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Chapter 1: Writing for Thinking

Have you ever had a thought that seemed clear in your mind, but the moment you tried to explain it, the thought fell apart?

Maybe you knew what you meant, but couldn't find the right words. Maybe you started speaking and realized that several different ideas were mixed. Or maybe you were trying to explain an emotion, but the word you used did not quite capture what it was that you were thinking.

I have had this experience many times.

Most of the time I understand something because I can feel the general shape of the idea in my mind. But when I try to write it down, I discover that the idea is incomplete. I need to write more examples and do more research or elaborate on what I’ve already thought of. And, most importantly, I need to ask a question I had not considered before to find the gaps that are most likely there.

Writing by hand gives me time to slow down and look at what I’m thinking. The first version may not be especially good and most definitely is not. It’s fragmented, repetitive, or uncertain. But it gives me something to work with.

Writing is more than a way to communicate a finished thought. It’s one of the best ways we discover what we think.

Before we talk about becoming better writers, it helps to think about why we write in the first place. The relationship between writing, thinking, and communicating is complicated. These activities are connected, but they are not exactly the same process, and they all serve slightly different purposes, which is one of the main ideas I write about in this essay.

Depending on who you are and what situation you are in, you may need to sort out your thoughts before you communicate them. This, more often than not, is the way my thinking is developed and sometimes makes me envious of the people who can seemingly articulate themselves so well without any preparation. However, there may be so much more going on behind the curtains that we don’t see. Some of the best communicators I know are people who write before they speak. Of course, you cannot always pause a conversation and say, “Give me a few minutes to write this down first.”

When you write, you are translating an experience, an observation, an emotion, or an idea into symbols that either just you or another person may eventually interpret if you purposely wrote it for other people. But even if it’s just for yourself, that’s totally fine because it may be your way of interpreting your own thoughts. Just like when we journal.

In this chapter, I want to explore three connected ideas:

1. Writing is a symbolic activity of meaning-making.

2. Writing for others is a staged performance.

3. Writing is a tool of understanding as well as communication.

These ideas also connect to the CARE Method: Clarify, Articulate, Refine, and Execute, which I periodically mention throughout my posts. It’s an adaptable thinking, teaching, writing, and planning framework that can help you transform your ideas into tangible outcomes. I originally developed CARE as a way to think about learning, teaching, note-taking, and meaningful action. But the more I use it, the more I realize that it also describes the way thoughts become words—and the way those words eventually become reality.

Writing Is a Symbolic Activity of Meaning-Making

Let us begin with symbolism.

The written and spoken word are symbols for our thoughts. Think about the word cat. Now say it in another language, such as Indonesian: kucing.

The written word is different. The pronunciation is different. The letters and sounds are different. But both words point toward the same general idea.

Our language is a system of symbols for what we think, feel, notice, and experience. We place those symbols on a page or speak them aloud, hoping that another person will understand what we mean.

But there is no perfect way to convey exactly what is happening inside our minds. Telepathy does not exist. We only have the symbols available to us: the words we speak and write, the images we create, the gestures we make, and the actions we take.

Even then, those symbols are incomplete.

Have you ever thought to yourself, I do not know how to say what I am feeling right now?

Emotions are interpreted through our thoughts and then translated into words. You may say that you feel sad, but what does that actually mean? What caused the sadness? Is it grief, disappointment, loneliness, exhaustion, frustration, embarrassment, or something else?

There may be several different experiences contained within the word sad, yet you may have to use that one word to describe what is happening inside you.

Sometimes you may not even know what is happening inside your own mind. Or you think you might know, but do you truly know? That makes it even more difficult to communicate your meaning to someone else.

This is one reason writing can be so useful. Writing gives you a way to examine the symbols you are using. It allows you to ask whether the word you chose actually represents what you mean.

Saying I feel sad may be accurate, but it is incomplete. Writing helps you move from the first symbol toward a fuller understanding of the experience behind it.

This also leads to another problem: how will other people interpret the words you say or write?

Sometimes your words may be interpreted differently from what you intended. Sometimes you may intend one meaning but communicate another. You may then have to return to the conversation and clarify what you meant. But sometimes the other person has already interpreted your words, reacted to them, and formed a conclusion. This could become a tough situation because you can’t take your words back, but it can be an opportunity to clarify what you mean after you have had time to articulate it in a way the other person can understand.

Like any other symbol, language—the written and spoken word—is a representation of the mind. It can be interpreted in several different ways.

So the challenge, as writers and speakers, is to find better ways to articulate what we mean.

This can be accomplished through the CARE Method:

• Clarify: What am I actually trying to understand or communicate?

• Articulate: What do I currently think, in my own words?

• Refine: What needs to be explained, tested, supported, or changed?

• Execute: What will I do with this understanding?

You do not have to use these stages as a rigid checklist. I tend to think of them more as different kinds of attention. At different points in the process, you are asking different questions of your own thinking.

Writing gives you a place to work through those questions.

Researchers sometimes describe part of this process as cognitive offloading: using an external object or action to reduce the amount of information you have to hold in your mind at once. Writing does not automatically make your thinking accurate, but it gives you a visual you can inspect, question, and revise. Risko and Gilbert’s review of cognitive offloading offers a useful explanation of how external tools can change the demands placed on our thinking.

For me, the important point is that writing is not simply removing thought from the mind.

It is giving thought a temporary form.

Once an idea has a form, you can work with it.

You do not have to arrive at a perfect explanation. You are simply giving yourself a little more language to think with.

Writing for Others Is a Staged Performance

When you write for other people, you are performing in front of an audience.

That does not mean your writing is fake. It means that communication changes depending on who is receiving it.

You probably act differently when you are alone than when you are around other people. Sometimes the difference is obvious. Sometimes it is subtle. You may use different words, gestures, tones, and expressions depending on who is in the room.

You speak differently with your parents than you do with your best friend. You speak differently with a colleague than you do with your boss. You may explain the same idea differently to a child, a group of students, a professional audience, or someone who already understands the subject.

The audience changes the performance.

When you write for other people, you have to think about context, clarity, expectations, background knowledge, tone, and purpose. But there is a danger in becoming aware of your audience too early.

If you begin criticizing every sentence before you have given yourself a chance to explore the idea, you may prevent yourself from discovering what you actually think.

This is why I try to turn off my awareness of the audience during the early stages of writing.

I may begin with an idea that feels relevant to my work. Then I write with curiosity in mind.

At this stage, I’m not trying to impress anyone. I am not trying to produce a polished essay.

This is what the Clarify stage often looks like for me. I clarify the question, research, collect information, and begin compiling it in my own words.

Only after I have begun exploring the idea do I start thinking more carefully about how it might help someone else.

I still write for an audience of one: someone who thinks somewhat like me, someone who wants to learn the way I learn, and someone willing to explore ideas similarly.

That does not mean you have to do things exactly as I do them. My writing is simply a way for me to express my perspective. From there, you can adapt that perspective to your own circumstances.

Writing for yourself first gives you something authentic to work with.

The process of discovering, articulating, and formulating ideas is not the same as criticizing, testing, and reshaping them.

Discovery suggests exploration, speculation, intuition, imagination, risk-taking, and a headlong dive into a new rabbit hole of thought and experience.

Criticism suggests distance, doubt, testing, assessment, and the responsibility to support your ideas with evidence.

Both processes matter. But they do not always belong in the same moment.

If you criticize an idea before allowing it to develop, you may reject something before you understand it. If you explore forever without testing anything, you may become attached to an idea that does not hold up.

Writing for yourself first gives you a private space for discovery. Writing for others requires you to return to the idea and prepare it for public performance. They are like two different rooms.

The mistake is believing that the workshop and the stage should look the same.

You do not need to write your private thoughts in a way that already sounds like a finished article. In fact, trying to do that may make it harder to think honestly.

Writing for an audience is a form of performance, but that performance becomes more authentic when it grows out of an earlier stage of private thinking.

Otherwise, you can end up going through the motions of sounding intelligent, organized, or persuasive without really understanding what you are trying to say.

Writing Is a Tool of Understanding as Well as Communication

I often think writing is described too narrowly. We tend to think of it as a way to communicate something we already understand: first comes the thought, then comes the writing, and finally another person receives the message. Sometimes that is how writing works. But in many cases, writing is part of how the thought becomes understandable in the first place.

There is often a gap between our first thought and our final expression. A thought can seem clear while it remains inside your mind because you are experiencing it all at once. But when you try to put that thought into words (both spoken and written), you have to give it a sequence. You have to choose the words, decide what comes first, separate ideas that may have become mixed together, and notice what is missing. You may discover that you need to add an example, a better definition, a piece of evidence, or a distinction you had not considered before.

Writing is useful because it gives you a place for your thoughts to be sorted out, which makes it easier to visually organize them. Your first explanation isn’t going to be perfect, but that’s okay because it’s only for your eyes anyway.

Writing begets thoughts. Thoughts create opportunities for clarity. Clarity makes it more possible for someone else to understand what you are trying to tell, teach, or persuade them to consider.

It is easy to describe writing primarily as communication, but that description can overlook the importance of articulation. Before you can communicate something effectively, you usually need time to develop and hone the thought.

A first draft gives you a chance to see whether the idea has a shape. It shows you where the gaps are. It reveals which words you keep repeating and which claims you have not yet supported. It may even show you that the question you began with is not quite the right question anymore. The writing does not simply display what you already know. It helps you discover what you know, what you do not know, and what you still need to understand.

Of course, this does not mean that every piece of writing needs to become a long research project. A journal entry, a personal note, or a quick message may not require extensive revision. The amount of refinement should match the purpose. But even a short piece of writing can help you understand what you think, especially when you use it to explain, connect, interpret, or make meaning rather than record information.

Writing is such an important part of learning. William Zinsser explores this idea throughout Writing to Learn, whose subtitle connects writing directly to thinking: How to Write—and Think—Clearly About Any Subject at All. Zinsser describes writing as “a way to explore a question and gain control over it.” I think that is a useful way to understand what happens when you write about something you are learning. You are not simply demonstrating what you know after the learning is finished. You are trying to gain control over the idea by putting it into your own words, connecting it to what you already know, and noticing where your explanation still breaks down.

Research on writing-to-learn suggests that writing about content can improve learning, particularly when the task requires you to explain ideas, connect them to prior knowledge, interpret their meaning, or apply them in a new situation. Research on the effects of writing on learning offers some useful context here.

Daniel T. Willingham makes a related argument in Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy. One of his central reminders is that “outsmarting your brain means doing the mental exercise that feels harder but is going to bring the most benefit in the long run.” Although Willingham is discussing learning more broadly, the idea applies directly to writing. Explaining something in your own words often feels more difficult than rereading a polished explanation, highlighting a passage, or asking AI to summarize it for you. But that difficulty may be evidence that you are doing more of the mental work yourself. You are retrieving the idea, organizing it, connecting it to what you already know, and discovering what you still need to understand.

Of course, writing itself does not automatically produce understanding. Copying a paragraph is writing, but it may not require much thinking. Transcribing a lecture word for word is writing, but it may not involve meaningful interpretation. Producing a polished summary with the help of AI may look like learning, but you may not have developed a personal understanding of the material.

The value of writing depends partly on the kind of thinking the writing requires.

• Are you merely recording information, or are you explaining it?

• Are you copying someone else’s language, or translating the idea into your own words?

• Are you producing a finished answer, or using writing to discover what remains unclear?

Writing is valuable when it helps you notice, explain, connect, question, interpret, and decide.

The more writing, editing, elaboration, and refining you do, the more capable your writing can become. Every draft gives you another opportunity to see something you could not see before.

I am not arguing that AI has no place in the writing process. I find it useful for noticing patterns, identifying gaps, generating questions, comparing possibilities, and refining communication. But I find it most useful after I have begun thinking.

My notebook, rough draft, or unfinished explanation gives AI something meaningful to respond to. It gives the tool a record of my attention and a starting point for understanding what I’m trying to do. Without that first layer of human thought, AI may give me an answer that sounds impressive without helping me become more capable.

This is why the order matters:

Think first. Write first. Elaborate in your own words. Connect and refine. Create, test, reflect, and carry the work forward.

That sequence is part of the larger purpose of the CARE Method. First, you Clarify what you are trying to understand, solve, question, notice, or create. Then you Articulate what you currently think in your own words. You Refine the idea by adding context, examples, connections, evidence, and useful resistance. Finally, you Execute by turning the developing understanding into something tangible—a paragraph, a lesson, a conversation, a decision, a product, an experiment, or another form of meaningful work.

I do not think of CARE as a rigid checklist that has to be followed perfectly every time. I think of it more as a rhythm for working with ideas. A new question may send you back to Clarify. A difficult explanation may show you that the idea needs more Articulation. Feedback may reveal that the idea needs further Refinement. A failed attempt may give you information that changes what you decide to Execute next.

Writing belongs throughout that process. It helps you capture the first thought, develop the idea, make uncertainty visible, and prepare the work for someone else to encounter. It gives you a private space to explore before you step into the public space of communication.

Writing is not only what happens after thinking.

Writing is one of the places where thinking happens.

Before the Paywall

If you are a free subscriber, I hope this first section has already given you something useful: a different way to understand the blank page, the first draft, and the role writing can play in learning.

But these ideas become even more useful when you have a process for practicing them.

Below the paywall, I want to turn this chapter into a practical writing-for-thinking routine. I will show you how I tend to:

• Capture a first thought before searching or asking AI for an answer.

• Develop a rough note through explanation, examples, connections, and questions.

• Separate my own interpretation from information gathered from a source.

• Use CARE to refine an idea without losing my voice.

• Use AI as a questioning and refining partner rather than a replacement writer.

• Move from a developed thought to a small, honest, visible form of action.

• Follow a seven-day practice for turning one idea into meaningful work.

The free section explains why writing matters.

The paid section gives you a process you can experiment with and adapt to your own writing, learning, teaching, or creative work.

[PAYWALL: Free preview ends here]

Become a paid subscriber to continue reading this chapter and put these ideas into practice with the complete 42-page CARE Note-Taking Method workbook as a perk! Your subscription also includes access to every past and future paid post.

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What a Gen Z playbook taught me about AI, human judgment, and the kind of education that creates agency rather than dependence

The experience of moving back to the United States after fourteen years of living and working in Indonesia shaped the way I read Find Your Workverse: Gen Z’s Playbook to Thrive at Work. With AI. With Humans. With Purpose., by Michelle Duvall and Dan Negroni with Coach Marlee.

The book is written as a guide for Gen Z, but I do not think the problem it describes belongs only to Gen Z. The deeper problem is that the inherited map of work is becoming less reliable for everyone.

For much of the twentieth century, the cultural script was relatively clear: go to school, attend university or receive vocational training, find a job, work your way up, support a family, and eventually retire. That path was never as universal or stable as we sometimes remember it, and it excluded many people. Still, it offered a recognizable sequence.

The country has changed. The economy has changed. The way employers search for candidates has changed.

• Contract work and project-based work seem more available, while the stable positions I remembered from earlier in my career appear harder to find.

• Even the first stage of applying for work has become more impersonal: a résumé is almost always sorted by software before a person ever sees it.

Today, people may move between salaried employment, contract work, freelance projects, entrepreneurship, caregiving, retraining, and periods of unemployment. Some of these changes create welcome freedom. Others transfer risk from institutions to individuals. A flexible work life can be meaningful, but flexibility without stability can become anxiety with a nicer name.

This is why I think Find Your Workverse is most useful when we read it not as a book about one generation, but as a book about how human beings learn to make decisions in an unstable environment.

The central question is:

How do we help young people develop the judgment, confidence, relationships, and practical learning habits needed to build a meaningful life when no single career path can guarantee security?

That question belongs to parents, educators, employers, and learners of every age.

The problem is bigger than generational labels

One of the book’s premises is that many members of Gen Z know what they care about but struggle to translate those values into work that can sustain them. I recognize that problem, but I would widen it.

Many adults have also struggled to connect purpose with livelihood. The difference is that younger people are entering adulthood at a time when the economic and technological pressures are more visible and harder to ignore.

The International Labour Organization has described a similar tension in global youth employment: youth unemployment can improve while young people still feel anxious about job insecurity, housing, and their ability to move into independent adulthood. The problem is not only whether a young person can find any job. It is whether the work provides a decent foundation for a life.

This matters because the language of the “future of work” can sometimes become too enthusiastic about individual adaptability. We hear that everyone should become a creator, freelancer, solopreneur, or personal brand. We hear that young people should constantly reskill, build a network, and turn their interests into opportunities.

Some of that advice is useful. It is also incomplete.

Young people should learn how to adapt, but institutions should not use adaptability as an excuse to abandon responsibility. If employers rely increasingly on short-term contracts, workers may need several income streams simply to pay for healthcare, housing, transportation, and family life. A person can be entrepreneurial and still need a stable salary. A person can value freedom and still need benefits. A person can be excited about the future and still be worried about whether the future will support them.

We should prepare young people for a changing workverse while also asking what kind of workverse is worth building.

Gen Z is not uniformly excited about AI

The book sometimes presents Gen Z as the generation that has picked up the AI baton willingly and eagerly. That may describe some young people, but it is too broad to describe the whole generation.

In August 2026, Pew Research Center reported that a majority of U.S. adults under thirty felt more concerned than excited about AI. The same study found that 73 percent of adults under thirty believed AI would lead to fewer jobs in the United States over the next twenty years. Young people are not simply rushing toward AI because they are naturally comfortable with technology. Many are looking at the technology and wondering whether it will reduce their opportunities before they have even had a chance to build a career.

This distinction matters for educators and parents. Calling young people “digital natives” can make adults assume that they need less guidance. But familiarity with an interface is not the same as judgment. Knowing how to use a chatbot is not the same as knowing when to trust it, how to question it, or how to preserve your own thinking while using it.

The more accurate description may be that Gen Z is the first generation to inherit AI as a normal part of education and work. They did not create the conditions, but they will have to make decisions inside them.

Human work is more than what AI cannot do

It is tempting to describe human skills as the leftover category: everything AI cannot yet perform. That framing makes human work sound like a temporary refuge, as if we are simply waiting for technology to catch up.

I think human work is more important than that.

Our personal experiences matter because experience gives us a relationship to consequences. When I write about teaching, I am not merely arranging words about education. I am drawing from classrooms, students, mistakes, conversations, cultural transitions, and years of noticing what helps people learn. Those experiences shape what I pay attention to and what I am willing to claim.

AI can help me organize, question, compare, and revise my ideas. It can produce a plausible paragraph in my voice. But it cannot take responsibility for the life from which those ideas emerged. It cannot decide what my experiences mean to me or what I should do next.

That is why the best response to AI is not simply to become more “human” in an abstract way. It is to become more specific.

Specificity is a form of human value. It comes from paying attention to real situations, remembering what happened, asking why it mattered, and developing an interpretation that is connected to evidence and experience.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 points in a similar direction. Employers identify analytical thinking as a leading core skill, while resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership, social influence, creative thinking, curiosity, and lifelong learning are all expected to remain important or grow in importance. AI and big data are also among the fastest-growing technical skills.

The lesson is not that technical skills replace human skills, or that human skills replace technical skills. The future belongs to people who can combine them.

Someone who can use AI but cannot evaluate its output is vulnerable. Someone who can think critically but refuses to learn how new tools work may also become limited. The more powerful combination is technical fluency guided by judgment.

The workverse is a learning environment

The phrase “find your workverse” can sound as if there is a perfect professional universe waiting somewhere for each person. Once you discover it, the story goes, you will finally feel aligned.

I do not think most people find a workverse once and remain there forever. We build one through experiments, relationships, habits, and decisions. We learn what energizes us by doing things. We discover our strengths by attempting work that is slightly beyond what we already know. We clarify our values when those values meet constraints.

This is where the book connects naturally with the CARE Teaching Method: Clarify, Articulate, Refine, and Execute.

CARE is a learning loop for turning uncertainty into action. It gives learners a way to move from vague interest to a visible trail of thinking, experimentation, feedback, and follow-through.

1. Clarify: give attention a target

The first question and further better questions might include:

• What kind of day gives you energy?

• What kinds of problems do you notice without being asked?

• Do you prefer working with people, tools, systems, information, money, place, time, or activity?

• What kind of environment helps you do your best work?

• What are you curious enough to practice for six months?

• What would you like to test before making a larger commitment?

The book’s exercise about designing an ideal workday is useful because it moves career reflection away from job titles and toward conditions. Where do you work? When do you feel most alert? How much collaboration do you want? What kinds of tools do you use? What makes you feel proud at the end of the day?

When I imagine my own ideal workday, I do not picture a completely isolated remote life. I enjoyed the human contact of working in a school, but I did not always enjoy having every part of my day determined by a fixed schedule. My ideal work probably includes a mixture: some time in a collaborative environment, some time working from home, and some time in a creative space where I can think and write.

That kind of answer is more useful than simply saying, “I want to work in education.” It begins to clarify the conditions under which the work becomes sustainable.

For educators, Clarify means giving students a real question, problem, text, design challenge, or possibility to encounter. For parents, it means asking curious questions before offering advice. For learners, it means identifying what you are actually trying to understand or change.

Clarity does not remove uncertainty. It gives uncertainty a shape we can work with.

2. Articulate: turn interest into language

An interest becomes more useful when we can explain it.

The book offers eight areas that can help people notice patterns in their interests:

1. people,

2. tools,

3. systems,

4. information,

5. money,

6. place,

7. time, and

8. activity.

These categories are prompts for noticing what repeatedly draws our attention.

Someone who cares about people may be energized by stories, mentoring, service, counseling, or teaching. Someone drawn to tools may enjoy engineering, design, technology, or product testing. Someone interested in systems may be drawn to operations, logistics, or organizational problem-solving. Someone drawn to information may enjoy research, journalism, writing, or analysis.

Most people are combinations. I am drawn to people and information, but also to systems: how a learning process fits together, how a note becomes an idea, and how an idea becomes an action. That combination has led me toward curriculum writing, teaching, and the development of CARE.

Articulation is also where learners begin to claim ownership. They explain an idea in their own words. They name the connection between an interest and a possible problem. They describe what they have tried, what they are unsure about, and what they want to learn next.

3. Refine: mastery beats panic

One phrase from the book stayed with me: mastery beats panic.

Panic learning happens when we rush through a course, collect resources, watch explanations at double speed, and mistake exposure for development. We try to reach the goal quickly, but the knowledge never becomes usable. The moment the assignment, exam, or immediate pressure disappears, much of what we learned disappears with it.

Mastery is slower and more deliberate. It asks us to practice, retrieve, apply, receive feedback, notice errors, and try again. It asks us to stay with a problem long enough for our understanding to become more precise.

This is one reason I have become more cautious about over-learning. I love books, courses, and new ideas, but learning can become a sophisticated form of avoidance. We can keep preparing forever because preparation feels safer than putting something into the world.

Analysis paralysis and imposter syndrome often grow in that space. We learn one more thing, compare ourselves to one more expert, and wait for confidence to arrive before we act.

But confidence is usually an effect of action, not a prerequisite for it.

Refinement requires productive friction. A learner might ask:

• What is missing from my explanation?

• What evidence supports this idea?

• What would challenge it?

• What distinction am I failing to make?

• What feedback should I accept, reject, adapt, or verify?

• What can I test in a small, low-risk way?

AI can be useful here, but only if it enters downstream of human thinking. The learner should provide a question, a draft, a set of notes, or a proposed solution. AI can then help compare possibilities, identify gaps, generate counterarguments, or suggest questions. It should not become the starting point, the final judge, or the only route through refinement.

This sequence also aligns with research on motivation. Self-Determination Theory identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs. A 2024 meta-analysis of educational research found that autonomy-supportive, competence-supportive, and relatedness-supportive environments are associated with stronger student engagement, performance, and well-being, while need-thwarting environments tend to show the opposite pattern.

That research gives us a useful way to think about the book’s advice. Young people need room to make choices, but autonomy without competence can feel like abandonment. They need structure, but structure without autonomy can feel like control. They need feedback, but feedback without relationship can feel like judgment.

4. Execute: give learning somewhere to go

The final stage is Execute, but execution is not merely finishing an assignment or submitting an application. It is the moment when an idea encounters reality.

The book recommends experimentation, small offers, internships, portfolio projects, networking, and building a personal presence that communicates what you can do. These ideas are most useful when they are treated as experiments rather than identity declarations.

Instead of asking, “Is this my future career?” a learner might ask:

• Can I design a small workbook and test it with five people?

• Can I volunteer for a project that lets me observe this kind of work?

• Can I interview someone who does this professionally?

• Can I publish one useful example of what I can make?

• Can I practice the skill in a real context and collect feedback?

Small experiments turn abstract career anxiety into evidence. They help a person discover not only what they enjoy, but what they are willing to practice when the work becomes difficult.

This is also where my own hesitation has become impossible to ignore. I have spent years writing about the CARE Method, explaining the ideas in newsletters, building workbooks, and discussing the framework with teachers. But an idea can remain an idea for too long. If I want CARE to help educators, I need to productize it, teach it, test it with real teachers, and improve it through feedback.

This is the point behind the phrase I have returned to often: hesitation is the killer of progress.

The answer is not reckless action. The answer is a small enough action that we can take it, learn from it, and decide what to do next.

Parents: support agency without removing responsibility

The book’s advice is especially important for parents because the temptation to protect young people can easily become a habit of deciding for them.

I have seen versions of helicopter parenting in education as well. Adults answer questions before students have had time to think. They give so many instructions that students stop noticing what the problem requires. They correct every uncertainty before it can become a question. Eventually, the student waits to be told what to do.

This is not because the student is lazy or incapable. Sometimes the environment has trained dependence.

An autonomy-supportive parent does not simply say, “Do whatever you want.” That is not support; it is absence. Instead, the parent provides a safe structure in which the young person can make decisions, encounter consequences, and reflect on what happened.

That might sound like:

• What are you considering?

• What have you already tried?

• What matters most to you in this decision?

• What is a small experiment you could run?

• What kind of help would be useful, and what part do you want to handle yourself?

• What did you learn from the result?

The goal is to help them become people who can learn from a failure without collapsing into shame or waiting for someone else to rescue them.

Young people need safety to explore, structure that does not eliminate autonomy, and encouragement that is specific enough to build competence. They also need connection. A career is not only a private project; it is built through teachers, family members, peers, mentors, colleagues, and communities.

Educators: teach the process behind the product

Schools often tell students to be creative, think critically, collaborate, and take initiative. But these abilities do not develop because we place them on a list of learning objectives.

They develop when the structure of the learning experience requires them.

If we want students to become independent thinkers, we need to give them opportunities to encounter a problem before receiving a polished explanation. We need to ask them to capture observations, questions, predictions, and uncertainties. We need to ask them to explain an idea in their own language, connect it to evidence, revise it through feedback, and create something that has a purpose beyond “turn it in.”

That is the notebook-to-action sequence at the heart of CARE:

1. Clarify: create a human starting point.

2. Articulate: select and develop an idea in personal language.

3. Refine: connect, challenge, verify, and revise it.

4. Execute: use, test, teach, create, or apply it, then reflect on what happened.

The sequence can be used with a literary text, a science investigation, a design challenge, a historical question, a personal decision, or a career exploration project.

For example, a teacher might ask students to investigate a possible career field. The first step would not be to ask AI for a list of jobs. Students could begin by writing what they already notice about the field, what questions they have, what assumptions they hold, and what kind of work they imagine doing. Then they could research the field, interview someone, compare sources, and refine their understanding. Finally, they could create a short portfolio artifact, presentation, interview protocol, or action plan for a real audience.

The final product would matter, but the visible trail of thinking would matter too. It would show how the student moved from uncertainty to a more informed decision.

This is especially important in the age of AI because teachers should not have to become detectives who guess whether a polished product represents student learning. When the process is designed well, copying becomes less useful than showing development and judgment.

Running the FIRST Pilot Workshop For Teachers

I’m hosting a live CARE Lesson Re-Design Workshop for teachers on August 30, and I’m limiting this founding pilot to just 10 seats. Bring one real lesson, run it through CARE, and leave with a stronger, classroom-ready redesign, both CARE workbooks, live guidance, and the recording.

Only 10 spots available. Sign up today before they’re gone:
Visit the Learning to Learn Well Store

Work is social, even when it is remote

The book includes advice about communicating across generations: Boomers may prefer real-time conversation and prepared materials; Gen X may value directness and evidence that someone has tried to solve the problem; Millennials may enjoy collaborative problem-solving and feedback; Gen Z may appreciate written clarity and a record they can return to.

These patterns can be useful starting hypotheses, but they should not become stereotypes. Individuals vary enormously within every generation. The best collaboration does not assume that a label tells us how someone communicates. It makes communication preferences explicit.

I have worked with people from several generations, and I have learned that many disagreements that look generational are actually disagreements about clarity. One person thinks a meeting is necessary. Another thinks an email would be more efficient. One person expects initiative. Another expects detailed instructions. One person gives feedback indirectly. Another wants a direct answer.

A practical solution is to create a shared communication habit:

• State the goal.

• Explain what has already been tried.

• Name the decision or question.

• Identify what kind of response is needed.

• Summarize the agreement in writing.

Written communication is valuable not because one generation is naturally better at it, but because a written record reduces the burden on memory. A conversation can be warm and productive, but if no one records the decision, the group may later remember different versions of what happened.

At the same time, written communication cannot replace every human interaction. Loneliness is not solved by giving people more messages. People need places where they can encounter others, develop trust, and participate in something shared.

Meaning should not be separated from stability

The book encourages young people to build meaningful work, and I agree with that goal. But meaning becomes harder to sustain when the work cannot support a life.

We should be careful not to romanticize the solopreneur. Building a small business or independent practice can offer autonomy, creativity, and purpose. It can also require constant administration, marketing, financial uncertainty, and self-management. If the work stops, the income may stop. There may be no paid leave, employer-sponsored healthcare, or colleagues to share the load.

A healthy workverse should include multiple forms of contribution and multiple forms of security. Some people will thrive in entrepreneurship. Others will thrive in a stable institution. Many will move between both. The goal is not to convince everyone to become a founder. The goal is to help people understand the conditions under which they can do meaningful work without sacrificing their health or their responsibilities.

This is why the book’s focus on the ideal workday is more useful than a simplistic focus on the ideal job. Work needs to fit a life, not consume it.

The same principle applies to productivity. The book suggests that much of our work should align with who we are, while acknowledging that some work will always be draining. I appreciate the spirit of that idea, but I would not treat the 80/20 split as a universal formula. Some necessary work will never feel energizing. The question is whether the overall arrangement gives us enough energy, meaning, recovery, and stability to continue.

Leadership begins with small acts of ownership

One of the book’s concerns is a coming leadership gap as older workers retire and younger workers take on responsibility earlier. The exact size of that gap is difficult to predict, but the underlying challenge is real: people cannot lead well if they have never been allowed to practice making decisions.

Leadership is often presented as confidence, charisma, or authority. I think it begins more quietly.

A leader can clarify what matters, articulate a direction, refine a plan through evidence and feedback, and execute a decision while learning from the result. That is the CARE loop again.

This is why CARE is not only a note-taking method or lesson-design process. It can also be a framework for developing judgment.

1. Clarify helps a person distinguish the real problem from the noise.

2. Articulate helps them explain what they believe and why.

3. Refine helps them invite friction, feedback, and correction.

4. Execute helps them accept responsibility for a decision and learn from reality.

The examples of Mark Zuckerberg building early versions of Facebook or Malala Yousafzai speaking publicly for girls’ education are very different in scale and moral context, so they should not be treated as interchangeable success stories. But they do illustrate a general principle: meaningful change often begins as a small act of expression that becomes more consequential through persistence, support, and response.

Students do not need to launch companies to practice leadership. They can lead a discussion, organize a service project, teach a skill, propose a change, interview a community member, or build a prototype. The important thing is that they move from waiting for instructions to observing a need and taking a responsible next step.

A practical Workverse readiness loop

Here is a simple version of the process I would use with a student, a young adult, or even myself:

Map the conditions. Describe an ideal workday, including energy, environment, collaboration, schedule, tools, and recovery.

Notice the pattern. Identify the interests that keep returning: people, tools, systems, information, money, place, time, activity, or a combination.

Name the transferable skill. Choose one skill that can travel across contexts, such as writing, communication, research, organization, digital literacy, design, or problem-solving.

Design a small experiment. Volunteer, interview someone, create a prototype, make a micro-offer, join a project, or publish a useful example.

Create a human-first artifact. Write the first notes, questions, or draft before asking a tool to help.

Invite refinement. Seek feedback from a person, compare sources, test assumptions, and use AI only for a defined purpose when appropriate.

Record what happened. What worked? What failed? What surprised you? What will you change? What is the smallest next action?

This loop is small enough to use regularly and serious enough to produce evidence. Over time, it creates a portfolio not only of finished work, but of judgment: the ability to explain what you did, why you did it, what you learned, and what you would do next.

The workverse is something we build together

Reading Find Your Workverse after moving back to the United States made the book feel personal. I am not Gen Z, but I have recently experienced what it feels like to re-enter a work environment with a changed map. Experience travels with us, but it does not automatically tell us how to navigate a new landscape.

That may be the most important lesson for older educators and parents. We do not need to pretend that the past was simple, and we do not need to assume that young people are careless or entitled because they want work that reflects their values. Older generations can offer perspective about patience, craft, reliability, and the importance of stable relationships. Younger generations can offer perspective about flexibility, digital possibility, mental health, and the need to question inherited systems.

Neither side has the complete map.

The goal is not to prepare young people for a world that no longer exists. It is also not to tell them that they are entirely responsible for adapting to whatever institutions decide to do next. The goal is to help them develop a compass, a set of tools, a network of relationships, and the confidence to keep learning when the route changes.

That is what Learning to Learn Well has always meant to me. Learning is not merely the accumulation of information. It is the process of becoming more capable of noticing, explaining, questioning, deciding, creating, and acting.

In the new workverse, those capacities may matter more than any single job title.

And we should remind them that a meaningful career is not discovered in one dramatic moment. It is developed through a series of clarified questions, articulated ideas, refined attempts, and executed experiments.

