If you lived in England through the mid-seventeenth century, chances are you were slightly—or very—drunk at any given point. Watered-down ale or beer was generally preferred to London’s nasty river water.

Coffee changed that. People were able to think more clearly and stay focused, spurring decades of economic growth. Coffeehouses, in particular, brought people and ideas together, inspiring countless innovations and discoveries. Conversation was the lifeblood.

Businessmen would hang out at Jonathan’s coffeehouse by the Royal Exchange, where the first stocks were traded. Stockbrokers met with merchants, ship captains, and cartographers at Lloyd’s coffeehouse to launch Britain’s insurance industry. Politicians debated at St. James and Westminster. Philosophers and clergy pondered at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Isaac Newton dissected a dolphin on the table of the Grecian Coffeehouse.

Coffeehouses serve as an essential step in the evolution of learning communities.

Realizing Maslov’s hierarchy of needs

So, what exactly is a learning community? At its essence, it’s just a group of people who meet regularly to learn together and collaborate on a shared learning goal.

Besides learning new things, why do people join them? At first, they help satisfy the third level in Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. They help us belong.

But that’s not enough.

People want to belong to a community, and have status within it. They want Esteem, the second level in Maslov’s hierarchy of needs:

Learning communities empower that.

By joining a learning community, you have a clear path towards earning status and recognition. Each member shares a common learning goal and when you make progress towards it, you feel respected. You keep pushing for new breakthroughs.

Learning communities spur innovation.

Bell Labs: a classic learning community

The transistor — billions of which exist in the device you’re reading this post on.

The silicon solar cell — a precursor for all solar-powered devices.

The laser. Communication satellites. Information theory. Unix. C.

All these inventions started at Bell Labs.

What made this place so special?  Mervin Kelly, a researcher turned chairman, was most responsible for fueling a culture of creativity.

To encourage a busy exchange of ideas, he needed a critical mass of talented people. At Bell Labs, Kelly housed thinkers and doers under one roof:

Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups. (source)

It was basically impossible to walk down the (intentionally designed) hallway without running into fellow researchers or developers with interesting problems, diversions, and ideas.

Hate the idea of open spaces at your tech company? You can probably blame Mervin Kelly.

Freedom to explore without overhead was also crucial for research-heavy projects. Kelly rarely checked in on progress until years after he gave his scientists the green light. He would likely scoff at the micro-managing tools we’ve built for project management today.

And most importantly, Kelly trusted people to create and help one another. All employees at Bell Labs were asked to work with their doors open, making collaboration organic and inevitable.

Richard Hamming, a retired Bells Labs scientist, delivered a speech in the mid-1980s to answer the question: “Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?”

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most.

But 10 years later somehow you don't quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance.

He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. (source)

Trailblazing a new paradigm for education

John Dewey, a leading educational theorist in the early 20th century, pioneered this social and experiential approach towards learning.

He believed education stifles individual autonomy when learners are taught that knowledge flows in one direction, from the expert to the learner.

Students thrive when they’re allowed to interact with the curriculum and take part in their own learning. To him, education and learning are fundamentally social and interactive processes.

The purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a predetermined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good. (source)

His ideas were met with stiff bureaucratic resistance in public schools. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed much today.

How different would education look if public schools were built around Dewey’s philosophy? For one, we probably wouldn’t be optimizing for grades. And we probably wouldn’t be packing as many students as we could in a room:

Most of online learning faces the same problem. Teachable, Udemy, Thinkific, and others built a new business model by empowering individual educators, but the education itself hasn’t changed from the earliest MOOCs. Learning means pre-recorded lectures or text packaged together in a “course.” This is lonely and ineffective: MOOCs have a 97% dropout rate.

If we flash forward half a century, you’ll see different implementations of student-driven learning communities across many US colleges. There’s an entire textbook covering these experiments.

And guess what? They seem to be working.

Students who participate in learning communities are more likely to persist to graduation (source), feel a strong sense of community and belonging (source), and have improved academic performance.

But these experiments are still quite limited. Take a look at Purdue’s implementation of learning communities. They basically ask a group of students who take the same 2 or 3 courses to live together and hangout. There’s a lot to be desired.

Hello, World!

Welcome to the Internet — the largest, most accessible coffeehouse ever built.

You don’t have to put a group of ambitious people in the same room anymore.

