Networks Shape the Future of Education

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Learning innovation with Sora, Galileo, and Prisma.

Image created by Eva Keiffenheim via Canva.

Education visionary Sir Ken Robinson once said:

“Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.”

Yet, many kids grow up in an education system that stems from the industrialized age. Most schools batch children by age and expect them to learn at the same speed with the same means.

Connected Learning Networks follow a new paradigm. The approach to learning is defined as “learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational, economic, or political opportunity.”

Here are three schools that build on Connected Learning Networks and how they might shape the future of education:

1) Sora — High school built for you

Sora is a virtual high school that aims to accelerate students toward their wildest dreams.

Teachers are no longer teachers who deliver lectures but so-called guides who challenge students, structure individual curricula, and facilitate learning.

Sora offers various learning formats:

  • Independent projects. Students follow their learning interests (e.g., computer science or 18th-century Victorian fashion) and work towards their project goal.
  • Learning expeditions. Live learning sessions (e.g., saving the coral reef and shellfish industry) happen three days a week. These expeditions have deliverables, and students are assessed based on a mastery scale.
  • Career tracks. Learning advisors help students design their school experience around their desired career track, e.g., engineering, design, or health sciences.

Here’s what a typical schedule at Sora looks like:

A Day at Sora
9:30am daily standup on discord
10:00am project work (e.g. programming a game or writing a book) 
11:00am first learning expedition (e.g. history of buddhism)
12:00pm lunch break
12:45pm second learning expedition (e.g. saving the coral reef)
3:00pm afternoon checkpoint
4:30pm 1-on-1 check-in with experts to work through questions
5:00pm virtual club (e.g. movie club, school feedback sessions)

Tuition is $3,600 to $9,600 per year with flexible tuition options for families with a non-working parent or any extenuating circumstances.

The school was founded by Wesley Samples, Indra Sofian, and Garrett Smiley. They have work experience in venture capital, content marketing, as well as financial and entrepreneurship education.

Screenshot of Sora’s landing page.

I rate this approach 2/5 — Here’s why:

I love how Sora rethought curricula and moved away from a factory schedule. Their learning design can indeed foster self-directed learning enthusiasts.

What’s also great is the mastery-based curriculum where skill levels go along with learning science (e.g., 0 for exposure, 1 for recognition and recall, 2 for elaboration, 3 for application, and 4 for transfer).

Moreover, I like is their student focus. They state: “Schools suck because they are so far removed from the students that they serve. Our students know that we hear them, and though we make mistakes, they know that we all can learn from them.”

Yet, there are a few aspects that make me question Sora schools. First, their curriculum isn’t holistic. I can’t see subjects that focus on relationships, physical education, or arts.

Their site says, “relationships are one of the most important aspects of an education.” But a virtual book club isn’t enough to reinforce social skills.

Sora also lacks a clear roadmap to physical education. There’s the subject on an exemplary grade certificate. Yet, there’s neither a sports teacher on the team list nor a subject in their curriculum.

The online school doesn’t seem to offer art classes. It’d be great to take a more open approach to career tracks. Next generations need more than engineers, designers, and health scientists.

Sora seems like is the perfect school for parents who can’t wait for their students to join the high-achieving workforce.

2) Galileo — Online self-directed global school

Galileo is a global learning community for 8 to 18-year-olds. They offer live learning experiences and online courses.

At its core, Galileo strives for self-directed (the freedom to choose what you want to learn) and self-organized (the freedom to design your daily schedule) education.

Their mission is to improve the way we learn. Here’s how they do it:

  • Clubs such as Minecraft education, history clubs, coding, or theater clubs. These are ongoing teacher-led experiences where students connect and collaborate on topics of their interest. Students may join clubs on a week-to-week basis.
  • Nanocourses such as Logo design, artificial intelligence, space exploration, food innovation, or photography. They are 1-month project-based courses where the students learn a new skill. Students present their products during the final week of the course.
  • Bootcamps on game development, anthropology, or documentary making. There are two or three-month-long project-based learning experiences to inspire and give students a jump start on topics they want to learn about.

The school states the schedule looks different for every student, but here’s an example of how it might look like:

A Day at Galileo
9:00am daily check-in
9:30am 3D modeling club
11:00am Spanish club
1:00pm psychology crash course YT
3:00pm Math Khan - decimals
5:00pm Dance ballet

Their curriculum builds on existing solutions like Khan Academy, BrainPop, CodeCombat, Coursera, CrashCourse, or Duolingo. In addition, they invite mentors for inspirational speeches.

Tuition is $300 per student per month or $2000 per student a year (with a 20% siblings discount).

Kelly Davis and Vlad Stan founded Galileo. Kelly has taught in various countries throughout Asia, and Vlad is a serial entrepreneur.

Screenshot of Galileo’s landing page.

