Hello and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson, and this week I'm doing a mini episode. I'm neck deep in research about the British Navy and the famous Admiral Horatio Nelson, episode one of that series will be coming next week. But in the meantime, I just wanted to drop a brief mini episode.

On other things that I'm researching. So in addition to reading all these biographies and all the research I do for the main episodes, sometimes I wander down other rabbit holes. And so I thought I would share  Some of the other things that I've been learning about and thinking about,  this week while, while we wait for the main episode.

So I got two things this week. One is something that I came across while doing background research on the British Navy in order to get ready for this upcoming episode on Lord Nelson. And I came across a character named Sir Humphrey Gilbert. And as you're researching the British Navy, you come across a lot of these figures, these classic Elizabethan English adventurers.

The most famous one is Sir Francis Drake. And this guy's kinda like that. So he fights the French at La hra. He then fights the Irish, he gets elected to Parliament. He fights the Spanish in the Netherlands. , he founds Gresham College. He's like a real rough character. So he brawls with a gentleman and seriously injures him.

Uh, and he murders someone in an argument. ,  So you see he's got this kinda interesting character in that he's a man of words. He's very literary. He's a great writer and he founds this college, but he's also like a rough character who fights.  He's an explorer. He is one of the big early figures in trying to.

Discover the northwest passage in Canada. So this is trying to find a sea route north of Canada through there to, to get to Asia. He's unable to find it because it doesn't exist. Uh, he goes a little bit crazy and then decides to go down with his ship on the return journey, yelling as the ship goes down.

We are as near to heaven by sea as by land. So he's this kinda larger than life crazy character. , A little bit feckless, but very brave and daring. And I like him. I really like learning about him. But one of the reasons I wanted to bring him up is he has this personal motto, which I love. It has become something of a motto for me as well.

So he created a flag, a banner, a personal banner, and on it he had the words written quid non,  which is Latin for why not.  I'm sure Alex Petkus can correct my pronunciation of the Latin, but I like that quid non, why not? And I love that motto cuz it makes me think that there are two types of people in the world.

There are those who, when they're presented with a plan or something ambitious, ask why. And then there are those who ask why not.  And the people who ask why are the ones who are safe ,  And don't have to suffer a lot of risk, but they don't accomplish much either. And the people who ask why not are the people who fail and fall flat on their face like Humphrey Gilbert often did, but they're also the people who accomplish things.

They do the adventure, they start the business, they make the speech, they do the thing, they take the risk. And so sometimes when I'm facing something scary, I'm tempted to ask myself, why? Why do this? Why go through with it? Why risk it? Why put myself through this?  And so a mental model that I have taken from this guy, Humphrey Gilbert, is to flip that on its head.

And ask myself, why not instead? And when I do that, , when I ask myself, oh, what's the worst that could happen? Why not? Why not Go for it. I'm more inclined to take those risks  and to undertake projects that ultimately help me progress. So maybe that is one mental model that is helpful to you and a motto that you can adopt as well.

Why not?

The other thing that is pretty unrelated to the episode I'm doing right now is something about genius education. So you might know that's something I'm interested in. I did an episode on this guy Laszlo Polgar.  He was an education researcher in Hungary, in Budapest, and he decided to implement his findings and he raised his three daughters to be chess masters and it worked out marvelously.

All three of them were great , and in fact, one of 'em was the greatest female chess player of all time.

And so that's one of my hobby horses. I've got young children and I'm trying to figure out what I'm gonna do for their education. I also started thinking about education this last week because if you listen to that, Steve Jobs part three episode, my go down a little thing there on education. He had a quote about how he didn't have great experience in his K through 12 education system.

So I was thinking about this last week. I was thinking about genius education. You know, these people like the Polgar sisters, like Tiger Woods, Mozart, Andre Agassi, Picasso, uh, these people that started really young and were able to accomplish really great things in their lives. And I came across this thing called Bloom's two Sigma problem,  and I found the results of this study fascinating.

So, Benjamin Blum was an education researcher who lived and worked mainly in the Midwest in the us. But he was one of the seminal academics in coming up with theories for testing proficiency in students and best practices in instruction in how to teach students. And one of the things Bloom was known for was his analysis of this study on a group of students that were in fourth, fifth, and eighth grade.

And they took these students and divided them into three groups.  And in one group, they just kept normal education. They just. Went to school, went to class every day.

The second group. They put in something called mastery education, this, this different form of instruction.   And then for the third group, they gave them tutors. And so they had full-time instruction from tutors.

So they test all three groups at the beginning, and they were all average, which is what they should be, right? That's what average means. So the median student scored about, in the 50th percentile in all three groups.  And so then they go through, they do, um, I think it's just six or seven weeks of education in these three different styles.

And then they tested them again at the end of the experiment, , to see. How they did. And so the students that got normal education continued to be averaged. They continued to be in the 50th percentile. , those in the mastery,  education group, , did a little bit better. And then the students that were tutored full-time for six or seven weeks,  They performed more than two standard deviations better than the normal students.

So that means that the average student in that group, the average tutored student performed in the 98th percentile compared to the control group.  And that is an absolutely huge effect size. You basically never get effect sizes that large in studies in social sciences. It's an insane result. Like there, there's no other intervention that you can find.

That leads to that drastic of a result, basically.  And by the way, it's called the Two Sigma problem because Bloom realized that this was a problem because you can't just one-on-one tutor every kid in, in the nation, right? That's way too expensive. That's not a realistic intervention. And so the problem is he's trying to figure out, well, what other things could we do that would give us a similar result that might be cheaper and.

