Write of Passage: A Camping Trip in the Digital Wilderness
On the surface, Write of Passage is a course about writing online. But after the 5-week journey, I’ve learned that it’s much more than that.
Here are 3 takeaways that have nothing to do with syntax, metaphors or punctuation.
Geography is no longer an obstacle to meaningful connections
In the last ten years, I've lived in five cities and four different countries across two continents. The joy of living a nomadic life comes at a price. It’s hard to rebuild a community of people you connect with at a deep intellectual level. Over time, I made peace with that trade off, accepting it as inevitable. And then I joined Write of Passage.
The way I bonded with fellow students in the course reminded me of what happens when you go wild camping with your friends. In the penetrating cold and uncomfortable dampness, everybody is at the same level. Light up a fire and the mind speaks freely and purely.
By celebrating vulnerability as strength, and uniting everyone around the struggle of writing, Write of Passage takes us for a camping trip in the digital wilderness. It lights a fire which strips you from the autopilot mode of mundane conversations. It frees meaningful interactions from the shackles of geography.
There is a cost to not sharing your ideas
I will never forget that session where a student asked David Perell whether it was arrogant to promote your ideas by sharing them publicly. His answer came down like a hammer on the anvil where truths are forged:
“What’s arrogant is to have ideas and not put them out into the world. What’s arrogant is to work so hard, spend all this time learning and not share it with other people. That’s how civilization advances, that’s how we expand as a society. It’s not arrogant to put your ideas out into the world, to tell other people how you can help. It’s not arrogant at all.”
I felt like the Scottish soldiers after Mel Gibson’s battle speech in Braveheart.
The emotion in David’s voice made me see something I hadn’t quite thought about: there is an opportunity cost to keeping your ideas for yourself.
You might be holding on to thoughts you think are too obvious to share when they might actually help someone feel seen or heard. You might be sitting on a small piece of a bigger puzzle that would help solve a problem in your community.
Arrogance is one of the many convenient narratives we use to protect the fragility of our own ego. We should remember that our refusal to see through this trick of the mind comes at a cost.
The secret to online learning is not technology, it’s other humans
I get a high from learning about topics I know nothing about. Over the years, online learning platforms took me to the unknown territories of psychology, urban design, marketing and experimental evaluation.
But for all the talk about massive online courses upending traditional education, the revolution never came. A recent study about MIT and Harvard courses confirmed a decade of disappointing data with completion rates hitting a staggeringly low 3%. I’m not surprised.
I often struggled with the static format of pre-recorded videos and would watch them at 1.5X the speed to get to the quiz faster. I felt detached from the experience. Despite the existence of online forums, it felt hard to connect with the 50,000 other avatars who were also taking the course.
Write of Passage was the radical opposite. Like gladiators, we were thrown into the arena of writing from day one having to slay the wild beasts of self-doubt with our bare knuckles. The only way to survive was to support each other. It was the spirit of camaraderie between the students, not the videos or curriculum, that formed the learning engine of the course.
What I got out of traditional online courses was a certificate of completion I could hang as a trophy on my LinkedIn profile. What I’m leaving Write of Passage with is a community of kind and brilliant minds I’ll continue to learn from in the months and years to come.