Education has helped me a lot.
After my parents' divorce in the early seventies, I grew up with my mother, who wasn't super educated herself. But there were a lot of kids from the subcontinent in the neighbourhood, many of whom were academic achievers. So my sister and I grew up around them, and both of us did well in school.
Later in life, when my kids struggle to understand a tricky concept or master a new skill, I want them to have the strength and experience to tell themselves, 'I don't know how to do this... yet!' I want them to be confident that, even if something seems challenging today, they have what it takes to figure it out.
I realized that there are many people who are very good students, but they think of themselves as bad students. At the end of the day, what they are really missing is way to understand where their gaps are and a way to address those gaps.
A one-size-fits-all lecture is not the way to go about education.
At a lot of college graduations, you'll hear people say, 'Follow your passions,' and that is important, but no one talks about the stress of not having enough money, the issues of debt, and the issues of work stress.
One cannot be dogmatic about the right solution.
I am infamously bad at asking for money.
I'd like to see a reality where, if someone wants to work when they turn 18 to help support their family, and they learn at their own pace on something like the Khan Academy or other things, that they can just, on their own, get a bunch of the credits they need just by testing out of things.
People who are looked up to in America will often say, 'I don't get math.' And they'll often say it like they're being humble, but they seem almost proud of it because it's acceptable to act this way.
I was a good but not super serious student until about 10th grade, until I was about 14 or 15. Then I started to realise how competitive the world is. I started to meet kids who were more high-performing.
I'm starting a virtual school for the world, teaching things the way I wanted to be taught.
I think history shows us that there is not one credible credential that has come from the for-profit reality, and that is because the for-profit reality is inherently motivated to maximize the level of people that take it.
I see no reason why there still are large lectures in universities throughout the world. When people gather, they should be interactive, problem-solving, and experimenting; not passively listening.
I do believe that education should become as close to free as possible.
One's perception of themselves has a much bigger role than has been acknowledged to determine who succeeds and who does not.
Sometimes I think people confuse rote learning with traditional conceptual instruction.
I'm a fan of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is possible.
My personal narrative - I was lucky early on in my career to have some really strong mentors. I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what really built me up.
It's an old idea. It's arguably the first way that people learn, that, hey, if you need to learn something, if you're having trouble with it, keep working on it until you master it and then you go to a more advanced concept. But in the education systems that all of us grew up in, we all learned at a fixed pace.
