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| Ditching The Script |
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Ian (MAEKAN member pen name) discusses the importance of questions when teaching something new to other people.
I’ve been writing an Investment Guide over the course of the past few months to help people learn to make better financial decisions for themselves. The project was inspired by my many friends swept up in the COVID stock market craze and wanting to flip stocks around without any understanding of what they were doing (and potentially losing it all). I recently had a chance to begin teaching the guide to a friend who wanted to build up her investing skills to become more financially independent.
My friend is a serial entrepreneur, though given her age and experience, “serial entrepreneur” probably does more lifting than it is given credit for. As we began to go through the guide, it became clear that she simply didn’t understand business to begin with, anything from accounting to strategy. Why teach someone about investing when they are unclear about the underlying principles that are foundational to the entire process? I started probing, asking questions to make sure I would teach the right things, rather than try to stick to a script that didn’t fit the bill. Those questions were invaluable to starch from scratch and help her on her way.
Regardless of the field, we often jump to conclusions or make assumptions as to what someone across from us should or shouldn’t know. In a state of embarrassment or self-confidence, we often gloss over the verbiage and pretend to know what someone is saying to move a process along, only to collapse later on from poor basic knowledge. As corny as it sounds, I’ll never forget the saying: “To assume is to make an ass out of you and me.” Start from first principles, always. There is never any shame in being a beginner, especially when you have the right attitude to learn and grow.
Needless to say, upon changing the methods and content, my teaching experience improved drastically, as my “student” started making noticeable jumps in her skills and ability to build concepts on top of each other. There are no bad students, only bad teachers, and they exist because they don’t take the time to probe, ask questions and build strong foundations.
Incidentally, if you are interested in the guide, I will share it for free once the final illustrated version is completed. It’s my greatest hope that people will have the right tools to learn to invest diligently on their own.
- Ian Specker
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The Bulletin
Hear and read the latest from MAEKAN and the community. |
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189: Four dirty c-words and memes as shared language
Eugene and Charis discuss an essay written by Paul Jun, “The Four Dirty C-Words of the Internet”, and breakdown the usage of the words content, culture, community, and creator. They also talk about memes as shared language and the conduit through which beliefs are transmitted.
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| For Your A-10-tion |
The best links from across the Internet.
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1. ➰ Teslas Will Drive Underneath The Las Vegas Strip Using The Vegas Loop
The Vegas Loop, an underground highway transit system, was recently unanimously approved by Las Vegas' Clark County zoning commission. Covering 29 miles (about 47km) and 51 stations, the system will spread under the Las Vegas Boulevard strip and as far as the nearby university and NFL stadium.
2. 📕 A Book Looks Back On IBM's Poster Program
The IBM poster program was started by staff designer Ken White in the 1960s as a creative outlet with which the design team could communicate with IBM's own employees and also break from their routine of designing packaging, manuals and other work. 111 of those posters are remembered in a new book called The IBM Poster Program: Visual Memoranda by Robert Finkel and Shea Tillman.
"These posters by White, Anderson, and Bluhm represent a diverse collection of corporate graphic design, while providing a glimpse of employee communications in post-war America. They also show the degree to which Thomas J. Watson Jr.’s charge, “Good Design is Good Business” touched every aspect of IBM and created a lasting influence on corporate design in America."
3. 🛹 Watch: Amar Chebib's Documentary About Cree Skateboarding Legend Joe Buffalo
Through a story of addiction and athleticism, Amar Chebib’s documentary short “Joe Buffalo” shows the effects of the system that separated Native children from their families.
4. 🧥 Confronting Fashion's Role As Gatekeeper
The first of a two-part series from Highsnobiety unpacks fashion's surface application of the principles it claims to champion, including democratization and diversity.
"Yet how much does the fashion establishment really care about changing the structures that have kept the power in the hands of the same people for so long? How much will it fall when those who are denied a seat at the table create a table of their own? Are most traditional luxury brands already playing catch-up with their younger counterparts? And, most importantly — what needs to change in terms of who is let into the room, and for whom it’s time to go?"
5. 📱 Trump's New Social Network Is Just A Mastodon Clone
Despite Truth Social not launching until later this year, saavy users have found ways to make accounts on the social media platform. What they discovered under the hood is that Trump's challenge to mainstream social media is really just the un-attributed base code from open source Mastodon federated social network with some cosmetic differences. Despite the code being open source, there are caveats to its usage, as Mastodon and lead developer Eugen Rochko explains:
"The main thing is that Mastodon is free software, released under the AGPLv3 license, so anyone can use it—provided they comply with the license. The main part of the license is making the source code and any modifications to it available to the public,” Rochko told Motherboard. With Truth Social saying that its code is proprietary “that would be a problem, as that would indicate a license violation."
6. 🌱 Could We One Day Be Able To Breathe Like Plants?
German scientists have successfully developed a method that used algae injected into tadpoles to oxygenate them when exposed to light. While it remains to be seen whether the algae could survive inside living tadpoles and also weather an immune response enough to keep producing oxygen, the future promise for humans could mean another way of treating them after strokes or in high-altitude or underwater environments where oxygen is scarce.
"To explore the possibility, the team injected green algae (Chlamydomonas renhardtii) or cyanobacteria (Synechocystis) into tadpoles’ hearts. With each heartbeat, the algae inched through blood vessels and eventually reached the brain, turning the translucent tadpole bright green. Shining light on these tadpoles prompted both algae species to pump out oxygen to nearby cells."
7. 🧠 Simple But Difficult Mindfulness Exercises To Retrain Focus
Dr Amishi Jha, professor of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience and an expert in the science of attention, offers a few exercises from her book "Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day." The exercises, which are rooted in mindfulness, are designed to retrain attention and our ability to focus in an increasingly distracted world. As Eleanor Morgan writes:
"The first step to better focus is accepting a key truth, says Jha: you cannot just decide to have unfettered attention. You have to practise. “The notion of an unwavering mind is a fantasy,” she says. The problem is that we now have far more sources of distraction. We are not just recipients of content, but willing participants. Despite how often we are encouraged to “unplug” from our devices, we cannot outwit the algorithms designed by armies of software engineers, statisticians and psychologists."
8. 🎨 Kang Myonghi Spent 30 Years On A Painting
The South Korean artist began work on her painting "Le temps des camélias" ("The Time of Camellias") in the 1980s while living in Paris. Abandoning her work, she eventually gathered the courage to revisit it when she brought it to Jeju Island in 2007. and it would be another 10 years before she finished it in 2018. The painting reflects both her impulsiveness and close relationship with nature, and is part of an exhibition on the past decade of her work currently at Hong Kong's Villepin gallery.
9. 🎬 After Death On The Set Of Rust, Eyes Are On The First AD
As the investigation into the accidental firearm death and injury on the set of Alec Baldwin's Rust continues, attention has turned to both reports of crew walking off set citing poor working conditions and the role of the First Assistant Director that handed Baldwin the gun. On October 21st, during the rehearsal of a scene Alec Baldwin accidentally fired a gun that was declared to not be loaded with live ammunition. One of the bullets struck and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joe Souza.
10. 📷 An Initial Review Of The A7 IV
As the most expensive iteration of the A7 line yet (from previous to current generation), the A7IV improves over the A7III in several ways for both the stills and video modes that incorporate advanced features from the A7IIIS but also features that you might find in one of Sony's vlogging cameras such as a new streaming mode and articulated LCD.
Data Visualization Society publication Nightingale goes to print
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