“The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.” 

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock 

The COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps the biggest catalyst to trends that have been around since broadband services became available. In 2 months, many of us have learned that it is possible to work out of home, that we can learn nearly anything from cooking recipes to programming languages by a simple search on YouTube, that the dressing up & commuting for a few hours is not really necessary to be productive. 

I believe that one industry that is being changed long term is education. I echo Naval Ravikant’s thought that schools are a form of day care. Schools are where we are dropping off kids for 7 hours a day 5 or 6 days a week in hopes they learn something. In the current schooling system, parents meet & evaluate the teachers once every 3-4 months and cannot truly judge their teachers. While some Indian startups like Byjus, Vedantu etc are trying to solve the problem, I think that they suffer from the all or nothing problem that schools also offer.  

What is the all or nothing problem you ask? 

The all or nothing problem is inherent to our current schooling structure and has 2 aspects, the teachers and the syllabus. If you pick a school, you pick all the teachers that come with it. A child cannot pick a teacher for a subject, and many a times, the feeling a student has towards a teacher gets transferred to the subject. The school also has a syllabus recommended by an authority. A teacher cannot go beyond the syllabus for a given year. A student who is excellent in math may not be able to learn more about his/her favorite as it is out of syllabus. 

With online classes as they are happening now, parents are seeing firsthand the quality of education their children are getting from schools. And they may or may not be impressed by the way a teacher teaches. 

The internet eliminates the all or nothing problem I mention above. With the internet, a child can their favorite teacher from a near endless list of teachers making & uploading their content on YouTube. You can break this down even further where the child can have 3 or 4 different “teachers” who teach different topics of that same subject. For example, a child may like one teachers’ explanation on trigonometry and another teacher’s explanation on quadratic equations. This helps kids learn better, learn on their schedule & understand concepts that perhaps their schoolteacher is doing a poor job of explaining. 

For teachers too, this opens large opportunities. Teachers can record themselves teaching, create interesting graphics to explain a point better and simply by monetizing their content with ads, can reach kids on the internet for virtually free, while getting paid by Google. There are many other ways that they can get remunerated, like having a subscription built in where the teacher can have a one on one session with every subscriber, or special questions or topics that only subscribing students can get. 

I understand that there will be concerns around how students will be able to socialize, learn soft skills, interact with others. I think we will be able to develop apps that let parents and children meet up based on the area of residence, age and even based on the topic of interest.  

I highly recommend you read Professor Scott Galloway’s blog on how the COVID-19 is going to change college education is as well.

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

Groucho Marx

Everyday many of us come home from work and switch on our television sets; & nearly everyday we listen to the floating heads on TV and their rather binary view of the world. And everyday, we accept the outrage that the floating heads deliver to us via the media, whether it be Television News, Newspapers, Web Portals or any other medium.

Take TV for instance. We have 6 or more floating heads per news channel arguing it out, on prime time; debating (screaming) about something, with one floating head being with the anchor and the other against the anchor.

I find it amusing that the anchor decides in the span of 45 minutes (allowing for commercial breaks) which side is righteous & which side “wins”.

We also feel that the news anchors we choose are fighting for us. They are displaying the indignation we must be displaying to the “careless Government” & the “stupid opposition. After all the News Anchor and his other floating head “panelists” chastise Narendra Modi,Rahul Gandhi, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Vijay Mallya,Arundhati Roy, M.S. Dhoni, Hugo Chavez, Bill Gates, Batman, Iron Man, Mickey Mouse, The Greek God Zeus and anyone else the panelists can find.

The entire premise of most Television news is that only if these famous people clean up their lives, we can all live in unlimited utopia. And the Television Anchor and his Floating Head friends are delivering us this utopia, at least for one hour 45 minutes everyday.

I believe that the excitement of watching famous and powerful people getting bashed on live TV is what we crave.

|Television “debates” are the new Gladiator matches.|

If we are tired of the floating heads on “News Channels” we can simply press a few buttons and switch to other floating heads on TV soaps & movies. These floating heads are well dressed ( in a lot of or very little clothing) and lead generally exciting lives.

For instance, Tulsi Viranis husband dies, Ted Mosby is out looking for his soulmate, Alia Bhatt is solving boyfriend problems with a therapist, Sunny Deol is fighting the Pakistanis with a hand pump, James Bond is seducing 3 to 4 very good looking ladies, Jethalal is arguing with Bhide while eating Jalebis, Tom Cruise is saving the world and Robert Downey Jr. is saving the darned universe and all of this is happening every evening.

Compare that to our own lives. Most days of our lives are rather monotonous. We go to work, chit chat with colleagues, come back home and watch these larger than life stories and characters. We feel like we are missing out on something. We ask ourselves, “why is my life not so exciting?”

After all, not all of our days are exciting. Not everyday are we launching a new product or making a breakthrough. Not many of us are working on something that can change the world.

And to avoid the void, we turn to the idiot box with the floating heads.

But here is where it gets interesting, regardless of our profession or role, not everyday is going to be exciting.

I recommend that you decide for yourself what you want in and out of life. Once you do that, I think the floating heads will lose all relevance.

I wish I could give you a surefire formula for success, but life doesn’t work that way.

–Scott Adams in How To Fail At Almost Everything & Still Win Big

We all come across ads like “Do these 5 things that ALL billionaires do.”, “3 life hacks you must know to retire by 40.”,”The ONE thing that you MUST DO to get ripped.” All such ads have a similar message, a quick, easy way that helps us find the one perfect solution to all our problems, the one perfect way to achieve all our goals & the one perfect way to never fail.

The green tea that you need to drink to lose weight, the protein powder that you must drink to get ripped, the bat you must own to bat like Sachin Tendulkar, the MLM scheme you must join to make big money very easily and countless other examples are all variants of the same.

And we are all enchanted, enchanted by the call that this one thing is all we need to make it in life. To use metaphor, we are all enchanted by the grail quest. It is seductive. It offers us a respite from all of our problems. We need only do the things recommended & everything else automagically falls in place.

And a part I find rather amusing is that we do not want people to point out flaws on what is being offered. We’d rather be ignorant about what the flaws in our wonder solution that have someone point them to us and destroy our dreams.

Why is it so?

My guess is that we are:

1. Averse to hearing flaws in our own plans.
2. Afraid to look within for answers.
3. That we are always given solutions in school & college.

The negative news breaks the spell and we are forced to come back to reality. Our problems still exist. And that is rather psychologically painful. We are afraid to look within because then we need to confront our demons. Our own laziness, our own mistakes, our own lack of judgement. Add to this the fact that we are always given the one perfect solution in classrooms for 20 or so years. Everyday, for around 21 years, an authority figure tells us what we should do. How we should solve a math problem. How we should sit in class, how we should behave. School even defines what a winner is.

Overcoming years of conditioning , added with our own aversion to criticism from outsiders and lack of honesty with ourselves is (in my opinion) what leads to our quest of the perfect solution. After all, the solutions we are applying are most probably the ones taught in school & are no longer working. And if we fail, we are (gasp) losers!

So what is my LIFEHACK?

I believe that there is none. The only “lifehack” I recommend to people is to take complete responsibility for themselves & learn to trust their own judgement. I believe that if I really, really want someone to follow my instructions & ideas, then I need to live them.

Psst… if someone does have a lifehack on how I might improve my writing, I am all ears.