I rate this approach 3/5 — Here’s why:

The school’s founders share a noble motivation: “ We want you to be obsessed — or at least passionate — about the topic you are teaching, no matter if your passion is related to the core curricula or it’s just something completely different you pursued on your own.”

Galileo offers a holistic curriculum that includes dancing, singing, writing, languages, coding, maths, books, science. In addition, they provide more than 70 live learning experiences that go beyond economics and business skills.

Unlike Sora, they add a personal layer to online learning. They have student-led check-ins and local dojos — small, local, in-person learning experiences. So far, these local communities exist in Romania, Japan, the USA, Kenya, and Portugal.

They give people the opportunity to individualize their kids’ curriculum, and their team shares a passion for lifelong learning.

Yet, I’m not sure whether un- and deschooling with local dojos encompass the future of education is. So, while Galileo is an interesting niche product, I can’t see how this solution would work at scale.

Galileo seems like is the perfect school for world travelers and digital nomads who want to offer their kids connected, self-directed, world-class education.

“We have to personalize education, not standardize it.”

— Sir Ken Robinson

3) Prisma — The world’s first connected learning network

Prisma is a personalized, full-time online school for 9–14-year-olds. They reinvent learning.

Their vision is to create the world’s most effective and inclusive Connected Learning Network dedicated to preparing millions of kids for life and work in the 21st century.

Prisma offers various formats to their students:

  • Peer cohorts. A group that meets daily to collaborate, socialize, and learn with.
  • Coaching. Learning coaches meet and assist with learning on a daily basis.
  • Live workshops. A selection of virtual workshops that focus on communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. According to their website, these workshops are optimized for engagement.

For students, a typical schedule looks like this:

A Day at Prisma
10:00am standup
10:30am independent learning routines (e.g. math, English, arts)
12:00pm lunch
1:00pm live workshops (e.g. debates, strategy simulation, writing)
3:00pm projects
3:30pm coach-learner 1-on-1 (once a week)

Prisma didn’t copy and paste a bricks & mortar curriculum to online videos. Instead, they’ve custom-designed their learning content.

Unlike other programs, this school places a focus on inclusion: “Each learner, regardless of disability status, develops an individualized learning plan along with their Learning Coach and family.”

They do so by adjusting individual learning plans, for example, through more structure or learning accessibility.

The school enrollment works in 6 x 5-week learning cycles per year and costs $7415 a year. In addition, Prisma offers financial support options to support 40% of learners in each cohort.

Prisma was founded by serial entrepreneurs and parents Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard. They built Prisma as a quest to reimagine school and for their children.

Screenshot of Prisma’s landing page.

I rate this approach 4/5 — Here’s why:

Prisma mastered many aspects I missed at Sora and Galileo.

Most importantly, their curriculum is holistic. They didn’t transfer the core curriculum to the online world but created their own learning framework consisting of:

  • Foundational knowledge (language literacy, numeracy, history, technology literacy, and science principles)
  • Powers (creativity, critical thinking, communication)
  • Perspectives (global perspective, empathy & compassion, mindfulness)
  • Practices (collaboration, design thinking, reflection, discussions, self-care)
  • Mindset (self-efficacy, emotional awareness, purpose, growth mindset, ownership & self-direction, love of learning).

Prisma also mastered to include physical education in a virtual learning environment. They acknowledge the difficulty of physical online education but have found three solutions that seem to work for their students:

  1. Live dance, yoga, and fitness instructors
  2. Fitness and other off-screen breaks that encourage movement
  3. Fitness badges by joining athletic endeavors in their local community

Moreover, they relied on learning evidence and eliminated grading: “There has been considerable research showing that grades reduce kids’ intrinsic motivation and encourage them to do ‘just enough’ rather than their best.”

I’d be curious what students say about the rather big group size with 50–70 learners per cohort and 12–18 learners per coach. In an online setting, this appears to make personalization difficult.

While their site states they’re a global online school, admission is only open to anyone who can operate in US time zones. So unless parents want to mess up with their child’s sleep cycle, Prisma is instead a US online school.

Prisma is the ideal online school for US homeschoolers and kids who don’t like traditional schooling.

In Conclusion

The application of Connected Learning Networks is still very young. Sora and Galileo started in 2018, Prisma in 2020.

These three online schools point us towards the future of education — personalized, global, and student-centered.

Yet, we mustn’t forget the entry barriers. To provide fair innovative learning experiences, all students need equitable access to devices, reliable wifi, and a safe place to learn.

Unless we focus on providing these resources to all students, Connected Learning Networks will further increase the digital gap among income levels.

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Antilibraries Are the Better Libraries

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Here’s how they can accelerate your learning.

Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash

Do you ever feel guilty about the book staple you haven’t read? Polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb says you shouldn’t:

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”

Yes, you read it right. The pages you haven’t studied indeed add value to your life. Here’s why.

Antilibraries protect you from ignorance

When you just read a few books in your life, you’re likely aware of what you don’t know. But once you’ve read through some hundred books, you tend to become ignorant.

You might be too confident, too sure, and less aware of the things you don’t know. That’s where antilibraries come into play.

The books you haven’t read (and will never read) assemble your antilibrary.

They represent unknowledge and are the best cure for overconfidence. Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:

“A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.”

Antilibraries help you overcome the biggest enemy

The illusion of knowledge — the things you think you know — is learning’s biggest enemy. The authors of the learning bible ‘Make it Stick’ write:

“The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making.”

Stuart Firestein, professor of Biology at Columbia University, adds an important point:

“We know a lot of stuff but of course there is more stuff that we don’t know. And not only is there more stuff that we don’t know — but the more we know, the more we increase the amount of stuff we don’t know, because there was all that stuff that we didn’t know that we didn’t know before. […]

An image I always like is of a circle of knowledge — but as the circle grows, as the diameter increases, so does the circumference that’s in contact with all that darkness outside the circle of light — that ignorance.”

When you’re convinced, you know something, learning something new means you have to change your mind.

People who don’t want to change their minds keep stuck in the same place. So overcoming our egos is one of the big learning challenges.

Antilibraries accelerate your learning

“You will never read all those books,” friends say when they look at my want-to-read list. The list grows by 2–3 books every day.

My friends are right. Even though I read 1–2 books a week, I will only get through some of them.

But that’s the point: My antilibrary is a constant reminder of what I don’t know. It helps me stay curious and humble. Psychologist Adam Grant writes:

“No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.”

How to move forward

Don’t ever feel discouraged by the books you haven’t read. Instead, see them as a reminder to be humble and curious. Combined, they’re the essential ingredients for life-long learning.

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Elon Musk Disliked His Kids’ Schools — So He Started His Own

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Is he quietly revolutionizing education?

Image edited by the author (Source: Duncan.Hull — CC BY-SA 4.0)

“So you want to keep your kids away from regular schools?” a reporter asked Elon Musk in an interview.

You know Musk’s mindset: If he doesn’t like something, he builds his own versions — cars, rockets, highways, energy companies.

Musk replied: “I just didn’t see the regular schools weren’t doing the things I thought should be done. I thought, let’s see what we can do. Maybe creating a school would be better.”

In 2014, Elon Musk asked Josh Dahn, a former Teach for All Fellow and his kid’s teacher at the time, if he’d start a better school with him at SpaceX. Dahn agreed. The school Ad Astra, Latin for ‘to the stars,’ was born.

Ad Astra School’s Two Core Principles

Musk reimagined education on First Principles thinking: boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there instead of reasoning by analogy.

Instead of accepting the prices of rockets, Musk asked himself, “What’s a rocket made of?” He listed the components and calculated the costs. He found that raw materials were nearly 100 times cheaper. He decided to build his own rockets instead of buying some.

For education, Musk came up with these two principles.

1) Batch children by ability instead of age.

Regular schools batch children by age, assuming it’s is the most important denominator. Traditional school systems expect students of the same age to learn at the same speed. Musk disagrees with age segregation:

“Kids have different abilities at different times. It makes more sense to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities.”

2) Don’t teach to the tool. Teach to the problem.

Ever asked a teacher why you learn something? Most answers don’t go beyond you’ll need this..someday. If the relevance isn’t clear, learning feels irrelevant.

Learning to use tools is pointless and boring unless those tools help you solve a real problem. Listing the tools you need to take an engine apart isn’t the same as trying to disassemble the engine yourself. By doing the work, you see the tool’s relevance as you go.

This EdTech Startup Scales Musk’s Ad Astra School

A few years later, Chrisman Frank, Dahn’s former colleague at ClassDojo, visited Ad Astra. He fell in love with one part of the school — Synthesis.

In 2020, Frank convinced Dahn to spin off Synthesis as a for-profit company. Frank’s vision was to scale the learning software and develop a generation of super thinkers. Here’s how it works.

Synthesis is a simulation-based learning experience built around complex team games. Students work through case studies, simulations, and game-based challenges.

While playing, kids teach themselves how to win. In the process, they learn new problem-solving skills. Two game examples:

  • Art for All. Students compete in an auction game for the best art exhibits. The simulation covers negotiation and covers mental models such as auction theory and the winner’s curse.
  • Fire! In this collaborative game, students fight forest fires with varying conditions. It covers mental models such as positive-sum vs. zero-sum games.

In a recent podcast episode Chrisman Frank, Synthesis CEO, and Ana Fabrega, Chief Evangelist, shared details about ‘the most innovative learning experience.’

Replacing Lectures and Books with Software and Games

Lectures remain the dominant teaching method in most schools. But they don’t allow for dialogue, discussions, and disagreement. Instead of training students to become active thinkers, schools train them to become passive listeners.

Books don’t train for problem-solving. From my time as a Maths teacher, I remember ‘real-world’ textbook examples. But students knew I had the right solution in my teacher’s book. Reality is more complex than right or wrong. Most schools teach students to follow the rules as opposed to thinking for themselves.

Synthesis doesn’t design simulations for content but for the experience. Simulations are complex and have no right answers. 18–20 kids work in groups with one facilitator. But facilitators don’t lecture. The student groups explore and learn game rules on their own.

The idea of the simulations is to change the way kids approach real-life problems and prepare them to navigate the complexity and chaos that comes with life.

Students make decisions that have consequences and meaning. They have to understand trade-offs and analyze their choices where there is no binary answer — and the teacher doesn’t have it either.

Expectations Outside Students’ Comfort Zones

Fleas can jump 8 inches high, but when put in a closed jar for three days, they will never again jump higher than the lid’s height. Their offspring mimics their parents and settles on the same height.

A school system’s low expectations are like flea training. Low expectations are a glass ceiling for children and one of the fastest ways to fail them.

Synthesis claims to have in-built high expectations that make kids step outside of their comfort zone.

At Synthesis, there is no teacher to ask for the correct answer when things don’t work. The students know the teaching team trusts to solve these challenges.

Fabrega says children crave complexity. She describes after a while; kids feel comfortable with all the uncertainty. Synthesis teaches kids to feel comfortable being uncomfortable.

Using the Super Mario Effect for Faster Learning

As a teacher, I fostered my student’s growth mindset. I planned entire lessons around it and focused on praising efforts instead of outcomes. I showed my students mistakes help us learn.

Yet, the system beat me. When a kid received a bad grade, they felt demotivated. When mistakes mean you get a worse grade I can’t blame children for trying to avoid them.

The question is: How can you frame a learning process so you’re not obsessed with failure?

Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer turned Youtube star, explored this question and says games are the answer: “The focus and obsession are about beating the game, not about how dumb you might look. And as a direct result of that attitude — of learning from but not being focused on the failures — we got really good, and we learned a ton in a really short amount of time.”

Rober continues: “It feels natural to ignore the failures and try again in the same way a toddler will want to get up and try to walk again or in the same way you want to keep playing Super Mario Brothers.”

Other research attests to the power of game-based learning. Synthesis applied this insight. They reframed the learning process and created game-based learning experiences.

The result: fear of failure isn’t a problem anymore.

Fabrega says: “When mistakes are not penalized, people are more likely to just keep trying. And if you keep trying, then naturally, you have more chances of eventually succeeding.”

“The more we can gamify the process of learning, the better.” — Elon Musk

Did Elon Musk Quietly Revolutionize Education?

Elon Musk did his thing again. He saw something that didn’t work well and changed it. From being unhappy with his kid’s obsolete education, he planted a seed to innovate the education sector.

The idea that our school system was built for the industrial age and the need for a paradigm shift isn’t new. Schools teach to follow instructions when reality has changed. Yet, systemic change is slow.

Musk’s assets and influence enabled people to rethink and rebuild learning environments. Their aspiration to put students’ learning experience front and center is great. If only half of what the kids say is true, Musk’s initiative is doing a great job on this.

Ad Astra recently changed into Astra Nova. Their philosophy is honorable: student centricity, a value for individual abilities, praising curiosity, and encouraging problem-solving and critical thinking:

“What if students were taken seriously and their time well spent? Astra Nova believes in meaningful student experiences across age levels and domains.”

I couldn’t agree more — there’s no reason any child should not enjoy learning.

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Mastering the Diderot Effect Can Help You Stop Wanting More

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How to get off the consumer escalator

Photo by Victoria Borodinova from Pexels

Have you ever wondered how your life would change if you received $50,000?

Denis Diderot, a French philosopher, had lived his previous 52 years in poverty. But in 1765, when an Empress of Russia wanted to buy Diderot’s books, everything changed.

From one day to another, Diderot got $53,000 plus a monthly income to spare. And so he did what any good philosopher would do — buying a new scarlet robe. And that’s when things started going wrong.

How the Diderot Effect Makes You Buy Things, You Don’t Need

Diderot’s new clothing was beautiful. In fact, it was so beautiful; everything else he owned looked misplaced. In his words: “All is now discordant. No more coordination, no more unity, no more beauty.”

So he bought things that matched his new robe’s beauty: a stunning rug from Syria, unique sculptures, a shiny kitchen table, and a magnificent mirror.

When you have money to spend, you see what Diderot calls “a void disagreeable to the eye. There was a vacant corner next to my window. This corner asked for a writing desk, which it obtained.”

