Shawn Lear (Ed.D. Writing a book on Virtual Ed)

Just do it

Gladwell gives a master class on poverty, IQ, and youth development. Listen to this once a year my fellow educators.

Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption. That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time. Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.” The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs. That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone. But the education system still runs on its logic. A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait. Neither is being served. Both are being processed. Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.” AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student. One at a time. Every time. It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle. It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done. A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture. The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does. No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill. Because the math doesn’t work. AI doesn’t have that constraint. Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.” The brain isn’t broken. The format is. Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes. That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem. Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.” Four years. Six figures of debt. And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you. The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance. Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.” The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you. Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace. The question isn’t whether the old model survives. It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.

During one of the worst losing streaks of my career, our team president walked into my office. Keli McGregor. One of the best men I've ever known. He could have come to vent. To question my decisions. To ask hard questions. Instead, he said: "Cut to the chase, Clint. What's next?" I looked him in the eye and gave him two words: "Shower well." The Colorado Rockies were struggling badly that year. Pregame preparation was solid. Scout meetings, early work, attention to detail. All of it was there. But at game time, the tires were flat. I told Keli: the game did everything it could to us today. We just couldn't meet its demands. Now it was time to reset. "Shower well" means exactly this: • Watch the frustration circle down the drain • Shampoo, rinse, repeat and get the grime of today completely off your mind • Walk out clean, go home, and actually rest Leave it at the ballpark. The game is over. There's nothing left to solve tonight. Keli nodded. Asked if he could share it with the whole organization. I said sure. And then it hit me. This isn't just for baseball. Bad day at the office. Grumpy boss. Missed deadline. Traffic on the way home. You can carry all of that through your front door. Or you can shower well. I've never seen a single problem get better because someone dragged it home with them. The reset is a discipline. Same as preparation. Same as showing up. Either we win. Or we learn. The only real loss? When you don't take a single thing out of a hard day. So tonight, whatever kind of day it was, shower well. Tomorrow is a new at-bat. What does your reset look like? I'd love to hear it.

@gabrelyanov Take 21 minutes of your life and listen to Rubio speech before you believe this propaganda.

45 million people have read Ray Dalio’s article on X in the past 2 days. This might be the most important 60 minutes you’ll spend this year. I made a 16-minute podcast using Google AI. In short: the world will never be the same. Just listen. 👇

@HoffWFAN Anyone who thinks the @Dodgers are not destroying the game of baseball does not understand the fans or basic economics.

Dodgers Payroll is up to $413 Million... And thats with all the deferred money.

In 1983, Steve Jobs predicted the next 50 years of technology. His predictions: • iPhone • Internet • Softwares • App stores • Artificial Intelligence 10 futuristic predictions from this talk that came true: 1. Every major revolution starts ugly

Got 5 minutes? Then you have enough time to forge a meaningful connection with a student's family member. Tips from @caselorg here: schoolguide.casel.org/uploads/sites/…

Check out my new single "Hello Goodbye" distributed by @DistroKid and live on iTunes! music.apple.com/us/album/hello…

This is me to a T.

Before you wrap for winter break, try this idea from P @PrincipalMcGinn with your team!

a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz: “Don’t follow your passion” Ben gives this advice to the Columbia University class of 2015: “Don’t follow your passion. Now I know you’re probably thinking: ‘That’s a really dumb idea because if you poll 1,000 people who are successful, they’ll all say they love what they do. And so the broad conclusion of the world is that if you do what you love, then you’ll be successful.’ But we’re engineers, so we know that might be true. It also might be the case that if you’re successful, you love what you do — you just love being successful, everybody loves you, it’s awesome. So which one is it?” He continues: “The first tricky thing about passions is they’re hard to prioritize. Are you more passionate about math or engineering? Are you more passionate about history or literature? Are you more passionate about video games or K-pop? These are tough decisions. How do you even know? On the other hand, what are you good at? Are you better at math or writing? That’s a much easier thing to figure out. The second thing that’s tricky if you’re going forward in time with this ‘follow your passion’ idea is that what you’re passionate about at 21 is not necessarily what you’re going to be passionate about at 40. Now this is true for boyfriends, as well as career choices. The third issue with following your passion is that you’re not necessarily good at your passion. Has anybody ever watched American Idol? So you know what I’m talking about. Just because you love singing doesn’t mean you should be a professional singer. And then finally, and most importantly, following your passion is a very ‘me-centered’ view of the world. And when you go through life, what you’ll find is that what you take out of the world — money, cars, stuff, accolades — is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. That is the thing to follow.” Video source: @a16z (2015)

@BurlsSports Tom Meschery Seattle

🚨 Giveaway 🚨 Want to win a free spot in 1969 breaks? I'm giving 1 away in each! (3 winners!) To enter for a chance to win, 1) follow, 2) repost, and 3) reply, letting me know which 1969 card is your favorite (any sport, any issue). Winner announced Sunday night.

Elon Musk: Everything is solar power. The rest is noise. “The sun is about 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter's about 0.1% and everything else is in the remaining 0.1%, and we are much less than 0.1%. So, if you burnt all of the mass of the solar system, then the total energy produced by the sun would still round up to 100%. If you just burnt Earth, the whole planet, and burnt Jupiter, which is very big and quite challenging to burn, turn Jupiter into a thermonuclear reactor, the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system and everything else is in the miscellaneous category. Basically, no matter what you do, total energy produced in our solar system rounds up to 100% from the sun. You could even throw another Jupiter in, so we're going to snag a Jupiter from somewhere else, you could teleport two more Jupiters into our solar system, burn them, and the sun would still round up to 100%. As long as you're at 99.6%, you're still rounding up to 100%. Maybe that gives some perspective of why solar is really the thing that matters. And, as soon as you start thinking about things at a grander scale, like Kardashev Scale 2 civilizations, it becomes very, very obvious. I'm not saying anything that's new, by the way. Anyone who studies physics has known this for a very long time. In fact, Kardashev, a Russian physicist who came up with this idea, I think, in the 1960s, just as a way to classify civilizations, where Kardashev Scale 1 would be, you've harnessed most of the energy of the planet, Kardashev Scale 2, you've harnessed most of the energy of your sun, Kardashev 3, you've harnessed most of the energy of a galaxy. Now we're only about 1% or a few percent of Kardashev Scale 1 right now, optimistically. But as soon as you go to Kardashev Scale 2, where you're talking about the power of the sun, then you're really just saying everything is solar power and the rest is in the noise. Like, the sun produces about a billion times, or call it well over a billion times more energy than everything on Earth combined.” All-In Podcast, October 31, 2025

This is another unexpected benefit of phone-free schools: big drops in # of fights and disciplinary referrals. I'm hearing this from so many schools. The constant drama and conflict on social media often leads to real-world fights. Shut it down for 7 hours a day.

More evidence for the sensitive period hypothesis: Boys are especially "imprinted" by the teams that won championships when boys were 8-12. Their brains are soaking up culture and values, weighted by prestige. Don't let social media choose who imprints and guides their brain dev

9 books that will teach you more than 3 years of university: