Cross-posted from my blog.
Contrary to my carefully crafted brand as a weak nerd, I go to a local CrossFit gym a few times a week. Every year, the gym raises funds for a scholarship for teens from lower-income families to attend their summer camp program. I don’t know how many Crossfit-interested low-income teens there are in my small town, but I’ll guess there are perhaps 2 of them who would benefit from the scholarship. After all, CrossFit is pretty niche, and the town is small.
Helping youngsters get swole in the Pacific Northwest is not exactly as cost-effective as preventing malaria in Malawi. But I notice I feel drawn to supporting the scholarship anyway. Every time it pops in my head I think, “My money could fully solve this problem”. The camp only costs a few hundred dollars per kid and if there are just 2 kids who need support, I could give $500 and there would no longer be teenagers in my town who want to go to a CrossFit summer camp but can’t. Thanks to me, the hero, this problem would be entirely solved. 100%.
That is not how most nonprofit work feels to me.
You are only ever making small dents in important problems
I want to work on big problems. Global poverty. Malaria. Everyone not suddenly dying. But if I’m honest, what I really want is to solve those problems. Me, personally, solve them. This is a continued source of frustration and sadness because I absolutely cannot solve those problems.
Consider what else my $500 CrossFit scholarship might do:
* I want to save lives, and USAID suddenly stops giving $7 billion a year to PEPFAR. So I give $500 to the Rapid Response Fund. My donation solves 0.000001% of the problem and I feel like I have failed.
* I want to solve climate change, and getting to net zero will require stopping or removing emissions of 1,500 billion tons of carbon dioxide. I give $500 to a policy nonprofit that reduces emissions, in expectation, by 50 tons. My donation solves 0.000000003% of the problem and I feel like I have f
Hey, I think Training for Good might be trying to put together a self-paced online course about learning how to learn. Have you by any chance connected with them?
Hey, first of all +1 for offering coaching, I think this is healthy for early stage projects like this (which might still need product market fit) because 1-on-1 meetings give a lot more important feedback than visitors in a website.
My personal feedback from the post: I think "learning" is more generic than what you're doing. If I remember correctly, you're specifically going for "learning how to memorize facts [using Anki]". I'd intuitively write the more specific version
Hey Yonatan, cheers for the feedback! If you haven't already then key ideas guide 2 sums up my rebuttals to the "anki is just for facts" view. Definitely agree that I'm only coaching on computer-based learning (Anki + Obsidian mostly), but would argue that as Anki uses the best techniques for learning (spaced repetition, active recall, active encoding), it's fair for me to advertise this as learning coaching. The aim is effective learning, the tool is Anki (+ Obsidian if people are interested!). There are things like experiential learning and generative learning that I won't be covering, but I don't claim to be a one-stop shop for all learning methods
Ah! Sounds like I just didn't understand it well. +1!
Although saying that: I have just discovered this learning coach who recommends some beyond-anki paradigms, which I'm very interested to try out!