Elon Musk’s Semantic Trees

I am a big fan of Elon Musk. He was born gifted, but he has been able to master how to learn, he reads a lot, surrounds himself with experts, and does a lot of experiments. Has been able to identify industries such as banking, energy, transportation, and space, that are important to the future of humanity and apply his unique thinking and resources to disrupt these fields.

One of the things that makes him unique is his ability to identify and master the core principles of a chosen field and then apply these to disruptive solutions. Elon Musk believes that most people have limited their capacity for creativity by not knowing how to outline their information in a way that leads to new connections.

Elon Musks has two stages of learning:

  1. Semantic trees – build the trunk on first principles
  2. Make connections – add peripheral knowledge as connections to these principles

Semantic trees

Not everything you learn in a field is equally important; some elements are central, and others are peripheral. Identify these central elements and then master them first before moving on to the peripheral elements.  

“Make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

Elon Musk

Taking this semantic tree approach, you can create a conceptual framework of the fundamental ideas and central debates of a discipline to help you come up with new ideas that have value. Naval Ravikant suggests a similar idea when talking about aiming to be able to pick up any book in a library and understand it. By learning the fundamentals of a subject first, and then you can pick up and understand any text in that field.

Introductory textbooks are a great place to start building a conceptual framework for a new field. You can usually find the reading list for many university introductory courses on their websites as a starting point when looking at a new area. These introductory courses for some of the best universities in the world can also be found on Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) platforms like EdX and Coursera if you need a more directed starting point. 

Make connections

We remember things better by associating them with something we already know. The fundamental knowledge of an area can be used as ‘hooks’ for new learning to be attached, speeding up your understanding and helping you remember more of what you read. Once you have built the foundational truck of your semantic tree, you can start to read more widely around a subject to construct vast trees in across multiple sectors. By starting with the core knowledge and then adding the peripheral knowledge to the truck of core principles, you will find that although slower, in the beginning, you will be able to go much further and faster with your learning in the long term. 

One approach that Bill Gates suggests is to find the leading thinker in a field and read everything they have published. This approach allows you to quickly find interesting peripheral knowledge and understand how these have been linked to the core principles by an existing expert. Once you have your semantic trees, over time, you can start to connect your current knowledge and new ideas as you come across them, using these connections to come up with new usable insights that can help you build experiments in your work.

Build your first tree

When approaching a new area, first learn the core principles and then move on to the advanced material, making connections to these core principles for faster and better learning. Build the truck first and then read everything you can to make the connections.

Try building a tree now; 

  1. Open a blank document (paper or digital) and write the disciple as a title at the top of the page. 
  2. Have a go at listing five to six fundamental principles in that area; these might be a formula in a maths-based subject or rules in a non-technical discipline.
  3. Try to find the reading list of an introductory module at the top university for that subject and edit your list with these new items.
  4. Now you have the trunk for your semantic tree, add any peripheral knowledge, ideas, or debates you can think of, using the core text and a google search to help. 
  5. Connect the peripheral elements to the fundamental principles you believe they relate to in your tree.

I would highly recommend reading Ashlee Van’s book on Elon Musk and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Connect with me on Twitter if you want to discuss these ideas. 

Universities in the UK

Universities UK, the ‘collective voice’ of universities in the United Kingdom states three core areas of impact to the country from the 165 registered higher education institutions:

  1. Training people for the key jobs communities rely on including teachers, doctors, dentists, and nurses. 
  2. Creating jobs and investment directly and indirectly by students spending including £7.3 billion per year from international students. 
  3. Producing world-leading research that positively impacts peoples lives.

Graduate employment

2.38 million students were studying at University in the Uk in 2018-18. In 2016-17 over 90% of graduates were in work or full-time study within six months of leaving university and in 2019 the median graduate salary in England was £10,000 more than that for non-graduates. In 2018-19 almost 4,000 new graduate start-ups were created, and 131 new university-owned companies were created.

Investment

Universities in the UK employ 440,000 staff, with 49% of these on academic contracts and support a total of more than 940,000 jobs. In 2014-15 they generated £95 billion in output for the UK economy with a total income of £38.2 billion, £18.9 Billion from tuition fees and education contracts. 

Research

The 2014 Research Excellence Framework or the REF, rated UK academic research productivity as 3.6 times that of the world average, with just 4.1% of the world’s researcher but 15.2% of the worlds most highly-cited articles. Research grants and contracts create an income of £6.2 billion annually.

Participation rates in the UK are at 49% of all 18-year-olds. Universities are becoming more inclusive, increasing the proportion of 18-year-olds from low participation neighbourhoods from 13.2% in 2010 to 21% in 2019. The proportion of students from the lowest-income households, judged by those who receive free school meals, has risen from 11.7% to 18.9% in the same period.