The workverse is not waiting for them somewhere in the distance.

They are already helping to build it.

Research anchors

World Economic Forum, *The Future of Jobs Report 2025*

World Economic Forum, “Skills outlook”

International Labour Organization, “Youth employment: Why are anxieties among young people growing even as youth unemployment rates fall?”

Pew Research Center, “Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs”

Howard, Slemp, and Wang, “Need Support and Need Thwarting: A Meta-Analysis of Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness Supportive and Thwarting Behaviors in Student Populations”

Ryan and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being”

Minor spoilers for the first season of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End.

I recently finished watching the first 28 episodes of Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End with my daughter.

On the surface, it is a fantasy story about an elf mage who has lived for more than a thousand years. There are heroes, demons, dragons, magical exams, ancient grimoires, and spells powerful enough to change the course of a battle.

But that is not really what the show is about.

At its heart, Frieren is a story about learning to notice a human life before it disappears.

That becomes clear almost immediately. Most fantasy adventures build toward the moment when the heroes defeat the great evil. Frieren begins after that moment. The Demon King has already been defeated by a legendary party: Himmel the human hero, Heiter the priest, Eisen the dwarf warrior, and Frieren the elf mage.

Their journey lasted ten years.

For the humans, those ten years helped define their lives. For Frieren, they felt like almost nothing.

After the party separates, she casually leaves to continue collecting magic. She promises to return in fifty years so they can watch a meteor shower together again. To her, fifty years is a short detour. When she finally comes back, her companions have become old men.

Not long afterward, Himmel dies.

At his funeral, Frieren is struck by a realization she should have had decades earlier:

“Why didn’t I try to get to know him better?”

That question becomes the real beginning of her journey.

She had helped save the world with Himmel. She had fought beside him, eaten with him, traveled with him, and listened to him talk. Yet only after he was gone did she begin to understand how little attention she had paid to the person himself.

The tragedy was not that Frieren lacked time.

She had more time than almost anyone.

The tragedy was that she assumed time would always remain available.

A thousand years can still pass unnoticed

Frieren experiences time on a scale that no human can comprehend. She can spend months searching for a particular flower or years deciphering a grimoire without feeling that she has made a serious commitment.

At one point, Heiter asks her to translate an ancient text. She stays for years, partly because four years barely registers to her. During that time, she trains Fern, a young war orphan Heiter has taken in. After his death, Fern becomes Frieren’s apprentice and traveling companion. Later, they are joined by Stark, Eisen’s gifted but deeply anxious student.

Together, the three of them form a new kind of family.

Fern makes sure Frieren wakes up, gets dressed, and arrives somewhere near the time she is expected. Stark may be powerful enough to split rock, but he often trembles before a fight. Frieren is the oldest and most accomplished member of the group, yet in many ordinary situations she behaves like the child.

That is part of the show’s humor, but it also reveals something important.

Living for a long time does not automatically make someone wise.

Wisdom requires attention.

Frieren knows a tremendous amount about magic, monsters, and history. She can recognize spells that have not been used for centuries. She can see patterns that younger mages cannot. Yet she is still learning how to interpret a facial expression, choose a meaningful gift, or understand why a short delay might matter to someone who does not have centuries to spare.

Her long life gives her perspective, but it also creates distance. Human urgency can appear irrational when a decade feels like a season.

We have the opposite problem.

Our lives are short, so we rush. We turn days into schedules, relationships into obligations, and learning into a series of outcomes to achieve as efficiently as possible. Frieren can disappear into the forest for five years in pursuit of a nearly forgotten spell. Most of us become impatient when a webpage takes five seconds to load.

And yet the result can be strangely similar.

Frieren overlooks life because she believes she has endless time. We overlook it because we believe we never have enough.

Both perspectives can cause us to miss what is directly in front of us.

Learning from people after they are gone

Almost every episode returns to Himmel in some way.

A statue reminds Frieren of something he said. A village brings back the memory of a small kindness. A decision in the present echoes a choice he made decades earlier. These flashbacks are not included simply to make the audience feel nostalgic. They show Frieren continuing to learn from a relationship she did not fully understand while she was living inside it.

Himmel becomes a kind of teacher in retrospect.

What she remembers most is not usually his greatest battle. It is the way he treated an ordinary villager. The time he insisted on helping someone when there was no reward. The way he gave a seemingly unimportant moment his full attention.

This is one of the most interesting ideas in the series: sometimes an experience teaches us twice.

First, it teaches us while it is happening.

Then, years later, memory reveals a lesson we were not yet ready to understand.

I have felt this in my own life. A comment from a former teacher, a habit I once noticed in a colleague, or a small kindness from someone I knew years ago can suddenly acquire new meaning. The event has not changed. I have.

Our memories are not perfect recordings, of course. But they can still become active sources of reflection. The question is whether we treat them as museum pieces or as instructions for how to live now.

Frieren does not honor Himmel only by thinking about him. Slowly, she begins to act differently because of what she remembers.

She takes the detour.

She helps the village.

She pays closer attention to Fern and Stark.

She tries—awkwardly, imperfectly, but sincerely—to know the humans beside her before they become memories too.

That may be the deepest form of learning the show offers: allowing someone’s influence to continue changing your behavior long after the original lesson has ended.

The intelligence of “useless” curiosity

Frieren’s great obsession is collecting grimoires.

Some contain powerful magic. Others contain spells that seem almost comically insignificant: magic for creating a field of flowers, cleaning a bronze statue, or changing the taste of grapes.

Fern does not always understand why a mage of Frieren’s ability becomes so excited about these things. Serie, an ancient elf whose view of magic is centered on power and talent, would see many of them as beneath serious consideration.

Frieren sees them differently.

To her, the pursuit of magic is enjoyable in itself.

This gives the show a philosophy of learning that I find refreshing. We live in a culture that asks knowledge to justify itself almost immediately:

Will this help my career?

Can I monetize it?

Will it make me more productive?

Is it worth the time?

These are reasonable questions. We cannot devote ourselves to everything. But when utility becomes our only filter, curiosity begins to shrink. We stop following ideas that do not lead somewhere obvious. We refuse intellectual detours. We demand that every interest reveal its return on investment before we allow ourselves to enjoy it.

Frieren would probably find that way of living very strange.

She collects “useless” spells because usefulness is not always visible in advance. A spell may later unlock a memory, delight a child, honor a friend, or create a moment of beauty. Even when it does none of those things, learning it can still be worthwhile because wonder is part of being alive.

There is research behind the educational value of this instinct. In a well-known study, participants remembered information better when they were highly curious about the answer. Even more interestingly, heightened curiosity also improved memory for unrelated information encountered along the way. Curiosity did not merely point attention toward a single answer; it seemed to create a more receptive state for learning.

That feels very Frieren-like.

Follow one question long enough, and you may learn far more than the answer you originally came to find.

Perhaps we all need the equivalent of a supposedly useless spell: a subject we study without needing to defend it, a skill with no immediate economic purpose, or a question interesting enough to follow simply because it makes the world feel larger.

Not every form of learning needs to become leverage.

Some learning should become part of a life.

The ordinary moments are not filler

There are battles in Frieren, and some of them are spectacular. But the show repeatedly refuses to treat combat as the only part worth watching.

It lingers on long walks, meals, shopping trips, chores, sleepy mornings, small disagreements, and conversations that do not appear to advance the quest. Fern becomes annoyed. Stark becomes embarrassed. Frieren gets stuck in a mimic chest again. The party spends time in a town that another adventure story might pass in a quick montage.

These scenes are not filler.

They are the substance of the relationships.

We often imagine that the defining moments of life will be obvious while they are happening: graduations, weddings, births, promotions, departures, and great achievements. Those moments matter. But many of the memories that later become precious begin as ordinary afternoons.

Research on what psychologists call the “value of rediscovery” supports this. Across four studies, people underestimated how interesting and pleasurable it would be to revisit records of their everyday lives. Extraordinary experiences already seemed memorable, so people could anticipate enjoying them again. The value of ordinary conversations and routine moments was much easier to miss—until time had passed and those details were no longer readily available.

This is why a forgotten note, an old voice message, or an unremarkable family photograph can affect us so deeply. It restores details we never expected to lose.

Watching Frieren with my daughter made this lesson feel especially close.

Finishing 28 episodes together did not feel like a major life milestone. We watched a show. We talked about the characters. We laughed at Frieren’s strange habits. Then the final episode ended.

But I also know that my daughter will never again be exactly the age she was while we watched it. Someday, I may remember less of the plot than I remember what it felt like to sit beside her.

The show was asking me to notice the experience I was having while it was still happening.

Six lines from Frieren worth carrying with us

Part of what makes Frieren so affecting is that it rarely announces its philosophy with a grand speech. Its deepest ideas often arrive in a simple sentence spoken during a quiet conversation, a memory, or an ordinary act of care.

The precise English wording sometimes varies between subtitle and dubbed versions, but these six lines from the first season stayed with me because each one captures a different part of the show’s view of being human.

“Why didn’t I try to get to know him better?”

— Frieren, Episode 1: “The Journey’s End”

This is the question that sets the entire story in motion. Frieren does not regret failing to accomplish more with Himmel. She regrets failing to become more curious about him. It is a reminder that proximity is not the same as attention—and that sharing years with someone does not guarantee we have genuinely tried to know them.

“It’s my fear that brought me this far.”

— Eisen, Episode 6: “The Hero of the Village”

Eisen’s words completely reshape Stark’s understanding of courage. Fear is not proof that he is unprepared or unworthy. It is part of what has kept him alert, training, and alive. Courage is not the disappearance of fear; it is the decision that something else matters enough to act while the fear remains.

“Everyone who works hard is a warrior.”

— Eisen, Episode 12: “A Real Hero”

This line expands heroism beyond battle. A warrior can be anyone who continues carrying a difficult responsibility, practicing an uncertain craft, caring for others, or getting back up when nobody is watching. Much of the work that shapes a life never looks heroic from the outside.

“I’ll carry your memory into the future, too.”

— Frieren, Episode 16: “Long-Lived Friends”

Frieren’s long life can isolate her, but it also allows her to become a keeper of other people’s stories. Remembering someone is not simply preserving a picture of the past. It is allowing something of that person—their habits, values, humor, and way of seeing—to continue traveling through time with us.

“The pursuit of magic brings far greater joy than any spell ever could.”

— Frieren, Episode 21: “The World of Magic”

This may be the clearest expression of Frieren’s philosophy of learning. The greatest reward is not possession of the final answer but the curiosity, experimentation, and discovery involved in reaching it. Knowledge is not merely something to accumulate. The search itself can become a way of living.

“But I have no intention of ignoring people who are within reach, when they need help.”

— Himmel, Episode 28: “It Would Be Embarrassing When We Met Again”

Himmel knows that one small kindness will not transform the entire world. He does it anyway. The scale of an action does not determine its meaning to the person receiving it. We may not be able to help everyone, but that does not release us from noticing the person directly in front of us.

Together, these lines form a quiet philosophy: become curious about people, act even when you are afraid, respect unseen effort, carry memories forward, enjoy the pursuit of knowledge, and do not ignore the good that is within your reach.

A human version of Frieren’s perspective

We cannot live as Frieren lives. We do not have centuries to wander toward an uncertain destination or five years to investigate every interesting question.

But we can borrow parts of her perspective.

We can become more patient with learning and more urgent about love.

That distinction matters.

Many of us do the reverse. We demand quick results from ourselves, yet postpone the conversation, the visit, the apology, or the expression of gratitude. We hurry the processes that need time and delay the actions that should happen now.

Frieren’s story suggests a better arrangement:

Give ideas time to develop. Give people your attention before time removes the opportunity.

Here are five ways I want to experiment with that perspective in my own life.

1. Collect one “useless spell”

Follow one interest each week that has no obvious practical outcome. Read about an unfamiliar historical event. Learn the name of a tree. Try a new way of drawing. Ask how a common object was invented.

The point is not to become an expert. It is to protect the part of your mind that still approaches the world with wonder.

2. Take the small detour

Not every interruption deserves your attention, but efficiency should not make every unplanned moment feel like an obstacle.

Pause when your child wants to show you something. Talk with the older person who has a story to tell. Walk down the unfamiliar street. Stay a few minutes longer when a conversation begins to deepen.

The detour may be the part you remember.

3. Study people while they are still present

Frieren’s regret begins with realizing that traveling beside someone is not the same as knowing them.

Pay attention to a person’s favorite stories, repeated phrases, small habits, private worries, and peculiar joys. Ask the additional question. Notice what makes their face change. Curiosity should not be reserved for books and ideas; people are also worlds we can spend a lifetime learning to read.

4. Record the ordinary

Write down one small moment at the end of the day—not the most impressive thing you did, but something you would otherwise forget.

A joke at dinner. The song playing in the car. Something your child mispronounced. A passing thought from a walk. The look on someone’s face when they heard good news.

You are not trying to document everything. You are leaving a few markers for the person you will become.

5. Let a memory become an action

Think of someone whose influence still appears in your life. Instead of merely remembering them, ask:

What did this person teach me about how to treat someone today?

Then do something with the answer.

Send the message. Offer the encouragement. Make the meal. Show the patience. Continue the kindness.

Memory becomes meaningful when it changes the present.

Slow down—but not because you have forever

At first, Frieren’s long life prevents her from understanding humanity. Gradually, it gives her a unique responsibility.

She can carry people forward.

She remembers voices that history has turned into legends. She knows that the statues scattered across the land were once living people who complained, joked, made mistakes, and cared for one another. As generations pass, she becomes a bridge between the myth and the person.

But her greatest growth is not in remembering more.

It is in noticing sooner.

That is the part of her perception I want to borrow.

To see learning as a lifelong pursuit rather than a race toward usefulness.

To let curiosity pull me toward small and unusual things.

To understand that an ordinary day may be quietly becoming a treasured memory.

To allow the people I have known to keep teaching me.

And to pay attention to the people beside me now, while I can still ask them questions and hear their answers.

We do not need an elf’s lifespan to perceive life like Frieren.

We need her patience with the journey, her curiosity about the world, and the lesson she learned too late about human time.

Life is longer than the next deadline—and much shorter than we think.

The goal is not to stop moving.

It is to stop moving so quickly that the people, questions, and ordinary moments that give the journey meaning disappear into the background.

Perhaps that is why finishing the show with my daughter felt less like reaching an ending and more like receiving a reminder:

This is one of the moments.

Notice it now.

A question for you

What is one ordinary moment—or one supposedly “useless” interest—you want to pay closer attention to before it passes?

References and further viewing

• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End on Netflix

• Gruber, Gelman, and Ranganath, “States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit”, Neuron (2014)

• Zhang, Kim, Brooks, Gino, and Norton, “A ‘Present’ for the Future: The Unexpected Value of Rediscovery”, Psychological Science (2014)

For fourteen years, I lived and taught in Indonesia. Now that I am back in the United States, I keep noticing differences that were harder to see when I was living inside only one of those cultures.

Some differences are small. Others are difficult to ignore.

One of the biggest is the way people understand national identity - and the role education plays in building it.

In Indonesia, students grow up with a shared civic language. They learn the same five foundational principles. They encounter them in school subjects, ceremonies, textbooks, projects, public symbols, and ordinary conversations. The principles are called Pancasila, a word formed from Sanskrit roots meaning “five principles” or “five pillars.”

In the United States, we have the Pledge of Allegiance, civics classes, state standards, founding documents, national holidays, and plenty of patriotic symbols. But these pieces do not always add up to a shared civic philosophy. They often feel like disconnected fragments. We repeat certain words, yet we do not necessarily agree on what those words require from us - or how we should treat the person living next door.

That difference has left me with a question:

What would it look like for the United States to develop its own version of Pancasila - not by copying Indonesia, but by agreeing on a small set of shared principles that every student would learn, examine, question, and practice?

I know this is sensitive territory. Americans are rightly suspicious of state-mandated ideology. A national civic framework could become propaganda, especially if one political group were allowed to define it for everyone else. Indonesia’s own history shows that danger clearly.

I am also not arguing that Indonesia has solved division, inequality, religious tension, or education. It has not. A common philosophy on paper does not automatically produce justice in practice. Indonesia’s schools still vary enormously in quality and resources, and its record of protecting pluralism is far from perfect.

But I do think Indonesia has done something the United States has struggled to do (or to keep alive): it has given a remarkably diverse population a durable vocabulary for belonging to one nation.

That is worth studying.

This article is not a finished policy proposal. It is an attempt to put an idea into the world so it can be tested. That is how I try to work through ideas: clarify what I am actually noticing, articulate the argument, refine it against the complications, and then decide whether there is anything worth executing.

Not every idea survives that full cycle. But ideas cannot be improved while they remain hidden.

So consider this an invitation to think with me.

A morning ritual - and the ideas beneath it

Imagine a school ceremony in Indonesia.

Students stand together in rows. The red-and-white flag rises. The national anthem is sung. Pancasila is recited. These rituals are especially associated with the regular Monday flag ceremony, although practices vary among schools.

If you only witnessed the ceremony, you might assume Pancasila was simply Indonesia’s longer version of the Pledge of Allegiance. But the comparison misses something important.

