I caught up with an entrepreneur friend this week. I’m doing my learning survey, so I asked him about his learning habits. That led to an interesting comment from him that stuck with me:

How I learned and how my kids will learn will be drastically different. I had to go to college to learn from people who possessed knowledge about jobs I wanted. My kids likely won’t need to go to college. The knowledge is more accessible now.

He went on to say this:

The jobs that my kids will have as young adults don’t even exist now. What people do for work will be so different from what prior generations did for work. How we learn and work is changing faster than people realize.

I’ve been thinking about this conversation because of my newfound curiosity about how people learn. The more I think about it, the more I believe my friend is right. If he is, then we’re likely to see disruption in education, which will create opportunity. These are early thoughts, and they’re subject to change. I want to think about this more and discuss it with other smart people.

Recently I listened to an interview in which the guest shared his favorite class in high school. It wasn’t a regular class; it was a work–study arrangement his senior year. He got to leave campus every day to work at a local business. He was paid for his time and received course credit. This work–study class was his favorite because he made money, which allowed him to buy and do things he enjoyed.

My favorite class in high school was woodshop. I loved it. I’d spent a summer working for a homebuilder and discovered I enjoyed woodworking. The teacher realized I knew what I was doing, so he gave me free rein. I could build whatever I wanted as long as I didn’t cause trouble or disrupt class (which the rest of the class did daily). It was the last class of the day, so he’d let me leave early when I was finished.

As part of my first “official” business, I sold speakers to friends and usually gave them a design for speaker boxes, too. They’d have to find someone to build the box for them, which wasn’t always easy. One day I realized I could use my time in woodshop class to build those boxes for my customers. I asked the teacher, and he thought it was a great idea. From then on, I was building and selling speaker boxes in woodshop class. It was a great hustle because I didn’t have to pay for materials, and I ended up showing a few classmates how to build their own speaker boxes.

Woodshop was my favorite class because it ended up being an entrepreneurial class. It allowed me to work on my business and make money, which made me feel financially independent from my parents. It also allowed me to share my knowledge about building speaker boxes with my classmates and do woodworking, which I find fun.

I was listening to a podcast today that mentioned a quote from Bruce Lee that I hadn’t heard before:

If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

I like this quote. It speaks to the power of mindset in what you can achieve. If you believe there are limits to what you can accomplish, then you will unknowingly limit yourself in everything you do in life. When you’re trying to accomplish anything hard, periods when you feel your progress has stalled are inevitable. But you have a choice in how you handle them. You can view them as your having reached your limit, or you can persevere and push through them and go further.

Over the years, I’ve learned that mindset matters a lot. For example, when exercising, I’ve always been able to lift more or run farther or faster than I thought possible. I learned that limits hinder my growth. I learned to keep pushing as hard and as far as I can (without hurting myself). It’s hard and painful in the moment, but when it’s done, I’ve always been glad I kept pushing. This approach led to achieving new personal fitness goals and realizing I’m physically capable of much more than I thought.

I have a personal goal to learn something daily and a personal system for doing so. I recently shared my system with a friend, who told me my habits are abnormal (in a good way). He doesn’t believe the majority of people are learning daily, or even weekly for that matter. If they are, it’s because it was pushed on them.

This got me thinking. I wonder how people are approaching learning (if at all). How do they figure out how to solve unfamiliar problems? What tools are their default for learning? Are they proactive about what they learn or reactive to information pushed to them via social media?

I decided there’s only one way to find out: start asking people. I’m going to spend time casually asking friends and family about their learning habits over the next few weeks. I’m curious and excited to see what responses I get.

This is my one-hundred-ninety-ninth weekly reflection. Here are my takeaways from this week:

• Idea – This week I listened to someone share an idea they used to build their business. The idea isn’t new, but the insights he shared about the idea were new to me and resonated. Something clicked in my head as I listened and got my wheels turning. I’ve been thinking about it the last few days, and I’m excited about digging into it more next week.  
• Reading tool – I played with this new tool. It’s going to be a lot more work than I originally thought to digitize the highlights in each book I read. Not the outcome I hoped for, but I think the value in doing this will far exceed the effort. Most people who read books rarely review their highlights. When they do, they usually have to go to each individual book to find the highlights. I think the value from aggregating highlights from various books, having them be searchable, and regularly reviewing them could be big.

Week one hundred ninety-nine was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

One of the things I like to think about when evaluating a business model is the cost of scaling it. For example, if a company is in the business of manufacturing and selling widgets, to grow sales it would need to produce more widgets and then sell them. A cost is associated with each additional widget sold. To produce and store more widgets, it would need to incur costs to increase production and warehousing capacity. These investments likely must occur before the number of widgets sold can increase. The widget company has high replication costs, which impacts the scalability of its business model (unless it has unlimited cash).