He went through, he tested a bunch of things. Some he found an effect, but nothing nearly as large as, uh, tutoring as this two sigma effect.  And, um, in the subsequent years, I think this was in the, the seventies, the 1970s, maybe 1960s, that this study was done. And in the intervening time, people have tried to replicate this result.

And when they compare  tutoring, full-time tutoring to full-time normal classroom education, what they find is that it does indeed have an enormous effect.  Not two Sigmas big. Uh, it's generally a little smaller, so that seems to be a little bit of an outlier. And part of it is the way the study was designed.

He had them do tutoring with this mastery education. A style of teaching, so maybe that contributed. But anyway, it's been replicated many times the results are clear. It's maybe not two sigmas in reality, but it's probably more like one to one and a half standard deviations. There actually was one study by darpa, which is this advanced research arm of the US military, and they used a digital tutor.

To automatically assess students' abilities and then adapt to teach 'em the things that they hadn't mastered yet. And they actually found an effect larger than two standard deviations. So using this, this type of software that they had developed, , they found an effect that was larger than two standard deviations.

And  only took half the time to instruct the students as a regular classroom setting. So, um, there are certain circumstances under which tutoring could actually be larger than, , a two standard deviation difference in terms of the outcomes. So as I'm reading this study, I'm thinking to myself, huh,  I wonder how much this explains.

People like the Polgar  people like the William Sisters Venus and Serena Williams, two of the greatest women's tennis players of all time. Their father was intent on his girls becoming tennis stars. And so he started tutoring them,  teaching them tennis one-on-one when they were four and a half years old.

And he worked with them personally, taught them himself. And then when they got too good for him to continue coaching them, he got them coaches to continue that education.

And so you look at that and you say, wow. So that's very similar to the Polgar sisters, very similar to Tiger Woods, who, who similarly, like when he was three, his father started him playing golf and one-on-one instructed him.   So I start to think how much of that is just, wow, okay, you're getting  a result.

That is one standard, maybe one and a half standard deviations better  than. Normal classroom instruction

or if you're looking at it in terms of athletics, you know, maybe, uh, a team setting.  So you're getting a, a standard deviation or more better, and you're letting that compound over   years and years and years over decades. Right? 10, 20 years until the 30 years, I guess, until their careers usually, usually are over.

so I do think it, it comes down a lot of it to that. I think if you go back and listen to that Polgar episode, I pull out a lot of the lessons that. He says Work ingenious education, , in his book Raise a Genius. And I think those are worth studying, but I really think if you can only learn one thing  and you really want, uh, your, your children to learn and be ahead, the one thing to learn is  tutoring lots and lots of tutoring.

And that is going to put them way, way ahead.

It also makes me think that tutoring is  way, way undervalued. A lot of people will do tutoring for like an hour or two per week. I know very few people who are doing full-time tutoring and you know, I, I start to think back to these stories that I have studied and realize, wow, tutoring is actually really common.

So, You know, in the classical world it was very common. Alexander the Great had his own tutor.  And you know, by the way, one of his tutors was Aristotle, so maybe that is something that helped him be great. , you know, Caesar had his own tutors.  That is how young Roman aristocrats were educated.

Uh, Thomas Edison was homeschooled by his very well educated, very intelligent mother. And so he was basically tutored as well, uh, for, for his education. The five rothchilds were taught finance, not in school or university, but personally one-on-one by their father while apprenticing,  for him and working in his shop.

And so  I think that this is something that is way undervalued is the power. Of this one-on-one personal tutoring, and I see a lot of really wealthy people pay to send their children to elite private schools. And I'm sure those private schools do a lot of things Great. I, I think one of the big things is that they just get to associate with other well-to-do and very intelligent people, but in terms of just the education,  you know, they're still getting basically a normal classroom education and the money that they spend on those private schools, if they're just thinking about the education.

Aspect of it would probably be much better spent on full-time tutoring for their child. And by the way, I'm talking about all this with children and their education, but I don't think it's just children.  I think adults could really benefit from more tutoring as well. Like, uh, golf and tennis are basically the only two places where adults spend good money on considerable amounts of tutoring.

 I think people who have the means should have tutors for lots of things. You know, I know so many people who are entrepreneurs, who are executives, who have a lot of money, have plenty of money, and they're still trying to do Duolingo on their own by themselves.

They're still trying to learn coding by doing Googling and taking a course online. So, And once you see this research, you realize, oh, actually they would learn so much faster if in trying to learn a foreign language or trying to learn Python or trying to learn to, you know, code in whatever way. They just got a tutor and they just did 10 to 15 hours of one-on-one tutoring per week.

I think that greatly accelerates learning as an adult as well.

On the podcast, my first million, Sean Puri, Sampa, one of the things they talked about their like goals for 2023 was more coaching. They found that coaching was really effective and a number of aspects of their life. So one of the things they wanted to spend money on was coaching.

They thought it was, was really worth it. And I think that's kind of a validation of this idea that you get this huge effect from one-on-one tutoring, from one-on-one coaching. .   And so that's a really effective way to spend your money if, if you wanna learn.

Um, okay, that's it this week. Special thanks and a shout out to Jose Luis Recon. Fernandez de LaPuente. What a name of the Nint till blog. I stole a bunch of his excellent research for that stuff on Bloom's two Sigma problem and the power of tutoring. So, uh, I'll link up his blog post if you wanna learn more about that.

That's a deep dive where he goes into all the research  about tutoring and mastery education and, , what all the studies say. So if you're interested in that, click on that link.  Okay, that's it for this week. Remember,  why not ask yourself, why not? And do yourself a favor, go find yourself a tutor. Go find yourself a coach, and supercharge your learning.

📍 Until next time, thanks for listening to How to Take Over the World

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