The Pledge is primarily an oath of loyalty: allegiance to the flag and the republic it represents. Pancasila is closer to a philosophical framework. It attempts to answer a different question:

What principles should guide the life of the nation and the relationships among its people?

Here is the Pancasila in English, which is commonly rendered as:

1. Belief in the One and Only God. (NOTE: In the context of America, this wording would have to be altered to ‘fit’ the culture and respect that everyone has their own beliefs. I’ll dive into that in a bit)

2. Just and civilized humanity.

3. The unity of Indonesia.

4. Democracy guided by wisdom through deliberation and representation.

5. Social justice for all the people of Indonesia.

Together, the principles offer a recognizable moral sequence: spiritual grounding, humane treatment, national unity, deliberative democracy, and social justice.

Pancasila education is built into the national curriculum. Under the Merdeka Curriculum (Learning Independence), Pendidikan Pancasila is a named subject, and government guidance has treated Pancasila education as required national content. The curriculum has also connected Pancasila to character development through project-based learning and a broader learner or graduate profile.

The details change as governments revise curricula. The implementation varies. Some teachers create meaningful projects; others may teach the subject through memorization. But the continuity matters. An Indonesian student does not encounter national values once during a single unit and then leave them behind. The same core ideas return across years.

We rarely learn an important idea because someone tells it to us one time or recites it without any teachings behind the meaning and how to incorporate it into our lives. We learn it because we retrieve it, see it in different contexts, argue with it, connect it to experience, and gradually decide what it means.

This does not guarantee good behavior. Students in every country learn ideals that adults fail to practice. But repetition across contexts gives a society a shared reference point. When an Indonesian appeals to persatuan Indonesia, the unity of Indonesia, or gotong royong, the practice of mutual cooperation, the words connect to something other Indonesians recognize.

The United States has powerful words too: liberty, equality, justice, rights, democracy, opportunity, and E pluribus unum - out of many, one. But our educational system does not always weave them into a coherent civic identity. We inherit a toolkit. Indonesia provides something closer to a spine.

A country that had to learn how to become one

The achievement is easier to appreciate when we consider Indonesia’s diversity.

Indonesia is not a small, culturally uniform country. It stretches across a vast archipelago which, if laid across the whole United States of America, would go from end to end. It is definitely not a small country. The country’s official statistics have documented more than a thousand ethnic classifications, while Indonesia’s language agency has counted more than 700 regional languages. Religious life includes Islam, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and local belief traditions. Regional identities remain strong. A person can be proudly Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese, Minangkabau, Batak, Papuan, or Bugis while also being proudly Indonesian.

This kind of unity was painstakingly built.

Language played a major role. Bahasa Indonesia gave people from different regions a shared national language without requiring every local language to disappear. National symbols and ceremonies mattered. The shared struggle against colonialism mattered. So did the motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, usually translated as “Unity in Diversity.”

That phrase is more than cheerful multicultural branding. It expresses a difficult political problem: how can a population remain different without falling apart?

Pancasila was one answer.

Indonesia did not try to build unity around one ethnic group, one island, or one regional culture. It built a civic identity around principles broad enough to hold multiple communities together.

During my years there, I experienced that identity outside school as much as inside it.

This is, of course, one person’s experience. It would be dishonest to turn my own neighborhoods into proof that religious tension does not exist in Indonesia. It does. Minority groups have faced discrimination. Some places are much more tolerant than others. A principle of unity can be honored in one community and violated in another.

Still, I felt something there that I have struggled to name since returning to the United States: a thicker layer of everyday belonging.

In America, I may know that the person across the street is my neighbor. But beyond geography, what do we share? Do we understand ourselves as responsible for one another, or do we simply happen to own or rent homes near the same road?

Location matters. Many American communities are close, generous, and deeply connected. I have met some of my neighbors, and they seem like good people.

But I don’t KNOW them.

I am not claiming that Americans are incapable of community. I am asking why community can feel like an optional personal preference rather than part of our civic identity.

Indonesia gave me a different baseline. The community was not something outside the individual. It was one of the structures through which the individual lived.

The Pledge is a ritual, not a philosophy

The closest American comparison to Pancasila is probably the Pledge of Allegiance. Both are learned by children. Both are connected to flags, ceremonies, and national belonging. Both can stir pride in some people and discomfort in others.

But they do different work.

The Pledge asks for allegiance to a nation described as indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Those final words contain enormous moral substance. Yet the Pledge does not unpack them. It does not help a student explore what liberty requires when one person’s freedom conflicts with another person’s safety. It does not explain how justice should operate when the law has treated groups unequally. It does not tell us what obligations citizens have beyond loyalty.

That distinction becomes clearer when we imagine two students reciting “liberty and justice for all.” One may understand those words through the civil rights movement, constitutional protections, and the responsibility to defend the rights of people with whom they disagree. Another may experience the phrase as thirty seconds of sound before the morning announcements.

The words are the same. The learning is not.

A philosophy becomes educationally useful when learners have to work with it. They need examples and non-examples. They need difficult cases. They need to see what happens when two values collide. They need to examine how earlier generations interpreted the same principle differently. They need to recognize the distance between a country’s stated ideals and its actual behavior.

Pancasila provides categories. “Just and civilized humanity” creates a question: What would humane treatment look like here? “Unity of Indonesia” creates another: Does this action strengthen unity or demand sameness? “Democracy guided by wisdom through deliberation” raises questions about how decisions should be made and whose voices are missing. “Social justice” forces attention toward distribution, opportunity, and the common good.

Again, the presence of a category does not guarantee deep thinking. It can be reduced to memorization. But without categories, civic learning becomes scattered. Students may learn the three branches of government, the dates of wars, the language of the Constitution, and the process of an election without ever assembling those facts into a philosophy of citizenship.

Institutional knowledge matters. But a functioning democracy needs more than people who can identify the judicial branch on a test. It needs people who can disagree without dehumanizing each other, examine evidence, participate in public life, recognize manipulation, and balance individual rights with shared responsibilities.

Those are learned practices, not automatic outcomes of living in a democracy.

American civics is fragmented by design

The fragmentation I am describing is not an accidental administrative mistake. It grows from the structure of American education.

Education is primarily a state and local responsibility in the United States. The federal government can protect civil rights, collect data, direct certain funds, and establish conditions around federal programs. But it does not create one national curriculum. States develop standards and graduation requirements. Districts select materials, organize courses, and respond to their communities. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the country had 13,318 regular public school districts in the 2021-22 school year.

Decentralization has real advantages, such as local communities responding to local needs. States can experiment. Teachers and districts can design programs connected to their students rather than waiting for a distant ministry to approve every adjustment. A rural district, a large urban system, a tribal community, and a coastal technical school do not need identical electives or examples. Local control can protect pluralism and encourage innovation.

It can also produce an instructional lottery.

Two students can graduate from high school in different states with very different experiences of American history, government, media literacy, debate, service learning, and civic responsibility. Nearly every state has some form of civics content, and it would be inaccurate to say that civics has vanished. But requirements, course structures, assessments, classroom time, and instructional approaches vary widely. In some places, civic learning emphasizes inquiry and participation. In others, it may be compressed into a test of names, dates, and governmental procedures. Some students complete action projects. Others finish a worksheet.

The difference is not simply liberal versus conservative. That frame is too easy. The bigger difference is between civic education as information and civic education as formation.

When every curriculum decision becomes a proxy war

Local control works best when communities possess enough shared trust to make decisions together. In a low-trust society, local control can turn every school board election, textbook choice, and library decision into a proxy battle over national identity. This is where the American system now feels especially fragile.

• We do not simply disagree about how to teach history. We disagree about what history is for. Is it supposed to build pride, expose injustice, develop analytical judgment, or all three?

• We do not simply disagree about which books students should read. We disagree about whether encountering a different identity is education or threat.

• We do not simply debate instructional methods. We interpret the existence of the other side’s ideas as evidence that institutions have been captured.

The result is a strange combination: education is decentralized, but every local conflict is amplified into a national culture war.

This atmosphere reaches beyond schools. Pew Research Center reported in 2025 that fewer than half of Americans said they trusted all or most people in their neighborhood, a decline from a decade earlier. Trust is difficult to measure, and no single survey captures a whole country. Still, the finding matches something many people feel: we are increasingly uncertain not only about institutions but about one another.

I do not want to exaggerate this into a direct comparison with George Orwell’s 1984. America is not Oceania. But Orwell understood what mutual suspicion does to ordinary relationships. When people begin to imagine that every neighbor, colleague, parent, student, or teacher may be an enemy reporting them to a hostile system, social life becomes unhealthy long before it becomes totalitarian.

Suspicion can be justified. Governments have abused power. Schools have excluded people and distorted history. Communities have silenced uncomfortable voices. A healthy democracy requires scrutiny.

But skepticism is not the same as permanent distrust. Skepticism asks for evidence. Permanent distrust assumes corruption before evidence appears. Skepticism can improve institutions. Permanent distrust makes shared institutions nearly impossible to maintain.

If every common standard is treated as control, every public institution as captured, and every disagreement as betrayal, then what remains to hold a nation together?

The market cannot do that work. Social media will not do it. A flag alone cannot do it. A political party certainly cannot do it.

Education may be one of the few places where a society can deliberately practice belonging before students inherit the full force of adult division.

What Indonesia actually centralizes - and what it does not

At this point, it would be tempting to create a clean comparison:

• Indonesia: centralized, unified, equal.

• United States: decentralized, fragmented, unequal.

• That comparison is memorable, BUT it is also too simple.

Indonesia has a national education system, national curricular expectations, and a much stronger national civic framework. Its Constitution directs the state to establish a single national education system and to allocate at least 20 percent of state and regional budgets to education. National ministries and agencies define curricular structures, learning outcomes, and required content.

But Indonesia has also undergone major decentralization. Local and regional governments play significant roles in funding execution, teacher management, and the delivery of basic education. Schools interpret national expectations through different resources, local cultures, leadership, and teacher capacity.

In other words, Indonesia’s unity is not created by controlling every classroom from Jakarta. It comes from establishing a recognizable national spine and then allowing implementation to vary around it.

For the American thought experiment, the United States would not need one federal textbook, one approved interpretation of history, or one scripted lesson taught identically in every school. In fact, that kind of uniformity would violate the pluralism the framework should protect.

What America could learn from Indonesia is not to centralize everything, but to decide what must be shared.

A national education system can be uniform in the wrong places and fragmented in the wrong places. It might require every teacher to complete the same paperwork while leaving the meaning of citizenship vague. It might standardize testing while allowing access to experienced teachers, safe facilities, and rich curriculum to depend on a ZIP code.

A better system would be firm about a small number of common commitments and flexible about the many ways communities can bring those commitments to life.

That is what I mean by a civic spine.

Funding reveals what a country treats as shared

Curriculum is only one part of educational unity. Funding tells another story.

Indonesia’s Constitution contains a striking commitment: at least 20 percent of the state budget and regional budgets is to be prioritized for education. That constitutional rule does not guarantee that every rupiah is spent effectively. It does not erase corruption, geographic barriers, weak infrastructure, or differences in teacher quality. But it makes education a visible national obligation.

The American structure is different. Public schools draw revenue from federal, state, and local sources, and the proportions vary considerably by state. Local property taxes supplied 36 percent of total public-school revenue nationally in 2020-21, according to NCES, and 83 percent of local revenue came from property taxes.

That is an important correction to an easy misconception. American schools do not receive half of all their money from property taxes everywhere. But local property wealth still plays a major role, and the reliance varies dramatically by state. State funding formulas often attempt to equalize resources, with mixed results.

The larger principle remains: when access to educational opportunity depends heavily on where a family can afford to live, students experience the nation differently before they are old enough to vote.

This is where debates about curriculum and funding should meet. If we believe civic learning is a national necessity, then every community needs the capacity to provide it.

Funding equality alone would not create national identity. Indonesia’s constitutional allocation has not removed enormous gaps between well-resourced schools in parts of Java and schools serving remote communities. A national target is not the same thing as an equal learner experience.

But the target says education is not merely a local consumer good purchased through housing markets. It is part of the country’s shared future.

America spends a great deal on education in total, yet the system often communicates the opposite message: your school is primarily the concern of your family, your district, and your state. People can stop seeing another community’s children as part of the same public.

A civic identity cannot survive if “our children” only means the children within our property-tax boundary.

Unity on paper is not unity in practice

This is the point where admiration needs refinement.

Pancasila offers Indonesia a common language, but common language can hide contradictions. A country can:

• Teach “just and civilized humanity” while people experience discrimination

• Teach social justice while educational resources remain deeply unequal

• Celebrate unity in diversity while minority communities face restrictions or prejudice.

Indonesia’s religious coexistence is real, but it is not complete. Human-rights and religious-freedom organizations continue to document obstacles faced by minority communities, including difficulties involving houses of worship and laws or local regulations that can be used against religious minorities. Regional, ethnic, and religious tensions have not disappeared simply because Pancasila says they should.

There is also a historical warning.

During Suharto’s New Order, Pancasila education was used as a tool of political conformity. The government promoted an authorized interpretation and required ideological training. A philosophy intended to unite citizens could be turned into a loyalty mechanism that protected those in power.

That history matters because Americans who hear “national civic creed” may immediately imagine ideological control. They are not irrational to worry about it. Indonesia itself demonstrates both the value of a shared framework and the danger of allowing a government to monopolize its meaning.

The lesson is not that national principles are inherently oppressive. Every nation already teaches values, even when it claims neutrality. The selection of historical events, classroom rules, graduation requirements, and acceptable forms of speech always communicates a vision of the citizen.

Students should be allowed to ask whether the nation is living up to them. They should compare official ideals with lived experience. They should examine how language has been used by people seeking justice and by people protecting power. They should learn that loyalty to a principle may sometimes require criticism of the state.

That is the difference between civic education and indoctrination.

Indoctrination gives students the answer and punishes the question.

Civic education gives students durable questions, credible evidence, and practice in forming responsible answers.

Unity is not the same as uniformity

One reason the Pancasila model interests me is that its central claim is not “be the same.” Indonesia’s national motto is unity in diversity, not unity through sameness.

Uniformity asks people to erase meaningful differences so that conflict becomes less visible. Unity asks people to maintain enough shared commitment that differences can exist without destroying the whole.

In a classroom, uniformity sounds like this: There is one acceptable interpretation, and good students repeat it.

Unity sounds different: We will examine competing interpretations, but we share rules for evidence, dignity, listening, and participation.

In public life, uniformity expects everyone to practice the same religion, tell the same version of history, hold the same political opinions, or express patriotism in the same way.

Unity establishes a common civic space in which different religions, histories, opinions, and forms of expression can coexist.

The United States already possesses language for this. E pluribus unum means “out of many, one.” The First Amendment protects religious exercise, speech, assembly, petition, and a government that does not establish a religion. The Fourteenth Amendment promises equal protection. The Declaration of Independence invokes equality and unalienable rights. The Constitution creates a system in which power is divided, contested, and transferred.

The raw materials are not missing.

What is missing is the educational synthesis.

• We expose students to the Constitution, so we assume they understand constitutional democracy.

• We expose them to the civil rights movement, so we assume they understand civic courage.

• We expose them to diverse authors, so we assume they know how to live in a pluralistic society.

A possible American Pancasila

So what might an American version of Pancasila look like?

I hesitate to name the principles because the naming itself can sound grandiose. However, the process would need people from different political traditions, regions, religions, racial and ethnic communities, professions, and generations. The principles would need to be grounded in existing American constitutional ideals rather than invented as a new party platform.

Still, a thought experiment needs something concrete enough to test.

Here is one possible starting point.

1. Human dignity and equal citizenship

Every person possesses dignity, and every citizen stands equal before the law.

This principle would connect the Declaration’s language of equality with the Constitution’s later development, especially equal protection. It would also force students to study the gap between principle and history: slavery, Indigenous dispossession, segregation, exclusion from voting, disability discrimination, unequal treatment of immigrants, and other failures.

The point would not be to teach that America has always achieved equality. It would be to teach that the principle gives citizens a basis for demanding better.

2. Liberty of conscience, expression, and lawful choice

People must have meaningful freedom to think, speak, worship, question, create, and direct their lives, while respecting the equal rights of others.

This principle would protect religious and nonreligious students. It would also prevent the framework from becoming purely collectivist. Community matters, but the individual cannot simply disappear into the state or majority.

Students would need to examine hard cases. When does expression become harassment? When can a school limit speech? What happens when religious exercise conflicts with another person’s rights? Liberty becomes real when learners work through tensions rather than repeat the word.

3. Pluralism and national belonging

Americans may hold different identities, histories, beliefs, and ways of life while belonging to one civic community.

This would be the American version of unity in diversity. It would reject both forced sameness and permanent separation. A student should not have to choose between a cultural identity and an American identity, nor should national identity be defined as belonging to one race, religion, or region.

Belonging also creates responsibility. If another group is pushed outside the civic community, the damage is not only theirs. The meaning of American citizenship becomes smaller for everyone.

4. Constitutional democracy through evidence and deliberation

Public decisions should be made through lawful democratic processes, informed judgment, credible evidence, peaceful participation, and genuine deliberation.