More investigation needed

These are all official figures published by the UK government and are provided on the Universities UK website. Many of the numbers sound very impressive and do not seem to warrant the public criticism that the HE sector regularly gets from politicians and the mainstream media. I am particularly interested in the ‘graduate premium’ on incomes and how variable this number is based on the university attended and subject area the student studied. 

I find the order in which the impacts are ordered interesting. Preparing students for jobs is first, the economic impact of the universities as employers second and research third. This order appears to be based on the size of the impact for the UK, but it is at odds with the way that most academics think, based on my experience, with research seen as the most crucial reason a university exists and the cultural impact to students second. 

Future posts are coming looking into the details of these observations. Check out the Universities UK website to dig into the details from this post or contact me on Twitter if you want to talk about the impact of Universities in the UK or the country you are based in.

Deadhang for good posture and shoulder health

One of the best stretches you can do is to dead-hang from a bar. According to John M. Kirch, one of the worlds leading orthopaedic surgeons, hanging for 30 seconds three times per day can cure or prevent 99% of all shoulder pain. Hanging from a bar will open up the shoulder joint, improve mobility and strengthens the shoulder.

Kirch came to this conclusion by noticing the similarity of the human’s shoulder join to that or the great apes. These apes still brachiate; hand and swing from trees, and adapting this practice into our own lives will allow the shoulder to do what it is designed to do.

If you were chased by a tiger up a tree, the muscles you use to hang on to the branch for a long time are tonic muscles. If you decided to chase a deer and throw rocks, you would use your phasic muscles.

Dan John

Regular hanging can help with hunched over posture too. Doctor Vladimir Janda, a neurologist and exercise physiologist, when studying posture separated muscles into two groups; tonic muscles that shorten with age and phasic muscles, which weaken with age. The tonic muscles include By stretching the tonic muscles and strengthening the phasic muscles; we can improve posture and reduce the likelihood of pain from long hours of sitting hunched over a laptop or slumped on a sofa.

Working on a University campus, I used to spend a lot of time walking between buildings for meetings and would regularly hit 10,000 steps without thinking about it. At the time of writing, I have been working from home for the last seven months. All my meetings are video calls in front of a computer in my spare bedroom with no forced transit every 50 minutes. With walking no longer a natural part of my day, and spending most of my working day sitting down with less than graceful posture, I have had to find ways to introduce physical activity and stretching to the natural gaps. 

Adding it to my routine

For every day I work from home I am finding three times when I can hang from a door mounted pull up bar I bought from Amazon for less than a week’s worth of petrol. In an ideal world, I aim to do the first 30-second hang when I wake up, the second when I break for lunch to get the 4-5 hours of sitting in front of a computer out of my back, and the final 30 seconds when I finish in the evening to stretch off the day. The reality is messier, and I stopped using a timer after the first few days and go off feel and grip strength. The main thing is I am stretching regularly and can feel the difference in my back, chest, and posture.

Try the dead-hang for better posture and shoulder health

Grab a pull up bar, monkey bars, a tree branch, or anything else you can hang from with an overhand grip around shoulder-width apart and hang, allowing your shoulders to relax completely. If your grip can’t take 30 seconds straight away, do what you can and gradually work up to 30 seconds. Alternatively, you can rest your feet on a bench or the floor and use your legs to take some of the weight, gradually reducing the amount of weight until you can do 30 seconds hanging unaided.  

Contact me on Twitter if you try this and want to share how it went. If you are interested in this and want to know more, I suggest you read ‘Shoulder Pain? The Solution & Prevention’ by John M Kirsch. 

Zero-inbox with Outlook

Zero-inbox at a tactical level is a set of techniques for managing large amounts of email in a reduced amount of time. At a strategic level, it is a way of taking more control of your working day, reducing the urge to spend your day reacting to every new message, and freeing up your mind to focus on tasks that have long term value. The Outlook web app has several integrated tools that can speed up the processing of your emails and reduce the time you spend in your inbox.

Your email inbox is someone else’s To Do list

Tiago Forte

There are four applications you need to manage your email, a calendar, a todo list, a read-later app, and a reference app. The Calendar and To Do app in Outlook will do for the first two; I use Instapaper to store things to read later and Roam Research for my reference app (OneNote is an office365 app and is a better option for you want it all integrated).

You can access both the Calendar and Todo apps in your Outlook online inbox by clicking on the ‘My Day’ icon in the top right-hand menu of the Outlook web app. The ‘My Day’ icon will open a panel down the right-hand side of the browser window. The exciting part is that you can drag an email into this panel and generate a calendar event or a todo item with the email attached for access to it later.

