Patrick O'Shaughnessy: belief

Transcript context

…French literature, yeah. Arguably philosophy. Although I did more theater and stuff. Man, I never used Excel either. I just got hammered. I was bottom of the class for a long time. It's just that learning curve. Like you said, coming in with a fresh mind and just having that, it's a stretch to call it adversity. You got to sink or swim. You got to learn this stuff. Having a liberal arts education and being prepared to learn, it ended up serving me super well and it sounds like you too. I think the best thing that can come out of any early education is just the feeling of what it's like to enjoy learning. Whatever area that happens to be, it opens the door for you to be a high slope learner and other stuff. If you're curious and let that be the pull mechanism versus some push mechanism, which as I mentioned just didn't work for me. I think that's the skill that really matters. You can figure Excel out if it's a means to an interesting and curious end for you, and any other tool that we have at our fingertips. I think becoming a high slope learner and getting the experience of how fun that can be is really the only truly valuable thing that college or some other formal education can bestow on you. I had this moment. I remember sitting in college physics freshman year. I went the engineering route. But when I was sitting in that lecture and I remember connecting the dots between how orbit works and why I can't throw a baseball very far. Understanding how that manifested in the equations we were learning. This teacher, this lecturer, we have the most amazing narrative between the practice theory, those two concepts, and putting them together. I still remember the high that I had from the flow state of what a pleasure it was to learn that. In a lot of ways, all three of us are constantly chasing that in how we learn something new in such a complete and well-illustrated way that it's thrilling and enjoyable to learn.…

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