Diderot’s behavior coined what we now know as The Diderot Effect. Buying new things can lead to a spiraling consumption of complementary goods. As a result, you crave for more and more things to feel happy and content.

Photo by Jeff Sheldon on Unsplash

Unlike Diderot, I never lived in poverty, but everything changed when my income quadrupled in 2020.

From one day to another, I had money to spare. While I followed my mentor’s recommendations and invested most of it, I also bought a lot of stuff. I upgraded my desk with a new monitor and noise-canceling headphones.

For the monitor, I also needed a better webcam. And for the webcam, additional cable clips, and sockets, so everything looked clean. I was trapped in a vicious consumer circle.

But even if you don’t get an unexpected sum of money, you likely feel other possessions should match your new possessions:

  • You buy a new suit and have to get a belt to match.
  • You buy a new phone and suddenly need insurance, a protective case, new headphones, or a second charger.
  • You upgrade a part of your home and suddenly need the new decor to match it.

Juliet Schor, a professor for sociology, compares the effect to an escalator:

“When the acquisition of each item on a wish list adds another item, and more, to our “must-have” list, the pressure to upgrade our stock of stuff is relentlessly unidirectional, always ascending.”

How to Get Off the Consumer Escalator

There are a few things you can do to break free from The Diderot Effect.

Awareness. If you realize you’re in the consuming spiral, you reclaim your decision power. Once you understand marketing mechanisms, you’ll likely stop buying luxury brands. Not because you’re wasting your money but because you’ll feel foolish doing so.

Self-imposed restraints. Voluntarily change your environment. Stay away from malls, catalogs, online shops, or shopaholic friends.

Durability. Buy things not because of novelty but in terms of how long they can help you. Once you are emotionally attached, it’s harder to replace them with new stuff.

Additional costs and tradeoffs. Before you buy something new, think about the implications and consequences. Does your current software run on a new computer? What else do you need if you acquire that thing you want?

Downgrading exclusivity. New things don’t reflect prestige but ignorance. As Juliet Schor says: “What if, when we looked at a pair of Air Jordans, we thought, not of a magnificent basketball player, but of the company’s deliberate strategy to hook poor inner-city kids into an expensive fashion cycle?”

Final Thoughts

Buying new things can make you dissatisfied with what you have. You’ll end up in a spiraling consumption pattern that has severe psychological and environmental impacts.

As Denis Diderot once said:

“My friends, keep your old friends. My friends, fear the touch of wealth. Let my example teach you a lesson. Poverty has its freedoms; opulence has its obstacles.”

If you’re serious about breaking the consumer spiral, start with the suggested steps and free yourself from the shackles of ever wanting more stuff you don’t need.

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The Butterfly Effect: How Tiny Changes Massively Impact Outcomes

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Embrace the chaotic nature of life.

Image by Pixabay on Pexels

Have you ever wondered how things would have gone differently if you tweaked your starting condition just a tiny bit?

Tiny changes can lead to entirely different results.

In 2013 I failed my undergrad studies’ most important exams by 0.25 points. I had to wait for six months before I was allowed to retake it. I was furious and disappointed. I doubted my aptitude and looked for things to do instead of studying.

I paused my studies for a year and worked for a startup in India, a German bank in Shanghai, and an education project in Argentina. These experiences shaped my drive for education and entrepreneurship — the things I work for now.

But what if I hadn’t failed the exam? I would have followed the beaten track, doing an internship at KPMG or PWC and pursue a corporate career. A minimal change in the starting conditions (such as 0.25 points in an exam) can have a tremendous effect on the outcome.

Understanding the butterfly effect can alter your perspective on decision-making and predictability.

The Butterfly Effect — And Why Nobody Can Accurately Predict the Weather

“You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby … changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.”

— Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Many people have heard of the butterfly effect because of the American science fiction film from 2004. Ashton Kutcher travels back in time to change his troubled childhood.

But only a few know that the movie misinterprets the effect. The storyline suggests you can calculate the effect with certainty, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The butterfly effect is about the unpredictability of specific systems.

The concept is called the butterfly effect because a small act like a butterfly flapping its wings and cause a typhoon. And while the metaphor is exaggerated, small events can be a catalyst depending on starting conditions, as Lorenz’s discovery shows.

Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, mathematician, and professor at MIT, discovered the Butterfly Effect while observing his weather prediction model in the 1960s.

He entered initial conditions slightly different from each other into his computer program (0.506 instead of 0.506127). As a surprising result, these tiny differences led to completely different predictions. A tiny change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

“I found that the new values at first repeated the old ones, but soon afterward differed by one and then several units in the last decimal place, and then began to differ in the next to the last place and then in the place before that. […] The initial round-off errors were the culprits; they were steadily amplifying until they dominated the solution.”