Some basic rules

  • Only read an email once in your inbox, process it as soon as you have read it.
  • Do not move onto a new email until the one you are reading is processed.
  • If ‘completing’ an email will take less than 2 minutes, do it there and then.
  • Block out a time each day when you process all your email in your inbox; I like to do this at the end of the day.
  • Block out a time once per week and then once per day where you read through your todo list and schedule which tasks you will do that week and each day; I like to plan my week on Sunday afternoon and then my day for 5 minutes each morning. 
  • Check-in with your inbox once or twice a day to read the subject lines or new emails to pick up anything urgent. 

How to process your email

  1. The setup
    1. Sort your email in date order with the oldest first, 
    2. Turn off focus inbox and any other tools that put email in additional boxes, so all your unprocessed email is in one inbox.
    3. Unsubscribe from all non-essential newsletters and email lists.
  2. Skim read the first email.
  3. If it takes less than two minutes to complete, do it straight away. 
  4. If it would take longer than two minutes, ask “what do I need to do about this?”
    1. If it requires a conversation, drag the email into the calendar and set a time to meet the sender and cc’d people.
    2. If it requires action, drag the email into the todo list.
    3. If it is a long read, save it to Instapaper to read later by forwarding the email to your personal Instapaper email address found in your Instapaper settings or opening linked webpages and using the chrome extension to save it.
    4. If you want to reference the email later copy and paste the text to your reference app (I will find a smarter way to do this and update this post).
  5. Drag the processed email into a reference folder; it is now accessible via the calendar event and todo item so you should not need to find it again. 
  6. Move to the next email and repeat until all your messages are out of your inbox.
  7. Close your email and go and do something productive.

Email is addictive; many of us will open our inbox as a holding task at any stage of the day when we are bored or have a few minutes to spare. Now you have this ‘holding task’ time back, fill it with a more productive habit such as opening Instapaper and reading something that will make you smarter.

Contact me on Twitter if you try this and want to share how it went. If you are interested in this and want to know more, I suggest you read the One-Touch to Inbox Zero post by Tiago Forte, and if you’re going to get into the details read Getting Things Done by David Allen.

200 hours of learning challenge

The need to develop ourselves into experts has never been more critical. Retirement ages in the UK are rising to catch up with increasing life expectancy, meaning millennials, like me, will need to work into our late 70s. As well as working longer, if we want to be paid well, we are going to need to have a broad and deep set of skills as computing and automation hollow out the jobs market, turning many middle-income jobs into high-income ones. Being experts in our chosen fields is the only way to build a meaningful, enjoyable, and financially rewarding work.

Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born.

K. Anders Ericsson1

The good news is that expertise can be learnt. K. Anders Ericsson in the paper ‘The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance’2 argues that ‘…the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.’ In the paper, deliberate practice is defined as ‘…a regime of effortful activities designed to optimise improvement.’ 

The journey to expertise is a decade long pursuit, but most of us are not starting from scratch, and some starting qualification in your field is likely to accelerate the process. To become an expert, we need to begin a deliberate practice that stretches your current abilities and takes you out of your comfort zone. A coach, mentor, or teacher will speed up the process too, telling us how to develop expertise in the field, provide a feedback loop, and developing the ability to coach ourselves.  

Reading is the easiest way to start your deliberate practice. Many of the worlds smartest and most impactful people spend significant amounts of their working lives reading. Bill Gates, in his Nextflix documentary, talks about finds the leading expert in a field he is interested in and reads everything they have published to build up expertise in the area. Naval Ravikant suggests first developing the habit by reading fiction that you love. You will naturally move towards theory, concepts, and non-fiction.

Finding time

Deliberate practice takes time, and so we need to create this space to develop our expertise, but how much? Benjamin Franklin used to dedicate one hour per day during the working week, whereas Warren Buffet spends around 6 hours per day reading and thinking. Many other examples of highly successful people’s learning practices can be found with a quick Google search, but the baseline seems to be an hour so let us start there.

For me, the two best times to find an hour are first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Getting up at 5:00 to study before the world wakes up got me successfully through a degree while working full-time, but the current absence of a commute for most of us means we can push this back a bit. My new practice is to get up at 6:00 am (ish), do some sit-ups and 5 minutes of light exercise to wake up, and then sit down to learn for a solid hour at least. If life gets in the way, I can skip the TV in the evening and do the work then. For people that have more commitments outside of work than I do, finding an hour during the working day might work too as long as the learning is related to the work you do. You will find yourself less productive in the short term, but your new skills will start to make the remaining hours more effective over the longer-term.

We have talked about reading is an excellent place to start, but there are additional ways that we can make each hour of study time more meaningful. The first is to highlight your reading and transfer these a separate document; you could then summarise these highlights in your own words. Once your knowledge starts to grow, you can begin to apply your learning to projects at work and creating a network of like-minded people you can discuss ideas with and solve problems collaboratively around the things you are learning.