This principle would go beyond telling students that voting matters. Voting is essential, but democracy also requires listening, organizing, serving, questioning sources, accepting lawful outcomes, protecting minority rights, and continuing the argument without treating opponents as enemies.

The word deliberation matters. It suggests that democracy is not simply the victory of whichever side can shout louder. It is a practice of giving reasons, hearing objections, revising positions, and making decisions under shared rules.

5. Mutual responsibility and the common good

Rights make free citizenship possible; responsibilities make shared life possible.

This principle would ask what we owe one another beyond avoiding harm. It could include service, care for public institutions, stewardship of natural resources, contribution to one’s community, and concern for whether other people have a genuine opportunity to participate.

It would not require agreement on the size of government or one economic program. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, progressives, and people outside those categories will disagree about how the common good should be pursued. The shared principle is that citizenship is not only a private claim on rights. It also involves participation in a world we hold together.

These five principles would not settle American political disagreements. They should not.

Their purpose would be to create common ground underneath those disagreements.

Two people could agree that human dignity matters and still disagree about criminal justice policy. They could agree on liberty and still disagree about its boundaries. They could value the common good and propose very different budgets.

Shared principles do not remove politics. They make democratic politics possible.

How to teach shared principles without teaching obedience

The worst version of an American Pancasila would place five sentences on a classroom wall, require students to recite them, and punish anyone who questioned the government’s interpretation.

That would not create unity. It would create performance.

The better version would treat the principles as recurring problems for inquiry.

Return to the same ideas across grade levels

Young children could learn dignity, fairness, listening, and community through stories and classroom decisions. Middle-school students could examine historical cases in which rights and responsibilities came into conflict. High-school students could deliberate constitutional questions, analyze policy evidence, study propaganda, and complete community-based projects.

The principles would stay recognizable while the intellectual demand deepened.

This is the educational value of a spiral curriculum. A learner returns to the same important idea with greater knowledge, more complex cases, and a larger capacity for judgment. “Fairness” at age seven is not the same concept as equal protection at age seventeen, but the earlier idea creates somewhere for the later one to attach.

Teach contradictions, not national perfection

Students should study moments when the United States lived up to its ideals and moments when it failed them.

That means the curriculum should include courage, invention, democratic reform, mutual aid, and the expansion of rights. It should also include conquest, slavery, exclusion, political violence, and institutional failure.

The goal is not to balance every positive fact with a negative fact as if history were an accounting exercise. The goal is to ask a more demanding question: How have Americans used, violated, reinterpreted, and expanded their stated principles?

This allows students to develop attachment without mythology and criticism without cynicism.

Patriotism that cannot tolerate truth is fragile. Criticism that cannot recognize anything worth preserving is empty. Civic maturity requires both commitment and honesty.

Use genuine deliberation

Students need structured experience discussing issues where reasonable people disagree.

That means more than a competitive debate in which each side tries to win. Deliberation asks students to identify values, examine evidence, represent opposing views fairly, notice trade-offs, and decide what they would do.

Teachers need support for this. Leading a discussion on a contested public issue is difficult, especially when families fear political bias. Clear national principles could actually protect teachers by defining the purpose: not to recruit students into a party, but to teach constitutional reasoning and civic habits.

Connect civic learning to local action

Students should not study community as an abstraction.

They might investigate pedestrian safety near the school, access to a local library, water quality, emergency preparedness, support for new families, or the preservation of a neighborhood story. They could interview residents, analyze public data, compare possible solutions, attend a meeting, create a proposal, and reflect on what they learned.

This is where civic education becomes formation. Students experience disagreement, limited resources, institutional constraints, and the need to communicate with real people. They discover that public life is slower and less dramatic than social media makes it look, but also more open to contribution.

Teach media literacy as civic survival

A shared framework cannot survive if citizens inhabit completely different realities.

Students need to verify claims, trace information to original sources, distinguish reporting from commentary, recognize emotional manipulation, and understand how algorithms shape attention. They also need intellectual humility: the ability to say, “I may be wrong; I need more evidence.”

Media literacy should not become another method for labeling disliked opinions as misinformation. It should focus on transparent habits that can be applied across ideologies.

Who made the claim? What is the evidence? What is missing? Is the source close to the event? Has the image or quotation been taken out of context? What would change my mind?

Those questions are civic habits because democratic decisions depend on a shared capacity to evaluate reality.

Assess practice, not loyalty

Students should never be graded on whether they feel patriotic enough or agree with an official position.

They can be assessed on whether they use evidence accurately, explain a constitutional principle, listen and respond to another view, revise an argument, contribute to a project, and reflect on consequences.

The distinction is crucial. A democratic school assesses the quality of thinking and participation. An authoritarian school assesses conformity.

CARE as a civic learning cycle

As I worked through this idea, I kept returning to the CARE process I use for turning notes and learning into action: Clarify, Articulate, Refine, Execute. It offers a practical structure for civic education because it does not tell learners what conclusion to reach. It teaches them how to move from confusion toward responsible action.

Clarify

Students begin by defining the problem, identifying the people involved, and separating what they know from what they assume.

If the issue is whether a community should restrict a form of public expression, clarification might include the relevant law, the purpose of the restriction, the groups affected, and the values in tension. Liberty may matter. Safety may matter. Equality may matter. The common good may matter.

Naming those tensions prevents students from rushing into slogans.

Articulate

Students explain their current position in their own words. They use evidence, examples, and a clear chain of reasoning.

Articulation matters because vague agreement hides weak understanding. A student may say “freedom is important” until asked which freedom, for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost.

Writing, speaking, drawing a concept map, or teaching the idea to someone else makes the thinking visible.

Refine

Students test their position against counterevidence, history, competing principles, and the strongest version of an opposing view.

This stage is often missing from public discourse. People clarify just enough to choose a side, articulate the side’s talking points, and then execute by posting. They skip refinement.

Refinement is where democratic judgment develops. It asks: What am I missing? Whose experience complicates my view? Which part of the opposing argument is valid? What unintended consequence could follow from my preferred solution?

Changing one’s mind is not failure. It is evidence that thinking occurred.

Execute

Students decide what responsible action fits the evidence and their level of authority.

Execution might mean writing a proposal, conducting a community interview, presenting to a school council, designing an informational resource, joining a service project, or choosing not to act until better evidence is available.

The action does not need to be dramatic. Civic life is built through small acts of attention and contribution as much as through elections and protests.

CARE would also make the national principles more than content to memorize. Students would use the principles as lenses throughout the cycle. Which commitment is involved? Where do commitments conflict? Which proposed action respects human dignity, pluralism, liberty, democratic process, and mutual responsibility?

That is what it means to turn a national philosophy into a learning practice.

The safeguards would matter as much as the principles

Any serious proposal for a shared civic framework would need strong safeguards.

1. First, the framework could not belong to a presidential administration, political party, religious institution, or advocacy organization. If it changed every four years, it would become another partisan document. Its legitimacy would have to come from a broad, public, transparent process and from grounding in the Constitution and existing civic traditions.

2. Second, the framework would need to distinguish principles from policy conclusions. “Human dignity” can be shared. A particular health-care bill cannot. “Constitutional democracy” can be shared. A position on the electoral college will remain contested. Teachers should help students reason from principles without pretending that the principles yield only one answer.

3. Third, religious liberty would need explicit protection. Indonesia’s first principle begins with belief in God, reflecting Indonesia’s history and constitutional identity. An American framework should not copy that language. The American adaptation would need to protect religious practice and nonbelief under liberty of conscience, consistent with public schools’ constitutional obligations.

4. Fourth, students and teachers would need the right to criticize the framework itself. They should study who wrote it, which voices influenced it, what concepts were omitted, and how its language might be interpreted differently. A creed that cannot survive examination does not belong in a democratic classroom.

5. Fifth, local communities would need meaningful flexibility in examples, projects, texts, and teaching methods. A tribal nation, an immigrant neighborhood, a farming community, and a large coastal city should be able to connect national principles to their own histories and problems. The spine is shared; the learning experiences are not identical.

6. Sixth, the country would need to invest in teachers rather than simply announcing a mandate. Teachers require high-quality materials from multiple perspectives, professional learning in discussion and inquiry, time to plan, and institutional support when controversy appears.

7. Finally, evaluation should examine whether students can think and participate, not whether they can repeat approved language. A portfolio of deliberation, source analysis, community work, and reflection would reveal more than a loyalty test ever could.

These safeguards would make the framework slower to create and harder to control.

That is a feature, not a flaw.

What the United States should not copy

Learning from another country does not mean importing its system whole.

The United States should not copy Indonesia’s religious foundation. It should not copy a history of authorized ideological interpretation. It should not assume that national curriculum language will be implemented equally across regions. It should not confuse ceremonial participation with genuine belief.

It should also avoid the bureaucratic trap of believing that more detailed standards automatically produce better learning.

I have worked in education long enough to know how this happens. A good idea becomes a framework. The framework becomes a document. The document becomes a compliance checklist. Teachers spend their time proving that they have covered the correct language, while students experience one more disconnected activity.

A civic spine should be short enough to remember and deep enough to revisit. It should reduce fragmentation, not create a new layer of paperwork. It should help teachers connect history, literature, media literacy, and community learning rather than compete with those subjects for time.

The United States should also preserve the best feature of decentralization:

the ability to experiment.

States and districts could pilot different approaches to the same national commitments. One might build civic projects into English and social studies. Another might use advisory periods. Another might partner with local libraries, tribal governments, universities, veterans’ groups, faith communities, unions, or nonprofit organizations. Researchers could compare outcomes. Teachers could share practices that worked.

Unity should create coordination, not stagnation.

What Indonesia might learn from the American model

The exchange should not travel in only one direction.

Indonesia’s national civic spine is powerful, but American education offers its own lessons. Local autonomy can create space for teachers to adapt learning to students. Open disagreement can expose where national narratives have become too neat. Strong protections for speech and inquiry can help students challenge official interpretations. Diverse curricula can surface histories that a centralized narrative may overlook.

The Merdeka Curriculum itself reflects some recognition of this need. Its language emphasizes greater flexibility, essential learning, differentiated instruction, and room for schools to adapt projects to local contexts. The idea of merdeka belajar - freedom to learn - complicates the notion that Indonesian education is simply top-down.

The strongest model may therefore sit between the two countries.

Indonesia offers a shared direction but needs to keep expanding inquiry, local responsiveness, and protection from ideological misuse.

The United States offers local freedom but needs a stronger shared direction, more equitable capacity, and a clearer language of civic responsibility.

The goal is not centralization or decentralization as an ideology. The goal is to place decisions at the level where they can best support learning while maintaining the commitments that make the system a public one.

Some things should be local.

Some things should be shared.

Wisdom lies in knowing the difference.

Can schools create a unity the wider culture does not model?

There is an obvious objection to everything I have proposed: schools cannot repair a culture by themselves.

That is true.

• Students will not learn respectful deliberation if every adult example shows politics as humiliation.

• They will not learn media literacy if profitable platforms reward outrage and adults share claims without reading them.

• They will not learn mutual responsibility if public policy consistently treats every need as a private failure.

• They will not trust institutions merely because a teacher assigns a lesson on trust.

Education is not magic. A national framework would not make polarization disappear.

But schools are not powerless either.

Education works slowly. It establishes language, habits, expectations, and memories that may become useful years later. A student who practices representing an opponent’s view fairly may not transform public discourse tomorrow. But that practice becomes part of what the student knows how to do. A class that solves one local problem will not repair national institutions. But students learn that participation can produce something other than anger.

Schools are also among the few institutions where people from different families and backgrounds still spend sustained time together. That makes them imperfect but irreplaceable practice grounds for pluralism.

Start smaller than a national mandate

Even if the idea of an American Pancasila has merit, a national policy is not the first step.

The first step is conversation.

A school could ask families, students, teachers, and community members to name the principles they believe people need in order to live together across differences. Participants could compare their language with the Constitution, local tribal traditions, civil-rights history, religious and humanist ethics, and the experiences of newer Americans.

• A district could identify three or five recurring civic questions and embed them across grade levels.

• A teacher could choose one shared principle - dignity, liberty, pluralism, deliberation, or mutual responsibility - and use it as a lens across several texts rather than teach it in one isolated lesson.

• A community organization could host structured conversations in which people do not begin with policy positions. They begin with the value they are trying to protect.

• A state could create a civic-learning framework that includes inquiry, community action, media literacy, and reflection while preserving local curricular choice.

These smaller experiments would reveal whether the idea actually helps. They would also show where the language fails, which groups feel excluded, and which implementation demands are unrealistic.

That process matters to me. I am not interested in announcing a perfect system from a desk. I am interested in moving an idea from notes into the world, listening to what happens, and refining it.

That is the CARE cycle at a civic scale.

1. Clarify the need.

2. Articulate a possible framework.

3. Refine it through disagreement and evidence.

4. Execute a small, testable version.

5. Then begin again.

The deeper learning question

Underneath this comparison of two countries is a larger question about what education is for.

Is education mainly the transfer of academic knowledge to individuals so they can compete for future opportunities?

Or is it also the process through which a society teaches people how to share a world?

The first purpose matters. Students need knowledge, skills, employment pathways, and the capacity to build independent lives. But if education stops there, it reinforces the idea that learning is a private investment and society is a competition among separate individuals.

The second purpose asks something else of us. It treats learners as future neighbors, colleagues, caregivers, voters, jurors, volunteers, leaders, and community members. It recognizes that no amount of individual achievement can compensate for the collapse of trust, public reasoning, and shared responsibility.

Indonesia’s educational system makes this civic purpose unusually visible. Its national philosophy may sometimes become ceremonial or rigid, but it doesn't pretend that education is value-free. It openly connects learning to the formation of a national community.

American education forms civic values too, but often indirectly and inconsistently. Students learn from which histories receive time, whose voices count as credible, how authority responds to disagreement, whether classroom rules are fair, and whether community problems belong to them. Even silence teaches something.

The choice is not between value education and neutral education.

The choice is between examined values and unexamined values.

A shared civic framework would make those values visible enough to question and practice.

What do we have in common?

When I look back on fourteen years in Indonesia, I do not remember a perfect model waiting to be exported.

I remember complexity.

I remember communities where people of different religions lived near one another and made everyday coexistence seem normal. I remember warmth, hospitality, and a sense that relationships mattered. I also know that other Indonesians have experienced exclusion and that a national ideal can sound different from the margins.

I remember a school system with a clear national identity. I also remember bureaucracy, uneven resources, and the distance between what a curriculum says and what a classroom can deliver.

I remember Pancasila as something people knew - not necessarily something they interpreted in exactly the same way, but something available as common language.

That is the part I keep returning to.

America has never lacked ideals. Our problem may be that we possess so many fragments of civic language without a sustained educational process for assembling them. We have a pledge, a motto, founding documents, court decisions, social movements, local histories, and generations of people arguing over what freedom and equality require.

An American Pancasila would not need to use that name. It may not need to become a federal policy. Perhaps the phrase itself is only a thinking tool - a way to notice what our current system leaves disconnected.

But I believe the underlying need is real.

I do not know whether five principles would make a measurable difference, how long cultural change would take, or whether Americans could agree on the language. Those uncertainties are not reasons to abandon the question. They are reasons to test it carefully.

Indonesia did not become a unified nation because someone wrote five sentences. It built unity through language, institutions, education, ritual, community practice, historical memory, and generations of repetition. Pancasila is part of that system, not a shortcut around it.

The United States would need its own process, shaped by its own history and constitutional commitments.

But every process begins by naming what is missing.

Right now, too many Americans can describe the people they oppose more easily than the principles they share.

Education cannot solve that alone. It can help us practice another possibility.

So I will end where I began - not with a policy demand, but with a question:

Sources and further reading

The Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia of 1945 - Article 31

Indonesia’s official guidance on Pancasila education in the Merdeka Curriculum

Indonesia’s official overview of the Pancasila learner profile

BPS-Statistics Indonesia: Nationality, Ethnicity, Religion, and Daily Language from the 2010 Census

World Bank: Local Governance and Education Performance in Indonesia

World Bank: How Indonesia’s Subnational Governments Spend on Education

U.S. Department of Education: The Federal Role in Education

National Center for Education Statistics: Number of public school districts

National Center for Education Statistics: Public School Revenue Sources

Tufts CIRCLE: Equitable K-12 Civic Learning

Pew Research Center: Americans’ Trust in One Another

Global Centre for Pluralism: Indonesia Monitor Report

Research on Pancasila education and indoctrination during Indonesia’s New Order

There is a sentence in my notebook that I wrote while reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper:

Every mind works differently, but the common thread is that we all need a way to externalize our thoughts.

I did not write it as a polished thesis. It was one of those sentences that appears while you are still trying to understand what you think. The handwriting is uneven. There are arrows around it. The wording may change before this essay is finished. It might even change because I am writing this essay.

That is part of the point.

I have spent years writing in notebooks, but I do not think the lesson is that everyone should become a journal keeper. Not everyone likes writing. Not everyone has a natural relationship with the blank page. Some people discover what they think by speaking. Some need to draw. Some need to walk, dance, sing, build, design, or make something with their hands before the idea becomes clear enough to explain.