— Edward Lorenz in The Essence of Chaos.

A small error at the start can magnify over time (Source: Created by Author).

“It’s impossible for humans to measure everything infinitely accurately,” says Robert Devaney, a mathematics professor at Boston University, in an interview with the Boston Globe. “And if you’re off at all, the behavior of the solution could be completely off.”

So what Lorenz showed is that even if we think we have precise initial conditions, certain systems aren’t predictable. That’s why meteorologists can’t predict the weather beyond a few weeks.

Lorenz concluded that most weather predictions are inaccurate because we never know the exact starting conditions. In essence, the butterfly’s wing is a symbol of an unknown change.

Examples of the Butterfly Effect that Changed the World Forever

But there’s more to this effect than my statistics exam and inaccurate weather predictions. The butterfly effect can change history, and knowing these examples helps will help you be more realistic about forecasts and decision-making.

Franz Ferdinand

In 1914 a gunshot reshaped the world. It was June 28, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand had just escaped a bomb attack aimed at his car. To save Ferdinand from further attacks, the driver was supposed to change the route — yet he didn’t get the message and took a wrong turn. Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed, which set off a chain of events that led to World War I.

What if the driver would have gotten the message?

Covid-19

The World Health Organization supports the hypothesis that the Covid-19 outbreak started through a transmission from a living animal to a human host.

What if there were no living animals in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market?

Adolf Hitler

In 1907 and 1908, he applied for art school but was rejected twice. Historians and scholars argue that these rejections formed him from an aspiring bohemian artist to the human manifestation of evil. We don’t know how things would have gone, but for sure, humanity would have been better of if Hitler spent his lifetime drawing watercolors.

What if the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna accepted young Adolf Hitler as a student?

Final Thoughts

Even though we love to think we can predict outcomes by our actions, the butterfly effect shows we can’t. Seemingly insignificant moments can shape entire destinies.

We want our world to be comprehensible, but nature proofs us wrong. Our world is chaotic and can change from moment to moment. We’d love to use science to make precise predictions and get clear answers about the world we live in — yet science suggests we can’t.

Science can help us understand the universe, but as the butterfly effect shows, it does so by unraveling the limits of our understanding.

Yes, we can aim to create excellent starting conditions, but we don’t have the power to predict the outcome.

Small imprecisions have a significant impact — our world is unpredictable. If there’s one thing to be learned here, it’s that we can stop obsessing over outcomes.

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The More You Learn the Richer Your Life

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Three ways to make learning a daily habit

Photo by Meryl Katys from Pexels

Naval Ravikant once said:

“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.”

And while life-long learning pays great dividends, many people struggle to make it a habit for life. They never learned how to learn or don’t know where to start.

Continuous learning is one of the most powerful habits you can build. The following three ideas will spark your desire to learn and help you make learning a habit you’ll stick with.

1) Create your want-to-learn list.

The best motivator to continue learning is a long list of things you want to learn in life. Similar to a want-to-read shelf, your want-to-learn list creates urgency. If you don’t realize the first two items on it, you’ll never get to all the other things you dream about.

Ask yourself, ‘What do you want to learn before you die?’ and note your answers in your journal or note-taking app. I use a simple table in Notion to collect my want-to-learns. Here’s a sneak-peak of how it looks like:

Notion Want to Learn List (Source: Eva Keiffenheim)

Don’t worry if you don’t have many learning desires in mind. The ideas will flow once you start looking for answers, and your list will grow organically.

When you write down what you want to learn, think beyond online skills. While it’s nice to know how to start and grow your newsletter, the world will become richer when diversifying your skillset.

2) Follow your curiosity.

When was the last time you did something out of pure curiosity? With full calendars, there’s not much time for undirected exploration.

Many people optimize their days for focused mode thinking — through deep work, flow states, and other work sessions. Learning can happen during focused attention. But the diffused mode is equally important.

Diffused thinking only occurs when our minds can wander, for example, during a shower or while going for a walk. While this feels like taking a brain break, our mind continues to work for us.

While you gaze through the window, your subconsciousness consolidates knowledge. It connects the dots. Stephen King writes his best novel ideas came to him while driving, showering, or walking:

“Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty, and telekinesis came together, and I had an idea.”

Give your mind regular breaks and make space for exploration. Follow your curiosity — it will drive discovery. It’s the ultimate fuel for your desire to learn.

An excellent way to follow your curiosity is by asking yourself every evening, ‘Did your day help you cultivate curiosity?’

3) Ban your cell phone from the bedroom.

What if developing learning habits is about what you should do less of rather than more of? The smartest way to start learning every day is by identifying the patterns that hold you back. All you have to do is eliminate them.

If you charge your phone in your bedroom, you’re missing one of the most significant learning opportunities — reading before sleeping.

Once you ban your phone from your bedroom, you’ll realize learning is way easier than you thought.

“What I know for sure is that reading opens you up. It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold,” Oprah Winfrey once said.

And it’s true. Reading gives you access to the brightest brains on earth. Learning from the most remarkable people is the fastest way to become not only wealthy but also wise.

If I had to name a single learning habit that improved my life, it’d be reading. Books made me wealthy, transformed my sex life, expanded my worldview, and improved the way I work.

Follow your curiosity and order a few books that resonate with you. Replace your pre-sleep phone scrolling with reading, and witness how the pages will get through to you.

In Conclusion

Following these steps isn’t complex or exhausting. On the contrary: These ideas make learning fun and worthwhile.

  • Start and grow your want-to-learn list.
  • Use your curiosity as a guiding principle.
  • Replace your phone with a book.

Instead of feeling discouraged by all the ideas about what you could do to turn learning into an ongoing habit, enjoy experimenting in your rhythm. Think for yourself and keep the things that work for you.

Choose one or two new learning habits until you find a pattern that helps you on your journey to health, wealth, and wisdom.

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Albert Einstein Was a Genius, but a Terrible Husband

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How his life can change the way you look at productivity.

Photo by Taton Moïse on Unsplash

Albert Einstein is one of the most genius contributors to science. At age 26, he discovered light exists as photons and laid the basis of nuclear energy. At 34, he published the general theory of relativity.

He was considered so brilliant that the pathologist who inspected Einstein’s dead body even stole his brain. Nowadays, when you google genius definition, you find Einstein’s name in the explanation.

But what made him a genius in the first place? When asked, Einstein replied,

“Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work.”

And while that’s the story we continue to preach, it’s only one part of the equation. Einstein’s insane productivity came at high emotional costs for the people close to him.

Einstein treated his wife as an employee he can’t fire

When studying in Switzerland, Einstein fell in love with another student named Mileva Marić, the only woman in his physics classes at ETH Zurich.

And while their first years of marriage are told to be romantic, things changed soon. According to biographer Isaacson Einstein said, “I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire.”

Specifically, Einstein handed her a list of martial demands and only remained together if she agreed to the following conditions.

A) You will make sure:

— that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;

— that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;

— that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B) You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

— my sitting at home with you;

— my going out or travelling with you.

C) You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

— you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;

— you will stop talking to me if I request it;

— you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D) You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

The irony of Einstein’s popular life lessons

For preparing this article, I read through primary sources, like his letters and more recent articles on his life. And while his work is undoubtedly a great scientific contribution, we should be wary when it comes to his life lessons.

“Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.” — Albert Einstein

Really, brother? Do you say your marriage contract is based on understanding and has not much to do with emotional force? Dude, it’s 1913. For the sake of your two young children and her own social standing, your wife can’t just leave you.

“Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.” — Albert Einstein

Bro, I absolutely agree with your powerful quote. But here’s the catch: Are you aware that because of your marriage demands, your wife couldn’t take her exams and finish her physics studies? You treated her like a personal servant. You limited her intellectual growth.

Now what?

Historians argue Einstein also erased Mileva Marić’s contributions to the Theory of Relativity. Plus, Einstein cheated on Marić with his cousin Elsa Löwenthal whom he would eventually marry (and also cheat on).

When you remember the third point from the martial demands, you can put this into perspective: Einstein would sleep with whomever he wanted, and Marić shouldn’t expect any intimacy from him.

If there’s one life lesson he preached and practiced, it’s the following:

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” — Albert Einstein

Isaacson wrote about Einstein that “he worked as long as he could, and when the pain got too great, he went to sleep.” He even died while working.

In his biography, it says, “One of his strengths as a thinker, if not as a parent, was that he had the ability, and the inclination, to tune out all distractions, a category that to him sometimes included his children and family.”

Einstein was able to become an insanely productive monomaniac because he sacrificed his relationships.

The point is: For every successful genius, there are broken relationships we rarely hear about. So before reading the next article on Einstein’s, Musk’s, or Darwin’s productivity routines, ask yourself:

Do I see the full picture or only the productivity’s shiny side?

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How to Learn Like Someone Who Aced the MIT Challenge

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The four principles of ultralearning.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

In 2014, Scott H. Young embarked on a controversial project.

He completed the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum at 4x speed. Instead of the typical four years, he passed all final exams in less than 12 months.

Some people praise his results as the ultralearning experience.

Others are more skeptical as Scott transformed his MIT challenge into lucrative blogs and books. Here’s a question some people ask:

Is Scott a sneaky marketer or one of the most efficient life-long learners?

And while I’ll share my opinion at the end of this article, the answer doesn’t really matter. What matters is what we can learn from his learning journey.

These are Scott’s tips on how to become an ultralearner and quadruple your learning efficiency.