Conversely, if a company is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, it’s selling a software product that’s delivered digitally over the internet. Incremental sales don’t require producing more software. People can just buy the existing software at will. The software company can increase sales without incurring replication costs (for simplicity, I’m ignoring costs for R&D, sales, marketing, etc.). In an ideal world (which business isn’t), the software company has low, very low, or nonexistent replication costs, which means the business model is highly scalable.

Businesses with low replication costs and the potential for infinite scalability are intriguing. As I evaluate business models through this lens, businesses that don’t appear attractive on the surface become interesting opportunities, especially if their product or solution could be distributed digitally.

I’ve been thinking about the kind of discussions that I and other entrepreneurs enjoy since I read this quote from former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.

Roosevelt was blunt in her characterization of discussions that don’t revolve around ideas. To be fair, people are free to discuss whatever interests them. For some that’s events and others it’s people, and that’s okay. But I get what she’s alluding to about the discussion of ideas. I’ve experienced the power of conversations about ideas many times, and I’m always blown away. Conversations that energize me and other ambitious people I’m close to always revolve around ideas and the sharing of knowledge. They can last for many hours and regularly go off in unexpected directions. I’m always fired up after I’ve had a great conversation that exposed me to unfamiliar ideas and concepts.

The process of being educated via discussions with people I respect is energy to me. It adds fuel to the fire in my belly and sparks creativity. I think these conversations align with my desire to learn and better myself. Hearing about interesting new ideas causes me to focus intensely. I immediately want to learn more and figure out how to incorporate the ideas into what I’m working on.

Roosevelt, who was born in 1884 and died in 1962, figured out something that has stood the test of time. Discussions about ideas are powerful and energizing for ambitious people who have a thirst to learn and better themselves.

I’ve been chatting with a friend for months about something we’ve both noticed: there are people who excel at their highly technical profession because of years of training and experience and who would like to be entrepreneurs. We call them practitioners. They often continue to work for others because they don’t understand business. They’re aspiring entrepreneurs, but they don’t have the skillsets necessary to be successful entrepreneurs. They understand a problem and how to provide a solution to it, but they don’t understand how to build a business around that understanding because they haven’t been exposed to business concepts.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I think these practitioners could be great cofounders. They have deep expertise in their craft and the problem it solves but large gaps around monetizing it. They’re very aware of their gaps and want help filling them, but they don’t usually have entrepreneurs in their network—just other practitioners. An ambitious practitioner paired with a hungry hustler who gets things done and understands business could be a combination with a high probability of succeeding.

I’m going to think more about this and discuss it in more detail with practitioners who have entrepreneurial aspirations.

Today I celebrated the life of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I had the opportunity to commemorate his legacy by attending a great event at Atlanta History Center today. I learned a lot. I’m thankful for Dr. King’s efforts as they were foundational in moving our country closer to equality for all.

Hope everyone had a great MLK Day!

Yesterday’s chat with fellow entrepreneurs was great for all the reasons I gave yesterday. I learned about the amount of financial leverage new entrepreneurs are using to start their companies. Using financial leverage is normal, but I was surprised by the amount. These founders are receiving 100% financing from banks for all their start-up costs. No business plan and no entrepreneurial experience required, either.

This blew my mind. It reminded me of the years leading up to the global financial crisis (GFC), when homeowners were able to take out 100% of a home’s price as a loan from the bank. They didn’t have to put anything down, so they didn’t have any skin in the game. Some homeowners were given stated-income loans, meaning their incomes were verified. What my friend described yesterday isn’t exactly the same as the GFC, but made me think of that period and the ensuing carnage.

One of the entrepreneurs yesterday shared that he’s starting to see these new entrepreneurs struggle. Inflation has materially increased start-up and construction costs, so new entrepreneurs must take out larger loans to get the company going. These larger loans have higher interest rates, compared to the previous fifteen years, so the amount of cash required to service the debt payment is materially higher. Prices these entrepreneurs can charge customers haven’t risen materially, so they can’t offset the higher debt costs unless they build a business that can service materially more customers (which requires higher start-up costs and more debt). Some of these entrepreneurs are having second thoughts and considering selling their businesses at a discount to wash their hands of the problem.

It was super interesting to hear about this from operators at the ground level of this industry. It makes we wonder if there’s too much leverage in the system that many people aren’t aware of.