The medium is not the most important part.

The important part is finding a way to move thought outside yourself so you can work with it.

A thought that remains entirely inside your head can feel complete simply because it is familiar. You can circle around the same idea for hours and experience the movement as progress. But until the thought becomes a sentence, sketch, sound, movement, model, conversation, prototype, or some other visible or audible form, it is difficult to examine it closely. You cannot easily compare it with another idea, invite feedback, notice its weaknesses, or decide what to do next.

Externalization is what gives thought a surface.

It turns an experience into something you can revisit. It turns a vague intuition into something you can question. It turns an imagined possibility into something you can design, test, revise, and eventually share.

This is why I have come to believe that externalization is one of the basic conditions of improvement.

If you are trying to learn, create, solve a problem, understand yourself, or develop a craft, you need some way to make your thinking available to your own attention.

You do not necessarily need to write.

But you do need somewhere for the thought to go.

A sentence in a notebook

The sentence in my notebook appeared near the end of Allen’s book, in the chapters about modern notebooks, diaries, and Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal. I had been reading about the many forms notebooks have taken over time: places for lists, observations, experiments, sketches, calculations, memories, plans, and private reflections.

The objects were different, and the people who used them were different. Some notebooks were carefully organized. Others were full of fragments. Some were used to keep track of business or scientific observations. Others preserved personal experiences that might otherwise have disappeared.

But a pattern kept returning: people were using external marks to help them do something their unaided minds could not easily do alone.

They were trying to:

• notice

• organize

• remember

• make sense of what had happened

• and develop something that did not exist yet

The notebook is not simply a container for finished thoughts. It is part of the thinking process itself.

That realization connected with my own experience so strongly that I stopped reading and began writing. I did not want to summarize Allen’s argument. I wanted to understand why the idea was affecting me.

I wrote about how every mind works differently. I wrote about writing, painting, speaking, and dancing. I added lists, poems, and narrative as different ways of shaping experience. I wrote that ideas often need to be externalized before they can be revised, sharpened, and materialized.

The notes were not elegant, but they were alive. They were connected to my experience, and because they existed on the page, I could return to them later.

That is one of the reasons I keep notebooks. They allow me to encounter my own thinking at different times.

The blank slate after fourteen years abroad

This has become particularly important during the past year of my life.

I spent fourteen years living and teaching in Indonesia. During that time, I developed a professional identity, a network of relationships, a sense of place, and a rhythm of life. I taught English and humanities, worked with students, wrote curriculum, developed lessons, read books, and gradually became the person who could recognize what he cared about and what he wanted to contribute.

When I moved back to the United States in 2025, I knew the move was necessary for my family, but necessity does not make transition simple. Returning to a country you call home can be strangely disorienting. Even though it’s where you came from and recognize many things before your move, you do not necessarily recognize your place within them.

Professionally, I sometimes felt as though I had been returned to a blank slate. I had experience, qualifications, and years of work behind me, but the context that had made those things visible was gone. I had to rebuild a working life, understand a new environment, and figure out what parts of my previous identity still belonged.

There were practical problems to solve, of course. There was work to find, family life to establish, and a new routines and networks to create which is truly a never-ending process. But underneath those practical tasks was another question: What matters most to me now?

I did not answer that question in a single moment. I answered it gradually by writing and I found that, ever since elementary school, writing has been my way of figuring my own thoughts out.

I wrote about the move. I wrote about teaching. I wrote about the kind of work I wanted to do. I wrote about the books I was reading and the ideas bubbling inside my head, begging to be set free.

I wrote about uncertainty, frustration, ambition, gratitude, and the strange feeling of rebuilding a life while still carrying the previous one inside you.

Journaling did not solve the transition. It did something more modest and, in the long run, more useful: it gave the experience a form I could examine.

When everything remained in my head, the transition felt like one enormous and indistinct problem. On the page, it became a collection of smaller questions.

What kind of work do I want to do?

What do I want to teach?

What do I still believe about learning?

What did I gain from my years in Indonesia that I do not want to lose?

What am I building now?

What would meaningful progress look like this week?

The questions did not always produce immediate answers, but they gave my attention somewhere to land.

Over time, those entries helped me recognize that the work I wanted to continue was not separate from my previous life. My teaching, writing, reading, curriculum development, and interest in artificial intelligence were all connected by a common concern: how do we turn what we learn into clearer thinking and meaningful action?

That question became the center of Learning to Learn Well. It also became the foundation for the CARE Teaching Method.

The method did not appear fully formed. It emerged through years of teaching, reading, journaling, experimenting, drafting, revising, and noticing what helped students and adults move from information toward action.

The framework eventually became:

• Clarify what you are trying to understand, solve, question, notice, or create.

• Articulate the idea in your own words or in a form that makes it available to you.

• Refine it through elaboration, feedback, comparison, questioning, and revision.

• Execute by turning the refined idea into something real.

What does it mean to externalize a thought?

Externalization can sound abstract, but we use it constantly.

When you set an alarm, you externalize an intention.

When you write a grocery list, you externalize a memory.

When you draw a map, you externalize a spatial relationship.

When you create a prototype, you externalize a possible solution.

When you explain a problem to a friend, you externalize a line of reasoning.

When you rehearse a movement, you externalize a sequence through your body.

When you hum a melody, you externalize a feeling or idea that may not yet have words.

Researchers often describe part of this process as cognitive offloading: using an external resource to reduce the mental demands of a task. Writing down a phone number, drawing a diagram, or recording an appointment means you do not have to hold every detail in working memory at once.

The research on cognitive offloading shows that external tools can improve performance, especially when a task requires us to keep several pieces of information active at the same time. Risko and Gilbert’s review of the field describes how people use external representations to alter the information-processing demands of a task (Risko and Gilbert, “Cognitive Offloading”). Their review is a useful reminder that thought does not occur only inside the head; it often depends on the interaction between a person, an artifact, and an environment.

But “offloading” can make the process sound more passive than it needs to be. We are not simply removing information from the mind and placing it somewhere else. The most valuable forms of externalization create something we can think with.

There is a difference between storing a thought and developing one.

A note that says “important” may preserve a reminder, but it does not necessarily help you understand the idea. A screenshot may save an image, but it does not necessarily tell you why the image mattered. A voice memo may capture a feeling, but you may still need to listen again, name the pattern, and decide what it means.

The external object is not the end of thinking. It is an invitation to continue thinking.

This distinction also matters because externalization has trade-offs. Studies of memory offloading have found that relying on an external store can improve access to information while sometimes reducing the effort people invest in remembering it internally. Kelly and Risko’s research, for example, found evidence that increased reliance on an external store can compromise memory when the store is not available (Kelly and Risko, “Revisiting the Influence of Offloading Memory on Free Recall”).

The implication is not that we should stop using notebooks, calendars, diagrams, or digital tools. It is that we should pay attention to what the tool is helping us do.

Are we using the representation to avoid thinking, or to make thinking possible?

Are we collecting material, or are we developing it?

Are we creating a record that will help us act, or merely building a larger archive of things we once found interesting?

Externalization is powerful when it creates a feedback loop.

We put something out into the world. We look at it. We respond to it. We change it. Then we try again.

That loop is the beginning of learning.

Writing: the form I know best

Writing is my most familiar form of externalization because it is the medium through which I have spent much of my life teaching and thinking.

I began Learning to Learn Well in 2022, but my relationship with notebooks goes back much further. I have used them to record ideas from books, plan lessons, process difficult experiences, capture possible projects, and work through questions that were too large to answer immediately.

This is why a first draft often contains ideas that I did not consciously plan to include. The act of writing forces me to choose words. Choosing words forces me to notice distinctions. Distinctions reveal relationships. Relationships expose gaps.

Sometimes I begin with a sentence that sounds reasonable and end by realizing that it is too broad. Sometimes I begin with a vague discomfort and discover that it is actually a useful question. Sometimes I think I am writing about a book and realize I am really writing about a decision in my own life.

The page is changing the conditions under which thought can happen.

There is research behind part of this intuition. A meta-analysis of 48 school-based writing-to-learn programs found that writing had a small positive effect on conventional academic achievement (Bangert-Drowns, Hurley, and Wilkinson, “The Effects of School-Based Writing-to-Learn Interventions on Academic Achievement”). The effects were stronger when students received metacognitive prompts and when the writing occurred over a longer period, while longer assignments were not automatically better.

The value of writing does not come simply from producing more words. Writing helps when it makes the learner explain, question, connect, monitor, or apply something.

A page of copied notes may be longer than a paragraph of original thinking, but the paragraph may be doing more intellectual work.

This is also why I have become cautious about treating journaling as a daily streak or a personality type. You do not need to write three perfect pages every morning, an expensive notebook, or turn every experience into a profound reflection.

You need a form that helps you notice what is happening and gives you something to respond to.

Sometimes that may be a long entry. Sometimes it may be five words in the margin.

Writing by hand and the value of friction

I also continue to write by hand because the slower pace changes my relationship with the idea.

When I type, I can produce language quickly. That is useful when I am drafting an article, developing a lesson, or working with a large collection of notes. But speed can also allow me to move past an idea before I have really encountered it.

Handwriting creates a small amount of friction. I cannot record every sentence exactly as it appears. I have to select. I have to shorten. I have to decide what seems worth keeping.

Mueller and Oppenheimer’s well-known study compared students taking lecture notes by hand with students taking notes on a laptop. In their experiments, students who wrote by hand performed better on conceptual questions, and the researchers proposed that laptop note-taking encouraged more verbatim transcription. (Mueller and Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard”)

The study should not be turned into a simplistic rule that handwriting is always superior. Later discussion and replication have complicated the original conclusions, and the effect depends on how people use the tools. The more useful lesson is that the act of taking notes can shape the kind of attention we give to information.

If a tool encourages us to copy without processing, it may create the feeling of learning without the work of learning. If it helps us select, explain, connect, and revisit, it can become part of a productive thinking system.

This is why my own notebook often comes before the computer and before AI.

I want the first reaction to exist before a polished summary arrives. I want to know what I noticed before another system tells me what is important. I want to preserve the rough version so that later refinement has something personal and specific to work on.

AI can help me question a developing idea, identify gaps, compare possibilities, or suggest ways to organize an article. But if I ask it to generate the thinking before I have encountered the material myself, I may receive a polished answer without knowing whether it represents my understanding.

The notebook is upstream.

The AI system is downstream.

That order protects the learner’s agency.

What You Get Beyond This Point

The rest of this essay explores how externalization helps us think, learn, and improve—whether or not we enjoy writing.

You’ll discover how:

• Speaking can reveal gaps in our understanding

• Painting and drawing can make relationships visible

• Engineering and design can turn imagined ideas into testable forms

• Dancing and movement can help us think through the body

• Singing and music can give ideas rhythm, memory, and emotional form

• Prototyping can turn vague possibilities into something we can revise

• The CARE method helps move ideas from Clarify to Articulate, Refine, and Execute

• Other techniques—including voice notes, mind maps, lists, diagrams, conversation, and AI-assisted refinement—can help you discover the form your thinking needs

If you want to explore how externalization can help you turn private thoughts into clearer ideas and meaningful action, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Read more

What is one part of your own learning or working process that you might move back to paper before bringing it to AI?

and I had a conversation in Chat about feeling overwhelmed by the amount of information available today, and how artificial intelligence has intensified that feeling.

There is always more to read, watch, summarize, compare, and respond to. AI can help us process some of it, but it can also create even more possibilities. Before long, we may find ourselves asking a machine what we think before we have taken the time to think for ourselves.

I have also noticed something interesting. The more digital our lives become, the more some people seem to be returning to analog habits. We read physical books, write in notebooks, underline passages, and make handwritten lists.

Online, we are constantly analyzing the future of artificial intelligence. In person, we are usually talking about work, food, school, family, or whatever happened that day.

Still, the question matters: Why not return to analog thinking before turning to AI?

The problem is not simply AI

AI did not invent passive thinking. It simply makes passive thinking easier to produce.

We could already copy ideas from books, repeat someone else’s language, search for ready-made answers, or skim information without understanding it. AI has made those behaviors faster and more polished.

If we repeatedly outsource the first act of thinking, the forming of questions, making of connections, explaining of ideas, and deciding what matters, those abilities may become less practiced. Like any skill, they need regular use.

This is one reason analog tools remain valuable. A notebook does not instantly produce a polished answer. A physical book does not summarize itself. A handwritten page may be messy, incomplete, and difficult to organize.

When I write by hand, I cannot generate ten perfectly worded alternatives in a few seconds. I have to stay with one idea for a little longer. I have to decide what deserves to be written down. I have to encounter my own uncertainty instead of immediately covering it with fluent language.

That process can feel slower, but it is often where the thinking begins.

Analog first does not mean analog only

I am not arguing that we should abandon digital tools or pretend that AI is not useful. In fact, I think AI can amplify our thinking in remarkable ways when we bring it something of our own first.

The important question is not whether we use AI. It is where AI enters the process.

If I ask AI to generate an article before I have developed an idea, its starting point can easily become mine. I may accept its structure, language, assumptions, and examples simply because they appear quickly and sound reasonable.

But if I first write down my own observations, questions, examples, and possible arguments, the conversation changes.

Now I have something to examine.

I can ask AI:

• What assumptions am I making?

• What is missing from this argument?

• What would someone who disagrees say?

• Which claims need evidence?

• What connections can you see between these ideas?

• Can you ask me questions without rewriting my work?

• What would be a practical way to test this?

Those questions position AI as a thinking partner rather than an automatic author.

The machine is no longer deciding where the thinking begins. It is responding to a record of human attention.

A simple analog-first workflow

The process does not need to be complicated.

1. Begin with a physical book, a printed article, a lesson idea, a problem, or an experience. Before searching for an explanation or asking AI for a summary, write down your first reactions.

• What surprised you?

• What confused you?

• What connections came to mind?

• What examples from your own life or work relate to this?

• What might you want to do with the idea?

These notes do not need to be organized. They are not supposed to look intelligent. They are evidence of your first encounter with the material.

2. Next, return to the strongest ideas and explain them in your own words. This is where a quick reaction becomes something more useful. Add context. Give an example. Connect the idea to something you already know. Explain why it matters. I wrote about this in The Art of Elaboration.

   If you cannot explain an idea without looking back at the source, you may recognize it, but you probably do not understand it deeply yet.

3. Only then should you bring the developed material into a digital space or an AI conversation. AI can help you compare ideas, find gaps, challenge assumptions, reorganize notes, or suggest possible directions. You still have to decide what to accept, reject, adapt, or verify.

4. Finally, give the thinking somewhere to go. Turn it into an article, lesson, decision, experiment, conversation, product, or next step.

Thinking becomes more valuable when it leaves the notebook and enters the world.

This framework is what I call The CARE Note-taking Method which goes into much further depth in my Starter Kit you can download here. Or become a paid subscriber and download the Starter Kit as a perk!

Why this matters for teachers

This workflow is especially important in education.

1. Students should not begin every assignment by asking AI to produce a polished response. They need opportunities to encounter a text or problem, form their own questions, articulate their understanding, and make their thinking visible.

2. A teacher might ask students to begin with a handwritten “My Thinking First” page. Students could record observations, predictions, questions, uncertainties, and possible connections before using any outside assistance.

3. After that, they could develop one or two ideas in their own words. AI might then help them identify a counterargument, test the strength of their reasoning, or suggest questions for further investigation.

4. The final work would still belong to the student because the student’s thinking existed before the tool entered the process.

This is the basic logic behind the CARE method: Clarify, Articulate, Refine, Execute.

The notebook helps us clarify what we are trying to understand or create. Writing in our own words helps us articulate our thinking. AI and other tools can support refinement. Then we execute by creating something meaningful and carrying the learning forward.

AI gives us access to more information. A thinking process teaches us what to do with it.

The point is not to choose sides

We do not have to choose between analog and digital, books and AI, handwriting and productivity tools.

The stronger approach may be to give each one an appropriate place.

Use analog tools to slow down, notice, capture, and begin. Use digital tools to preserve, connect, retrieve, and develop. Use AI to question, challenge, compare, and expand—but do not let it become the place where your thinking starts or ends.

For me, the most useful sequence is simple:

Think first.

Write first.

Then invite AI into the conversation.

The goal is not to protect every thought from technology. The goal is to make sure that technology is working with our thinking rather than quietly replacing it.

What is one part of your own learning or working process that you might move back to paper before bringing it to AI?

Can a book continue teaching you even when you are not reading it?

When I look around my workspace, my books are not neatly displayed in the background as decoration. They are stacked beside my laptop, spread across my desk, crowded near the window, and piled on the nightstand across from where I work.

Some are sitting upright. Some are leaning against each other. Some stacks look reasonably intentional. Others look as though I couldn’t decide where the books were supposed to go.

I still do not have a proper bookshelf after moving back to the United States from abroad. I could probably solve that problem fairly easily. Bookshelves are not like buying a house!

But the truth is that I kind of like having my books scattered around me.

The mismatched stacks are symbolic of the way ideas actually develop.

Ideas do not always arrive in a perfectly organized sequence. They overlap, collide, interrupt one another, disappear for a while, and then return when we are working on something completely different. Some ideas need to be organized. While we need much more time to digest others.