We’re already all here. Hi 👋

Regardless of how “niche” your interest is, there is someone out there who is just as fascinated with that topic. And not just some*one. *Probably a hundred! Maybe thousands!

Take Reddit, for example. You can get brilliant insights in r/AskHistorians, geek out over the future in r/Futurology, or laugh at (and probably get creeped by) muscular kangaroos in r/kangabros.

There’s probably a passionate subreddit, Slack group, Twitter list, or newsletter for almost everything you want to learn.

In my next post, I’ll dive into examples of modern learning communities that bring Dewey’s ideas to life. Whether online or hybrid, free or paid, there are incredible applications in singing, vocational training, entrepreneurship, writing and you know, just having fun.

Afterwards, I’ll write about where we’re headed 🔮

What tools and companies are forming to make it easier to build learning communities? How can founders leverage the scale of technology *— *while retaining intimacy *— *to create new business models?

How can we use the internet to help people find a “sense of belonging” and earn recognition in the pursuit of a learning goal?

Thanks to Foster, Frederic Renken, and Pujaa Rajan for feedback on this post.

Related reading:

• Book: A History of the World in 6 Glasses

• Book: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

• Khan Academy’s research: Building complex reasoning skills online through open-ended activities

I peed my pants on my first day of kindergarten because I didn’t know enough English to excuse myself to the restroom.

A couple of months before that, I couldn’t even draw a straight line. I had just immigrated to the states from a tiny, Indian village.

My dad was the first person in our family (a long history of farmers) to make it out of Gujarat, let alone India. He worked double shifts at Dunkin Donuts while attending community college night classes to become a mechanical engineer.

He made it. This taught me the importance of education. My parents had dreams of me becoming the first doctor in our entire family.

I carried that hope with me for the next 15 years. I obsessed over grades and received instant gratification from my parents when I got As and was punished when I didn’t.

I still remember the look of teary-eyed pride on my mother’s face when I got called in for a special ceremony for getting straight A’s in the 5th grade. Of course, my parents still kept the plaque:

I still remember the day I graduated from ESL to normal english class. I had come a long way from a dirt-eating village boy.

And I still remember the failures. When I got a C in 7th grade English (ugh Ms. Batts 😒), I was terrified. My parents would kill me. I scanned the report card, changed the grade using Microsoft Paint, and printed that out on laminated paper to avoid the repercussions.

It might be hard to wrap your head around this “grade-chasing” concept if you didn’t grow up with immigrant parents. They’ve been surrounded by poverty. They grew up chasing discounts and coupons (and still do), *never *ate out, and never travelled for leisure. They’ve dealt with risk and instability their whole lives.

So stability—from getting good grades to a high-paying job as a doctor, lawyer, or engineer at a big company—isn’t boring. This is their American dream.

"The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades." - Paul Graham (source)

My obsession over grades helped me get accepted to the top state school. And that’s where things started to fall apart.

I fell in love with philosophy and started to hate the focus on rote memorization in my pre-med classes.  Rarely did I meet people who loved learning for learning’s sake.

I remember the excitement I had felt walking into the first seminar for “History of the Neuron” deflate immediately when the professor started talking. Every single student around me was viciously banging away on their keyboards — transcribing every word — just in case his comments came up on the first exam.

It felt like I was playing a zero-sum game with smart, talented people all obsessing over GPAs and MCAT scores to inevitably fill a tiny number of capped residency positions.

It was the humanities where I found my true passion.

This all reached an inflection point in my senior year. I dropped out of school and figured I’d find my calling during a “gap year” — I could always finish my last semester afterwards. I was lucky enough to stumble my way into a seminar by Alexis Ohanian at UVa.

His talk changed my life. It was the first time I was exposed to the world of startups, including his experience reading Paul Graham essays and joining Y Combinator’s first batch. I’ll never forget his line: “A hundred years ago, you needed a factory & thousands of workers to start a company. Today, you just need to open your laptop.” But most importantly, I learned that “risk” could be a good thing.

A month later, I was enrolled in Thinkful, a new online school that taught programming with 1:1 mentorship. I loved it and soon hustled my way into an internship—my pitch was effectively cheap labor for a year before I’d go back to UVa and finish up. I never went back.

From day 1, I was thrown into the fire and had to learn everything from programming and sales to content marketing and profit margins. There were no grades. If I messed up, our students would get angry, and we’d lose money. This made me fall in love with learning. Small wins and the encouragement of my teammates boosted my self-confidence.

I felt like Bradley Cooper in Limitless. I vividly remember telling the co-founders, “no one is stopping me from doing what I want here. It’s up to me to learn the skills and prove my value.”

This was a sharp departure from the structured, rigid environment I had been exposed to growing up. Founding your own startup or working for one is typically discouraged in immigrant communities—it involves way too much risk.

About a year into the startup space, I was exposed to Carol Dweck, whose writing captured the transition I had been experiencing: from a “fixed mindset” to a “growth mindset”.

"At the heart of what makes the “growth mindset” so winsome, Dweck found, is that it creates a passion for learning rather than a hunger for approval" (source)

Over-optimizing for a grade or test score kills this passion. It forces you into a mindset where you have to “hack the test” to win.

Chasing higher grades in school translates to chasing a higher salary as an adult.

You go to work to make money, not because you enjoy the work. But when it's your passion, you take the initiative to add your own improvisations and inventions.

Learning for a better grade can’t compare to learning out of curiosity or learning through experimentation. Grade-based learning is anti-failure. You have one chance to get it right each time.

So, what’s a better framework for measuring progress towards a learning goal?

I’ve been recently fascinated by “Shuhari”—a Japanese martial arts concept. It breaks down into three stages:

• Shu (守) - traditional wisdom. The student follows the guidance of their teacher precisely. The focus is not on the underlying theory, but how to do the task at hand.

• Ha (破) - breaking with tradition. Then, the student digs into the principles behind the technique. She starts integrating insights from other teachers into her own practice.

• Ri (離) -  transcendence. Now, the student develops her own theory. She can design different techniques to suit her particular circumstances.

Or basically:

The best jazz pianists are excellent improvisers, but learning instruction typically focuses on mastering techniques. In 1987, a group of academics designed a new course leveraging mastery-based learning techniques that yielded strong results. The class mapped perfectly to Shuhari:

Shu: Learning how to play

• “Knowledge of the jazz idiom consisted of the ability to define several jazz terms (blues, tritone substitute, etc.), the ability to name five jazz pianists and the ability to interpret several commonly used chord symbols”

Ha: Integrating different techniques

• "Students performed a jazz or popular tune of their choice using a walking bass line in the left hand and closed position seventh chords in the right."

Ri: Improvising

• “Students improvised on a 12-bar blues in two different keys, a portion of "Lover Man", and a jazz or popular tune of their choice.”

By obsessing over grades (and techniques), you will never reach this “Ri” stage. That’s where the magic of innovation happens.

When I started learning sales and customer development, I’d obsess over scripts and nailing down exact details and delivery. But with hundreds of calls under my belt, I tend to improvise now to drive organic conversation and new insights. I usually re-write entire “scripts” after 2–3 calls.

Can you imagine how terrible it would be if every company thought about sales, design, or marketing the same way?

Roam is an interesting example. For years, the founders engrossed themselves in every single note-taking / knowledge-sharing app (Shu), learned to extract the most compelling ideas (Ha), and then started building heads-down for years.

They built an obsessive cult following, while ignoring most startup / SaaS advice:

Obvious value prop? Nope. Easy to use? Nope. Welcoming brand? Nope. Helpful onboarding? Nope. Intuitive file-and-cabinet structure? Hell no.

Real breakthroughs only happen when you transcend consensus thinking (Ri).

I’ve spent the last 6 years helping adults push past their own misconceptions of what they can and cannot learn. A year after a Thinkful graduate had started his job as a full-time engineer (and purchased a new home!), he shared this:

"You are the first person to believe that I could do this, and because it was you, I believed it. I believed the program because of you."

Sean didn’t need my help. Frankly, he would have succeeded with any school. He was the hardest working student in his cohort. All he needed was someone to believe in him and break past the terrible stigmas about what is and isn’t possible.

Imposter syndrome is very real and a direct consequence of cultural stigma towards risk-taking paired with an outdated education system. This proliferates the “fixed mindset”.

Helping people realize their potential has been and will continue to be a lifelong obsession of mine. Is there something you've always wanted to learn but felt like you couldn't? Maybe it was your method that failed, not you.

Special thanks to the Foster, Frédéric Renken, Danny Keller and Nathan Baschez for feedback.