Use directness to improve learning effectiveness

Learning in formal settings is often ineffective because it’s distant from the actual application. Let’s take an example.

Imagine you’re a frequent flier. Before every start, you watch the video of a flight attendant putting on the life vest. You watch the video again and again.

But as this study shows, actually putting on the inflatable life vest a single time would be more valuable than repeatedly watching another person doing it. You acquire true mastery by performing the procedure yourself.

Social climber Dale Carnegie used to say knowledge isn’t power until it’s applied. And it’s true.

Don’t spend your time on tasks far away from your end goal. If you want to write online articles, don’t spend time watching a masterclass on how to write a book. Foster a bias towards direct action.

The directness principle is a powerful way to make learning more efficient.

How to do it:

What’s your end goal behind learning?

Let’s say you want to learn writing. What do you want to use it for? Is it for writing a novel? Then start learning to write by writing a novel. Is it for earning an extra income? Then start studying submission guidelines for paid online platforms and pitch your articles there.

Whatever you learn, focus on your true end-goal and pick a practice that’s as close to it as possible.

Feynman’s technique helps you remember anything

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was an expert for remembering what he learned — by teaching.

Teaching is the most effective way to embed information in your mind. Plus, it’s an easy way to check whether you’ve remembered what you learned.

Because before you teach, you have to take several steps: filter relevant information, organize this information, and use your own vocabulary to paraphrase the concepts.

Feynman mastered this process like no other. The people of his time knew him for explaining the most complex processes in the simplest language. They nicknamed Feynman “The Great Explainer.”

Bill Gates was so inspired by his pedagogy that he even named Feynman “the greatest teacher I never had.”

How to do it:

The Feynman Technique consists of three simple steps:

  1. Summarize whatever you want to learn on a blank page.
  2. Explain what you learned in plain, simple language as if you were talking to a child.
  3. Identify your knowledge gaps and revisit the concepts whenever you’re stuck circle back to your knowledge source.
  4. Reread what you forgot to mention and add it to your explanation.

By following this technique, your learning by ‘first principles’ instead of superficial memorization.

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

Create a meta-learning map

No life skill can earn you greater dividends than learning how to learn. Yet, most people don’t know how to master meta-learning.

Meanwhile, taking responsibility for your learning is one of the most important undertakings you can manage.

Your meta-learning map serves as a knowledge tree for your practice and will help you learn better. Scott Young, the author of ultralearning, says a meta-learning map should contain three key items:

  • Concepts: Anything that needs to be understood.
  • Facts: Anything that needs to be memorized.
  • Procedures: Anything that needs to be practiced.

How to do it:

Make a learning map before you dive into any specific skill.

If you want to write paid articles, don’t start by practicing headlines. Instead, list all the things you need to acquire, like style, editing, storytelling, research, headlines, and a solid idea-to-paper process.

Unsure how to start the map? Find people who mastered the skill you want to learn and ask them about their learning paths.

Do you want to publish a bestselling non-fiction novel? Craft personal, short e-mails and send them to Malcolm Gladwell, Brené Brown, Nicolas Cole, James Clear, and all the other successful authors. Ask them about the core skills they needed to master. Then, start drafting your own map.

Unlock the power of self-testing

Many people feel traumatized when they think of formal test settings. But testing can be a powerful tool to improve the way we learn.

Because self-testing helps us overcome the illusion of knowledge and shows us whether we truly mastered the subject at hand. Plus, self-testing helps to identify knowledge gaps and brings weak areas to the light.

Even if you don’t get the right answer, the process facilitates remembering the correct answer. In almost all cases, it’s better to solve a problem than memorizing a solution.

Use the testing process to learn more as you go along. Always test yourself before you feel confident and push yourself to recall information, not just review it.

How to do it:

My favorite testing techniques include flashcards with a built-in spaced repetition feature (like Anki for anything, readwise for books, podcasts, highlights, or lingvist for languages).

Apart from flashcards, you can also use free recall. After reading something, try to write down everything you can remember, then use the source material to fill the gaps you missed. After your session, sit down with a piece of blank paper. Challenge yourself to list everything you can remember from what you’ve learned in as much detail as possible.

A third alternative includes the question-book method. Here you write down questions that test the content and answer these questions whenever you revisit the source. Ali Abdaal explains the active recall method in one of his learning videos.

Did Scott Young really finish the MIT curriculum?

Yes and no.

Yes, because he achieved his goal of ‘just wanting to learn more about Computer Science.’

No, because he self-graded his exams, skipped advanced course modules, and replaced peer-projects with less intense modules.

There are plenty of discussions that shed more light on Young’s underlying assumptions. And meanwhile, he also shared a critical reflection on his learning path.

But there’s a more important lesson here: With the right tools, learning any new skill is possible.

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