A bookshelf sometimes communicates that the ideas have been archived.

A stack on the desk says that the conversation is still happening.

Over the years, I have come to think of my books as my buddies. The best books do not stop influencing us when we close them and put them back on our bookshelves. Their physical presence can reactivate memories, ideas, questions, and possibilities. Even when we are not studying our notes or turning through the pages, seeing the title or cover can spark something that has been sitting quietly in our minds.

1. Let books remain visible

The atmosphere where we work matters.

I want my office to feel warm, productive, calming, and conducive to generating ideas. For me, books help create that atmosphere.

I do not only see objects when I look around the room. I see past conversations, questions I have explored, lessons I have taught, and projects I might still create.

There are books beside my computer that I read years ago. There are others I have recently finished. A few are current reads, and several are waiting for me to begin.

Because they are visible, they remain part of my mental environment.

That visibility matters more than I once realized. A book sitting beside me can remind me of an idea before I consciously decide to retrieve it. I may glance at a title while working on a newsletter, curriculum project, lesson, or business idea, and suddenly remember something the author explained.

I might not recall the exact sentence. I might not remember which chapter it came from. But the general idea returns, and I can decide whether it is worth opening the book again, looking through my notes, or connecting it to what I am currently doing.

This is different from storing every book in a bookshelf (you can still see them, but they seem more hidden) and assuming I will somehow remember that it exists when the perfect situation arises.

Memory rarely behaves with the competence we want it to.

Keeping certain books visible gives them a chance to interrupt me.

Sometimes that interruption becomes the beginning of a new connection.

2. Keep old favorites close enough to restart the conversation

Several books in my workspace feel less like finished reading experiences and more like long-term companions.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren is one of them. I first read it in 2019, but many of its ideas still influence how I approach reading today.

One of the central ideas that stayed with me was the distinction between different levels of reading. The level I found especially fascinating was syntopical reading, which involves reading across several books on a related subject and placing their ideas into conversation with one another.

I have always liked taking that idea even further.

I enjoy connecting ideas not only across books about the same subject, but also across books that initially appear to have little to do with one another. A book about education might connect with one about creativity. A book about writing might help clarify a business problem. A biography might reveal something useful about deliberate practice, leadership, or finding a personal voice.

When I look at How to Read a Book, I remember that active reading is not simply about completing pages. It is about asking questions, examining ideas, and building relationships among what we encounter.

That book is now due for a proper reread. I have skimmed parts of it over the years, but I have never gone back through it completely. I also take notes differently now, so rereading it would not mean repeating the same experience. It would mean meeting the book again with seven more years of teaching, writing, and learning behind me.

How to Take Smart Notes has a similar effect. I believe I first read it around 2021. Seeing it beside me reminds me that notes should not merely record what somebody else said. They should help ideas develop, connect, and eventually support original work.

More recently, Teaching the Anti-Essay has become another important companion because it connects so closely with my thinking about student voice, authentic writing, and the limitations of formulaic assignments.

These books are not simply references. They are reminders of ongoing questions.

They keep asking me:

• What does it mean to read actively?

• How do ideas become connected knowledge?

• How should students learn to write?

• What makes learning visible without making it mechanical?

A good book can continue asking better questions long after you have forgotten many of its answers.

3. Allow a book to remind you of more than its content

Sometimes a book brings back an idea.

Other times, it brings back a season of your life.

Last winter was my first winter back in the United States after living for years in a tropical country. I had grown accustomed to warm weather throughout the year, so returning to a place with four distinct seasons was an adjustment.

The sun was rising at around eight in the morning and setting not long after four in the afternoon. The days felt short, cold, cloudy, and frequently wet.

Honestly, it was depressing.

I began connecting that idea to creativity and life more generally.

There are days when inspiration feels absent. There are seasons when our work seems to slow down, uncertainty grows, or everything feels heavier than usual. But creativity may still be present beneath the surface.

People are still around us.

Ideas are still available.

There are still things worth noticing, making, writing, teaching, and sharing.

When I saw that book sitting by the window, I did not need to reread the entire thing to regain that idea. The physical book became a reminder.

It reminded me not only of something I had learned, but also of the way I wanted to respond to a difficult season.

That is part of what makes books feel like buddies to me. The best ones accompany us through different parts of our lives, and their meaning changes as our circumstances change.

4. Keep your current reading focused

The books that I am currently reading usually stay directly on my desk.

That is deliberate.

I come into my office every day, so keeping the books in front of me reminds me to return to them. Sometimes I also bring them downstairs to the dining room table. They move around the house with me depending on where I am reading or working.

At this point, I generally try to focus on only two books at a time.

I used to read far more books simultaneously. Starting eight books can feel exciting because you are constantly encountering something new. But it also becomes incredibly easy to skim across the surface without diving deeply into any of them.

Usually, they offer something different. I might have one book that is directly related to education, writing, or my current work, and another that stretches me in a different direction.

I also tend to keep one upcoming book right on my desk next to my laptop.

That anticipated read gives me something to look forward to. It does not make me rush through my current book. In some ways, it does the opposite. It reminds me that reading is an ongoing part of my life and that there will always be another question waiting.

I had not really thought about this as a system before. And I still don’t. It could change because there’s no carefully designed spreadsheet or book-rotation algorithm overseeing the process. That would spoil the fun!

But there is a pattern:

• two current books;

• a few influential books I like seeing regularly;

• and one or two books waiting nearby because they connect with where my interests are heading.

Sometimes our most useful systems are the ones we discover we are already following.

5. Treat unread books as potential, not guilt

The unread books around my workspace do something different from the books I have already read.

I don’t think “unfinished curiosity” quite captures it. An unread book is not necessarily an incomplete responsibility. And I don’t owe every book I own a cover-to-cover reading experience.

Instead, the book represents something that might be discovered, questioned, adapted, criticized, tested, or eventually turned into something tangible.

The unread book currently creating the most curiosity for me is Thinking on Paper by V.A. Howard and J.H. Barton.

It is sitting directly on my desk, and it keeps egging me on.

I am especially interested in it because of the work I am currently doing around note-taking, writing, and the CARE Teaching Method. From skimming through the book, I can see that it approaches writing largely through an academic lens.

That makes me curious, but it also makes me slightly skeptical.

and I recently discussed how the traditional essay continues to be treated as a fundamental learning tool, even though much of real writing does not follow the predictable structure students are often taught.

As students move through high school and into university, they are frequently trained to write according to formulas: introduction, three body paragraphs, conclusion, quote, explanation, restatement, and so on.

The formula can provide useful support at an early stage. But eventually, writers need to develop a natural voice, make structural decisions, follow the needs of an idea, and communicate in a way that feels alive rather than assembled from instructional parts.

I am curious about what Thinking on Paper will offer, but I am also interested in what I may want to challenge.

That is another way an unread book can be valuable.

6. Recognize what physical books can do that digital books cannot

I read ebooks and listen to audiobooks, and both formats have obvious advantages.

They are portable. They are convenient. An audiobook allows me to learn while walking, driving, exercising, or doing something else with my hands.

But they do not affect my physical environment in the same way. And they are typically used when moving about which usually makes it harder to follow The Care Note-taking Method, but not impossible.

An ebook cannot sit on my desk as an individual, visible reminder. A Kindle can sit there, but I have to turn it on, open the library, and look through the titles before any particular book reappears.

The same is true of audiobooks. Unless I open the app or deliberately recall the title, the book remains invisible.

A physical book has a cover, size, texture, location, and presence.

I can see it with my own two eyeballs.

I can pick it up, flip through the pages, notice a section I marked, or move it to a more prominent place when it becomes relevant again.

Then there is also the smell.

Before moving back to the United States, I had around 450 books in my office. The room smelled like books, and I loved that. The smell became part of the atmosphere of reading, thinking, and creating.

7. Spend more time outside the book than inside it

There is an important caution to all of this.

Being surrounded by books can create the illusion of learning without actual engagement.

We can buy the book, display the book, highlight the book, finish the book, and place it on a shelf without allowing anything from it to change what we do.

I know this partly because I have struggled with it myself.

For years, I gathered knowledge from books, graduate study, teaching, note-taking, and personal development. I learned a great deal, but I did not always have a reliable process for turning that knowledge into action.

That gap eventually became one of the reasons I developed the CARE method. It was my attempt to synthesize what I had learned about reading, writing, teaching, reflection, feedback, and execution.

But the larger idea is much simpler than any formal method.

Information is not yet understanding, and finishing a source is not the same as finishing the learning.

The real result is what the experience changes in what we notice, question, explain, connect, decide, write, build, or practice.

A book should not become a place where we hide from life.

It should help us return to life with better questions, stronger ideas, and something worth trying.

In that sense, I sometimes think we should spend more time outside the book than inside it.

1. Read the idea.

2. Close the book.

3. Write about it.

4. Explain it to somebody.

5. Try it in your classroom.

6. Test it in your work.

7. Create something.

8. Notice what happens.

9. Return to the book when experience gives you a better question.

10. When you do have more questions, you can then discover deeper answers.

There is something almost contradictory about using books as reminders to stop reading, but that may be one of the most valuable roles they can play.

The books around me remind me that learning is not meant to remain trapped inside them.

Create a small circle of book buddies

You do not need 450 books or stacks covering every available surface to create this kind of environment.

Start with three:

One book you have already read and loved.

• Place it somewhere visible. Let it remind you of an idea you do not want to lose.

One book you are currently reading.

• Keep it close enough that returning to it requires almost no effort.

One unread book that represents a question you are ready to explore.

• Do not treat it as an obligation. Let it create anticipation.

Then pay attention to what happens when you see them.

Which idea returns?

Which question appears?

Which book makes you want to reopen it?

Which one reminds you of something you need to practice rather than merely remember?

Which book in your home or workspace is still quietly asking something of you, and what might happen if you answered it?

Writing is how reading becomes thinking.

In February 2020, I published a YouTube video called What Is Marginalia & Why You Should Use It. At the time, I had recently discovered the word marginalia through an internet search and realized the Bookstagram community on Instagram wasn’t really talking about it.

I remember thinking that it sounded like the perfect topic for a video.

I had already been writing in the margins of my books for years. I underlined sentences, wrote questions, added reactions, and occasionally responded to something the author had said, like having a conversation with them. But I had not really heard the practice described as marginalia before.

So I made a video about it.

When I recently rewatched that video, I was surprised by how much of my old thinking still resembles what I do today. My perspective on marginalia has changed, but it has not been abandoned.

It has expanded.

The practice of writing in the margins eventually became larger: underlining what catches my attention, writing my first thoughts in a notebook, developing those thoughts in my own words, refining them digitally, and eventually using them to write, teach, decide, experiment, or create something.

But rewatching the video also helped me notice an important weakness in my old approach.

Many of my notes were trapped inside the books.

I had marked interesting ideas, but I rarely returned to them. The books contained evidence that I had once noticed something important, but they did not necessarily help me remember what I had noticed—or what I intended to do with it.

What marginalia gets right

Marginalia gets one very important thing right: reading should be active.

Even when reading fiction, we are not simply receiving words. We are making judgments, noticing patterns, imagining possibilities, questioning characters, connecting events, and interpreting meaning.

We might ask:

• Why did the character make that decision?

• What is this scene revealing?

• What does this idea remind me of?

• Do I agree with the author?

• Where might this idea apply in my own life?

• What am I supposed to notice here?

Writing in the margins makes some of that thinking visible.

A line in a book becomes more than a line in a book. It becomes a place where your mind met the author’s mind.

That meeting might produce a question, an objection, a connection, or a personal insight. The writing does not need to be polished. It might be a single word, a confused reaction, or an arrow pointing from one idea to another.

Underlining can help us slow down. A question in the margin can help us pay attention. A short reaction can remind us that we were not simply moving our eyes across the page. We were thinking.

Sometimes you underline a sentence because it feels important. Then, a few weeks later, you see the same sentence again and recognize it immediately. It feels familiar, so you assume you understand it.

If you close the book, can you explain the idea? Can you reconstruct it in your own words? Can you give an example? Can you connect it to something else? Can you identify where it might be useful or where it might fail?

Research on retrieval practice makes a similar point. In one influential study, Jeffrey Karpicke and Janell Blunt found that practicing retrieval produced greater gains in meaningful learning than studying through concept mapping alone. The important part was not simply encountering information again. It was trying to reconstruct it from memory. Karpicke and Blunt, “Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping”

This is one reason I now try to write about an idea after I have closed the book.

The attempt to remember forces me to discover what I actually understood.

What changed in my reading practice

I still underline.

I still mark sentences that catch my attention.

But now, I prefer to write my first thoughts in a physical notebook.

The notebook gives me room to slow down and think without worrying about organizing everything perfectly. I can write a rough reaction, a question, a connection, or an unfinished thought.

I might write:

This reminds me of the difference between collecting information and developing judgment.

Or:

I agree with the author, but this probably works only when the learner already has enough background knowledge.

Or:

Could this become a classroom activity?

The note is not meant to be a summary of the page. It is meant to be my response to the page.

This distinction matters.

I am not trying to reproduce the author’s language unless I want to preserve an exact quotation. I am trying to reconstruct the idea in language that belongs to me.

That process can feel slower, but it is also where the learning begins to deepen.

Research on self-explanation supports this practice. In their study of how students learn from worked examples, Michelene Chi and her colleagues found that stronger learners generated explanations that expanded and refined their understanding of the examples. They did not merely observe the solution. They explained why it worked and when it might apply. Chi et al., “Self-Explanations: How Students Study and Use Examples in Learning to Solve Problems”

Writing in your own words is a form of self-explanation.

It requires you to select what matters, retrieve what you remember, clarify what you mean, and notice where your understanding is incomplete.

There is also some evidence that writing by hand can support deeper processing, although the research should not be turned into a simplistic rule that handwriting is always superior to typing. In a well-known study, students who took notes longhand performed better on conceptual questions than students who took notes on laptops. The researchers connected this partly to the tendency of laptop users to transcribe information rather than process and reframe it. Mueller and Oppenheimer, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard”

I am not attempting to capture everything.

I am trying to think with what I have read.

The notebook is not the final destination

The physical notebook is where the idea begins, but it is not where the process ends.

After I have written my first thoughts, I transfer selected ideas into my digital second brain. This might be a Google Doc, a PDF, or a ChatGPT Project containing my own developed notes and source material.

The important word is selected.

I do not transfer every sentence. I do not try to preserve every highlight. I choose the ideas that seem worth developing.

This is another lesson I have learned over time: not every interesting idea deserves to become a project.

If I try to act on everything I read, I will quickly become overwhelmed. Reading can become another form of productivity theater—collecting ideas, saving articles, highlighting books, and creating lists of things I should eventually do.

The goal is not to turn every note into an action.

The goal is to identify which ideas deserve further attention.

In my digital notes, I can expand an idea, connect it to previous thinking, compare it with another source, identify gaps, and ask better questions.

This is where a highlighted sentence becomes a developed note.

It is also where the idea might become an Action Note: a developed thought that points toward something I could write, teach, test, decide, practice, or create.

Why one framework can help

For several years, I tried to absorb too many frameworks.

I read about different approaches to learning, productivity, note-taking, creativity, decision-making, and personal development. Many of them were useful. Some changed the way I thought for a while.

But I often moved on before one framework became part of my natural way of working.

Eventually, I realized that constantly searching for a better framework can become a form of avoidance. You keep learning about systems instead of committing to a system and allowing it to shape your behavior.

I still believe it is useful to experiment with different approaches. You need to explore before you know what works for you.

But at some point, it helps to narrow down.

Find one framework that gives you a reliable way to approach your work. Use it repeatedly. Let it become a familiar mental pathway.

You can continue reading about other methods without abandoning your primary one.

For me, that framework became CARE:

• Clarify

• Articulate

• Refine

• Execute

The CARE Method did not suddenly appear in 2026.

It grew out of years of trying to make reading more active, writing more personal, and learning more useful. When I rewatched my old marginalia video, I realized that my 2020 self was already practicing the beginnings of CARE.

The framework simply gave those instincts a clearer structure.

Marginalia through the CARE sequence

1. Clarify: What am I trying to understand?

Clarifying is more than asking, “What is this book about?”

That question may be useful, but it is too general to guide much action.

A better question is:

What am I trying to understand, solve, question, notice, or create—and why does it matter to me now?

The same book can produce different learning depending on the reader’s purpose.

A teacher might read a book about motivation because students are disengaged. A student might read it because they are struggling to begin their work. A writer might read it because they are trying to understand how people change.

The words on the page are the same, but the questions are different.

Clarification connects the material to your actual life.

Before reading, or even before returning to your notes, try writing:

• What situation in my life connects to this idea?

• What problem am I trying to understand?

• What might I want to change?

• What would make this reading useful?

You do not need to know the final answer. You simply need enough direction to notice what matters.

2. Articulate: Can I explain it in my own words?

This is where writing becomes central.

After underlining an important passage, close the book and try to explain the idea from memory.

Do not look back immediately.

Write what you remember. Explain what you think the author is saying. Then compare your explanation with the original passage.

