How to make people more competent, smarter and more autonomous… quickly?
A few days ago, I discovered this young man, Tanmay Bakshi, who, in addition to being the world’s youngest IBM Watson programmer, is also an entrepreneur, author and keynote speaker… at just 13 years old.
Tanmay learned programming thanks to his father. The latter shared with his son what he knew and the young man went much further, thanks to the Internet. Today, Tanmay Bakshi is considered a prodigy, a genius. He has even been hired by Google at only 13 years old.
Tanmay Bakshi reminded me of the child I once was. I did not have a programmer father who could share his knowledge on that matter with me, nor did I have access to the Internet back then, but I was lucky enough to grow up surrounded by an extraordinary technology called : books. It was tons of knowledge and stories locked in a tool that did not even need electricity to work.
Thanks to books, I learned a lot of things and acquired many skills, including writing, storytelling, computer sciences, sales, etc. At that time, and that was well before Google, I thought all the answers to the questions I was asking myself were in books. I wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t right either.
How people acquire knowlege and skills ?
I have always been intrigued and fascinated by the way people acquire knowledge and skills. I have often wondered how geniuses become geniuses. How do they do to revolutionize or reinvent their field?
Is it because they have a different brain or because they are born with pre-installed knowledge, like the softwares that come with our computers? Are they supermen or just people who exploit their brains better than others? If so, how do they do it? Maybe they were just lucky enough to be surrounded by the right people, the right tools, the right informations, at the right time.
In one of his keynote, Tanmay Bakshi begins by saying that he was not born a software developer or author. It took him 7 years of dedication to get there. Is that what makes the difference between him and the others? Do you think that with 7 years of dedication, the kid who lives in a remote village of Burundi could also become a software programmer, entrepreneur, author and keynote speaker?
Tanmay began programming at the age of 5. I learned to play piano at the same age. He acquired this skill thanks to his father and by practicing. I learned to play piano by spying on a cousin who was a music student. I did practice too, but not for 7 years. My dad wanted me to be a good student, so he asked me to stop playing piano when school started. What is fascinating here is that neither Tanmay nor I acquired these skills at school.
I am as fascinated by the skills of this 13-year-old prodigy as by those of Wil Aime, another prodigy, who has acquired a certain knowledge and exploited it to create this universe in which he trains us in each of his videos. Wil Aime often says that he owes all this to his mother and the teacher who created a theater class for him. But Wil Aime has surpassed his mother and that teacher, as Tanmay Bakshi has surpassed his father. How did they do that?
People acquire knowledge in various ways. I have acquired a good part of mine from reading, which is why I have always thought that books are the best way to share knowledge. This led me to create Kusoma, a web and mobile platform that allows authors to publish, promote and sell their books so readers around the world can get and read them as they wish. But reading is only one of the various ways to share and acquire knowledge.
Today, I’m learning a lot from the podcasts I’m listening to, including How I Built This, Masters Of Scale, SuperSoul Conversations, Here’s The Thing… Others, like Tanmay Bakshi, have certainly acquired their knowledge through videos on Youtube or publications on GitHub, which is why it’s via those channels that he shares his knowledge. If Wil Aime decided one day to share what he does and has learned, he would probably do it via storytelling.
In the end, no matter which channel we learn from, knowledge always go from one person to another, from a brain to another. I think that’s the key.
My theory on making people more competent, smarter and more autonomous… quickly.
I think it’s possible to have a lot of people become like Tanmay or Wil Aime in a very short time. We don’t need to transform their brains or play with them. I strongly believe that we all have everything we need to become geniuses. We are just not surrounded by the right people and the right tools. How can we change that?
What we have to do is to democratize the way we share knowledge and adapt it to the various ways people acquire them. Not everyone is good at writing or public speaking or speaking in front of a camera. Yet, everyone can have some knowledge or skill to share. And we can learn anything from anyone.
If Tanmay’s father thought he wasn’t good enough to teach his 5-year-old son, Tanmay would have probably been a child like the so-called “normal”. If Wil Aime had not had a mother who was telling him movies’ stories, he wouldn’t have become the person we know. And if Mark Zuckerberg had not been exposed to a computer at a very early age and had not bathed in a world where programming was known, he would never have become the Zuck we know. This is to say that people acquire knowledge in very various way.
The challenge here is to make sure that people have easy access to other people knowledge. Google is not enough. Medium neither. Even Wikipedia is not suitable for this. These three platforms facilitate access to information. Coursera and others MOOC platforms approach it, but they are only a reproduction of the classical school.
On those platforms, knowledge is classified as at school. Implicitly, we say to people what they should learn. By doing so, we limit the range of possibilities they have. There’s too many things to learn in the world to be limited to those taught at school. Plus, the acquisition of knowledge must be fun. We must learn without thinking that we are learning. That’s what happened to Tanmay, Wil Aime and even I. We were having fun while learning.
Note to parents : no knowledge or skill is more important than another. Tanmay may be a computer genius, but that does not make him a better person than Lionel Messi, who is a football genius. People want to be free to learn what they want to learn, when and where they want to learn it. School is not enough. Moreover, it’s not fun. We are forced to learn, but people’s brain don’t work that way. We don’t acquire knowledge in the same way.
We need a place where anyone with a knowledge or skill to share can share it with anyone who wants to acquire that knowledge or skill. But some steps in the knowledge-sharing process (the BS steps) should be removed to make it easy for anyone to understand and replicate. A very wise man once said that “imitation is the first step to mastery and success”. That’s also my belief.
Masterclass.com is doing a very good job. It’s the closer I have seen so far to what I have in mind. But it’s not yet democratized, nor inclusive.
I am Ibuka Ndjoli, an African author and entrepreneur, founder of a start-up called Kusoma Group, which allows publishers and authors to publish, promote and easily sell their books to readers around the world. I share some tips, advice, discoveries and my experiences on a blog that I named Ibuka Sharing. I’m also more or less talkative on Twitter => @ibukandjoli