The 200-day challenge

  1. Find something to learn
    1. Read a book you will enjoy
    2. Take a practical course to learn a new skill
    3. Set yourself a problem to research
  2. Find an hour in your day to dedicate to that thing for the next three months
  3. Take notes and put them in place you can review regularly – roam research is a good option as it allows you to create links between similar themes from your various notes over time.
  4. Commit to it for the next 200 days.

Send me a message on twitter if you want to join in, and we can add a social element to the challenge. 

1http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf

2https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert

The old barriers to digital learning are gone but new ones have replaced them

In the past, the two most significant barriers to the mainstream adoption of digital learning in Higher education has been the willingness of academics to invest the time and risk their outcomes on an alternative method of delivery that has been seen as inferior, and good enough quality infrastructure to support such adoption.

The current pandemic with government-enforced lockdowns and social distancing has removed both these barriers. Academics have risen to the challenge of giving up what they know to work and go all-in with to them is untested and unexplored digital learning. Technology companies have drastically moved the tools they provide significantly to make teaching online easier and learning online more accessible.

As Learning Designer we have had three main jobs; to make quality standards clear and easy to follow, to knit technologies together into an easy to use ecosystem, and provide the support and training to academics to deliver their subject narrative and assessment strategies in a new and engaging way.

Initial feedback from students across the Higher Education sector has shown that many universities are going some way to meeting the challenge presented to us by the global pandemic, but three large tasks remain:

  1. How do we add more structure to students learning while the rules on what they are allowed to do continue to change?
  2. How do we keep the elements of connection in the university experiences and help students avoid loneliness?
  3. How do we provide learning environments when most traditional areas to study are unsuitable?

I believe that these three barriers are critical to addressing to make sure students return after the Christmas break and are thriving this academic year.

Taking control of my daily schedule

I have been working from home for seven months. Working in online learning in Higher Education, the period has been the busiest of my working life. Still, it has also allowed me to take control of my day in a way that the daily commute and traditional working day never allowed. I read more, I am healthier than ever, and my team and I have helped more the organisation we work in forwarding many years to deliver good quality blended learning under government social distancing guidelines. 

The Goals

At the start of the year, I wanted to achieve three big goals:

  • I want to be strong, healthy, and full of energy.
  • I want to master my specialism around learning, design, technology, and digital strategy
  • I want to build something the lasts and makes the world better. 

A modest home gym in the garage and some Dan John books have helped me to develop a strength routine. A commitment to run almost every day and reach a total of 2000 miles this year, with the help of Jon Albon, has forced me to leave the house for my state-approved daily exercise to get into the countryside and get some fresh air. A copy of the book Be fit or be damned has filled in the day with other times to stay engaged and healthy.

To master my area of Learning, Design, Technology, and digital strategy, I read a lot; online courses, books, articles, and newsletters. I have begun to read books on Kindle and almost everything else on the read later app Instapaper. These apps allow me to highlight key points and export these to Readwise. Readwise is a more recent addition to my tech stack; collating all my highlights and sending me spaced reminders in a daily email. My highlights sync to Roam research, where I collate and organise them into themes. I have started to write directly into Grammarly and will begin to publish on this daily blog. 

In May 2018, I started my current role leading the online and flexible learning at a large University. I was given a blank sheet of paper and asked to create a plan to move the organisation towards hyper flexibility. The groundwork before March 2020 and a growing team has allowed the University to change and adapt to the lockdowns and social distancing to deliver a significant proportion of all courses online. 

The schedule

A rough working day with timings is listed below. Most days I wake up at five when my wife gets up and go back to sleep, and might wake up at six or sometimes seven. Some days when I am tired or sore from the previous days training, I open my phone and cyberloafing, reducing my learning time or meaning I start work a little later. Sometimes my scheduled meetings or a hard deadline mean I do not follow this at all and work into the evening. Each day is different, but I am slowly finding ways to become less reactive and take control of my time. 

  • 6:00 -wake up
    • 10-100 sit-ups
    • 5-minute activity to wake up and get the heart rate going
    • weigh myself
  • 6:20 – Get a coffee and start learning
  • 8:20 – Shower etc. 
  • 9:30 – Team stand up
  • 12:00 – Running or a walk
  • 13:00 – Back to work
  • 17:00 weights or some tonic work (stretching or mobility)
  • 18:00 – Cook, eat, and spend time with my wife
  • 21:30 – Bedtime 
    • Clean the kitchen
    • 10-100 Sit-ups
    • Read in bed on the Kindle – running or mountaineering biographies
  • 22:00 – Sleep