You may discover that you remembered only part of the idea. You may realize that you misunderstood it. You may notice that your version is actually clearer than the original sentence—or that you still need more work.

All of those outcomes are useful.

Articulation is not simply paraphrasing. It is an attempt to understand the idea well enough to place it inside your larger mental landscape.

Ask:

• What does this idea mean in ordinary language?

• What example would make it easier to understand?

• What does this idea connect to?

• What would I say if I had to explain it to a student or colleague?

• Where does this idea fit into the bigger picture?

This is the difference between looking at one tree and understanding how the tree fits into the forest.

3. Refine: Can I test and improve the idea?

An idea does not become stronger merely because you have rewritten it.

You also need to examine it.

Refinement might involve adding an example, finding a contradiction, comparing the idea with another source, or identifying an assumption.

You might ask:

• When does this idea work?

• When might it fail?

• What is the author assuming?

• Do I have evidence for this?

• What would someone who disagrees say?

• How does this connect to something I already know?

• Could I test this in a small way?

This is also where digital tools and AI can become useful in my own workflow.

I do not want AI to generate my first response to a book. I want my initial thinking to exist before I ask for assistance.

But once I have developed my own notes, I can use AI as a thinking partner. I can ask it to identify gaps, propose counterarguments, compare two ideas, or help me organize a developing project.

The purpose is not to outsource judgment.

The purpose is to create useful friction.

Sometimes the most valuable response is not a polished answer. It is a question that shows me where my reasoning is incomplete.

4. Execute: What will this idea become?

Eventually, an idea needs a destination.

That does not always mean a dramatic life transformation.

Execution might mean:

• writing a paragraph;

• changing the way you teach a lesson;

• having a conversation;

• testing a small habit;

• making a decision;

• creating a product;

• asking a better question;

• changing your mind;

• or deciding not to pursue the idea further.

Execution does not mean acting on every idea. Sometimes the action is recognizing that an idea is interesting but it’s better to pursue a different direction.

The deeper question is:

What will I write, teach, decide, test, practice, or change because of this?

And after you take action, the process does not necessarily end.

You might need time to reflect.

What happened? What did I expect? What surprised me? What would I change next time?

That reflection may send you back to refinement. CARE is not a perfectly straight line. It is a repeatable cycle.

You clarify what matters, articulate your current understanding, refine it through questions and experience, execute in the world, and then learn from what happened.

A seven-step reading-to-action practice

Here is a simple version of the process you can try with your next book.

Read more

Our conversation centered on Wes’s Interiors/Worldbuilding assignment, which asks students to approach writing more like interior designers than like students filling in a template.

Why move beyond the traditional essay?

Matt: What led you to question formulaic essay instruction?

Wes: Traditional structures can give students support, but they can also become restrictive when students receive the topic, thesis, number of paragraphs, evidence requirements, and expected conclusion before they have discovered what they actually want to say.

Wes described the kind of writing he wants students to produce as “far more vigorous, robust, personal, intimate, vulnerable, and interesting.”

That distinction is important. The problem is not that students need structure. They do. The problem is when structure arrives before thinking and becomes the main thing students are trying to complete.

A student can learn how to produce a recognizable essay without ever learning how to develop an idea that feels genuinely theirs.

For me, this is one of the central questions teachers can consider when planning a unit:

Have I given students enough time to discover what they want to say before asking them to organize it?

What is the Interiors/Worldbuilding assignment?

Matt: How does the assignment work?

Wes asks students to think about writing as the design of a physical space. An interior designer decides what belongs in a room, what should be removed, what deserves attention, and how the different parts work together.

Wes asks students to make similar decisions on the page:

“Can you give me a look inside your mind? Can you show me how you think? Can you show me how you connect dots?”

The assignment begins with a simple activity. Students choose something small and familiar from their own world—a song, room, restaurant, object, meal, place, or routine—and write fifteen of their best possible sentences about it.

Wes models the activity by writing about Led Zeppelin’s “In the Evening.” He shows students how he connects the music to memories, images, metaphors, cultural references, and unexpected associations.

Then he asks students to do the same thing with something from their own lives.

The point is not for students to imitate Wes’s references. The point is for them to see that writing can begin with something they already know intimately.

A student may not think they have anything interesting to write about. But they may know a particular basketball court, video game, family meal, bus route, bedroom, or song better than anyone else in the room.

That knowledge can become the beginning of meaningful writing.

Give students actions instead of vague advice

Matt: What can design teach students about writing?

Wes pointed out that English teachers often tell students to “add color” or “develop” an idea. The problem is that this language may identify what is missing without giving students a clear next step.

As Wes put it:

“It doesn’t really give them an action item with which to engage and enact.”

The Interiors assignment gives students a more concrete vocabulary. They can think about:

• texture and layering

• contrast and juxtaposition

• focal points

• repetition and motifs

• atmosphere

• what belongs and what creates clutter

A detail such as “the rug was red” does not automatically make writing stronger. The student still needs to ask:

• Why does this detail matter?

• What does it reveal?

• Does it create contrast?

• Does it connect to a memory or larger idea?

• Does it contribute to the atmosphere?

• Could it become part of a repeated image or pattern?

This is more useful than simply telling students to add more description.

Students do not necessarily need more details. They need practice making decisions about details.

That idea can apply to analytical writing as well. A paragraph is not only a topic sentence, quotation, explanation, and concluding sentence. It can also have rhythm, movement, contrast, repetition, and emphasis.

The question becomes:

How can I arrange this writing so the reader experiences the idea rather than simply receives information about it?

Let students discover before they outline

Matt: What can this assignment reveal that a traditional essay prompt might not?

Wes said that the assignment can show students that “essay writing can be a delight.”

He also offered a line that stayed with me:

“Serendipity trumps an outline every time.”

I do not think this means outlines are useless. An outline can be valuable once a writer has discovered enough material to organize.

But sometimes students need to write their way toward an idea before they can structure it effectively.

The fifteen-sentence activity may help students discover:

• a connection they did not expect to make

• a sentence that sounds like them

• a new way to use punctuation

• a memory they had not considered important

• a pattern that could shape the entire piece

This is where writing becomes an experimental process rather than a performance of something the teacher has already decided.

Personal writing can also be analytical

Matt: Can personal writing be as rigorous as writing about a book?

Wes challenged the assumption that writing about literature is automatically analytical while personal writing is somehow less serious.

He pointed out that many essays about books become book reports. Students summarize the text, insert quotations, and repeat interpretations that have already been established by the teacher or class.

A personal essay can require just as much thinking. Students still have to make decisions about perspective, sequence, language, evidence, significance, and meaning.

Wes explained:

“The more personal the essay is, the more world building that student does.”

This connected with an assignment I have used after reading memoirs such as I Am Malala and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. Students studied how those writers shaped lived experiences and then used some of those techniques to write about a moment from their own lives.

The purpose was not simply to make the writing personal. It was to help students understand how experience becomes crafted nonfiction.

As Wes pointed out, much of what students write in English class is nonfiction about fiction. That means students also need opportunities to write nonfiction about the world they actually inhabit.

This does not mean abandoning literary analysis. It means expanding what analysis can look like.

A student could use a text as a starting point and then connect it to a place, memory, cultural experience, object, or question that they genuinely understand. The text becomes part of a larger world rather than the entire boundary of the assignment.

The student is the expert on their own world

Matt: How can teachers provide support without designing the entire world for students?

Wes offered one of the most important ideas from our conversation:

“You’re not the expert. I’m not the expert. I’m not the expert of their world.”

A student may know more about their family, culture, music, neighborhood, memories, or interests than the teacher does.

That does not make the teacher unnecessary. The teacher is still the expert in writing, diction, syntax, organization, revision, and audience.

But the student should remain the expert on the subject.

Wes compared the teacher to a record producer:

“I’m the record producer. They’re the talent. They’re the artists.”

That comparison gives teachers an important role without requiring them to control every decision. We can help students shape the work without taking ownership of it.

This also means that creative assignments need to be low-stakes. We cannot tell students to take risks and then punish them with a rigid rubric because their work does not resemble our preferred version of writing.

Before students attempt something unfamiliar, give them “ways of being.” Show them possible approaches:

• You could use humor.

• You could make an unexpected comparison.

• You could write through sensory details.

• You could use repetition.

• You could include cultural references.

• You could experiment with sentence length or punctuation.

• You could begin with a memory, image, question, or contradiction.

The goal is not to give students another formula. It is to give them enough possibilities to begin.

Where CARE fits

Near the end of the conversation, I introduced Wes to The CARE Teaching Method: Clarify, Articulate, Refine, and Execute.

CARE is not another required structure for the final essay. It is a flexible way to make the learning process visible.

Applied to the Interiors/Worldbuilding assignment, it could look like this:

• Clarify: What small part of my world do I want to explore? What do I want the reader to notice, feel, or understand?

• Articulate: What do I notice, remember, question, and connect? The fifteen-sentence activity belongs here.

• Refine: Which details deserve to remain? What should be removed, rearranged, repeated, or developed?

• Execute: What finished piece can I create from these decisions?

Wes connected this to independent learning:

That is an idea worth carrying into lesson planning. Independent learning does not begin only when students are sent away to complete homework. It begins when they start forming questions, making choices, exploring possibilities, and developing their own material.

A teacher could collect one small artifact from each stage:

1. rough notes or fifteen initial sentences

2. a selected idea with an explanation

3. a short revision or design decision

4. a finished piece and brief reflection

This gives teachers evidence of thinking without forcing every student to produce the same final structure.

One activity to try at the beginning of the year

Instead of beginning with a traditional icebreaker, Wes suggested giving students a creative, low-stakes writing experience.

Ask students to choose something small and familiar from their world. Then give them this prompt:

Write fifteen sentences that help another person experience this thing through your eyes, ears, memories, and associations.

Model the process first. Read your own example aloud. Explain how one detail led to another. Show students that the goal is not to sound impressive but to notice something specifically.

Then offer them several “ways of being”:

• humorous

• reflective

• sarcastic

• sensory

• analytical

• metaphorical

• personal

• culturally specific

Afterward, ask students to look back at their sentences and identify:

• the sentence that feels most like them

• the most unexpected connection

• one detail that creates atmosphere

• one detail that may not yet serve a purpose

• one idea they might develop further

Keep the activity low-stakes. Treat it as a workshop or experiment, not as a test of whether students are already good writers.

Final reflection

The main idea I took from this conversation is that students do not need less support. They need support that leaves room for discovery.

They need opportunities to notice, connect, select, arrange, revise, and create before every important decision has been made for them.

As Wes said near the end of our conversation:

“Whatever you give them, give them ways of being.”

That may be one of the most useful ideas to carry into the new school year.

Give students a clear purpose. Give them examples. Give them possible approaches. Give them room to make decisions. Then help them shape those decisions into something meaningful.

I’m grateful to Wes Phillipson for joining me for this first Learning to Learn Well video conversation. You can learn more about his book, *Teaching the Anti-Essay: 18 Creative Nonfiction Essay Prompts for the English Classroom, and I’ll tag Wes directly here in the post.

If you are planning lessons that help students make their own thinking visible before, during, and after the writing process, you can also explore the CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit.

CARE provides a flexible process for helping students clarify their purpose, articulate their initial thinking, refine their ideas, and execute meaningful work—without requiring every student to produce the same kind of final product.

What would your students still be able to explain if you took away the final answer?

We have all seen the limits of the traditional classroom conveyor belt. A student crams a list of historical dates or geographical terms into short-term memory, writes them down on a Friday exam, and forgets most of them by Monday morning.

Rote memorization has a place in establishing foundational knowledge. Students do need to learn vocabulary, dates, formulas, and basic facts. But memorization alone treats the mind as a storage bin rather than an active processor.

In a world where information—and increasingly, polished answers—can be generated almost instantly, the more important question is no longer simply what a learner can remember.

It is what they can do with what they know.

Can they explain it in their own words? Connect it to another idea? Question it? Use it to solve a problem, make a decision, or create something meaningful?

I realized the true scale of this shift during my time teaching seventh-grade humanities at Sampoerna Academy.

I wanted to move away from isolated textbook chapters and introduce a project that required students to combine different kinds of knowledge. So I asked my students to design an entirely new island from scratch.

The Blank Map Was Not Blank Learning

The assignment began with a blank page.

Students had to create an island, map its topography, identify its climate zones and natural resources, and imagine the civilization that would eventually develop there.

First, they became cartographers and geographers. They considered mountains, rivers, coastlines, harbors, fertile soil, and access to fresh water.

Then they shifted into the roles of historians and anthropologists. They had to write a cultural history explaining how their fictional society formed, adapted, governed itself, and traded with neighboring communities.

Finally, they had to present and defend their civilization in front of their peers.

The project was deliberately multi-layered. It demanded written creativity, visual communication, research, reasoning, collaboration, and public speaking.

It also made shallow understanding much more difficult to hide.

If a student placed a large mountain range in the middle of the island but later described a civilization that developed through easy travel across that same region, the contradiction became obvious.

If a student located the capital city far from a reliable water source, someone was likely to ask about it during the presentation.

If the written history did not align with the geography, the student had to revise one or both pieces.

The project became an active creative ecosystem. Each decision affected another decision.

To build a believable history, students had to understand how geography influences human migration, trade, conflict, settlement, and cultural development. They were not simply recalling information about human geography. They were using it to build something of their own.

That distinction matters.

What the Research Helps Us See

The island project worked because it brought several well-established learning principles together.

1. Students had to retrieve and reconstruct knowledge

Students could not simply reread a definition of human geography and copy it into their project. They had to retrieve what they understood about rivers, mountains, climate, resources, and settlement patterns, then reconstruct those ideas in a new fictional context.

Research on retrieval practice has consistently shown that recalling information strengthens learning more effectively than simply studying it again. Importantly, a meta-analytic review also found that testing can support transfer beyond the original learning situation. Karpicke and Roediger’s research on retrieval practice and Pan and Rickard’s meta-analysis of transfer both help explain why students often learn more by trying to produce an answer than by repeatedly looking at one.

The island project required students to use knowledge, not merely recognize it.

2. Students had to explain ideas in their own words

A student could not successfully write the history of an island civilization without explaining how physical features shaped human behavior.

A mountain range had to become more than a visual symbol. It had to become a reason for political division, cultural isolation, migration, or economic difficulty.

A river had to become more than a blue line on a map. It had to become a source of transportation, agriculture, conflict, or settlement.

This is the work of elaboration.

Students were continually asking:

• What does this feature mean?

• Why does it matter?

• What would happen because of it?

• How would people adapt?

• What other ideas does it connect to?

Research on self-explanation has shown that explaining relationships and reasoning—not merely repeating information—can improve understanding and problem-solving. Chi and colleagues’ research on self-explanation offers an important foundation for this kind of classroom practice.

The strongest learning did not happen when students copied information about geography.

It happened when they used geography to explain their own world.

3. Students had to plan, monitor, and evaluate their work

The assignment was too large to complete successfully in one sitting.

Students needed to plan what they would create, monitor whether their map and history still made sense together, and evaluate their work before presenting it.

This is metacognition in action.

The Education Endowment Foundation describes metacognitive and self-regulated learning strategies as approaches that help students plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning. Its evidence review identifies these strategies as high-impact when they are explicitly taught and embedded within normal subject learning. EEF guidance on metacognition and self-regulation is especially relevant here.

The students were not completing a separate lesson called “metacognition.” They were using metacognitive habits because the project required them to.

They had to ask:

• What am I trying to create?

• What have I completed?

• What no longer makes sense?

• What feedback should I act on?

• What needs to change before I present this?

4. Feedback happened during the work, not only after it

Instead of collecting one final project at the end, I divided the assignment into milestones.

Students submitted their maps first. Then they developed their cultural histories. Then they presented and defended their work.

This created a feedback loop.

The teacher could identify problems while there was still time to address them. Students could make changes before the final presentation. Peer review became part of the learning process rather than an optional activity after the real work was finished.

This aligns with the distinction made by Hattie and Timperley: useful feedback helps learners understand where they are going, how they are progressing, and what they should do next. Their review of the power of feedback helps explain why feedback is most powerful when it informs the next decision.

A comment on a final paper might tell a student what went wrong.

A check-in during the process gives the student a chance to do something about it.

5. Students had to synthesize knowledge through a meaningful project

Project-based learning is not automatically effective. A project can become a decorative craft activity if students are not required to think carefully, make decisions, revise their work, and connect the final product to meaningful knowledge.

But when it is designed well, project-based learning can create opportunities for students to apply knowledge across contexts.

A 2019 meta-analysis found positive effects of project-based learning on academic achievement compared with traditional instruction, although the design and implementation of the project mattered. The study by Chen and colleagues is a useful reminder that “project” is not enough by itself. The project has to be intellectually purposeful.

The island assignment was not simply an art project.

The map, history, and presentation had to depend on one another.

The Anatomy of a Multi-Layered Project

To move away from basic memorization, a project cannot be a creative activity added to the end of a unit.

It has to become the engine of the unit itself.

The island project relied on three operational pillars.

1. Iterative milestones instead of one final submission

Students submitted their geographic maps in the first week, their cultural histories in the second week, and their presentations in the third week.

This made the evolution of the work visible.

It also made it more difficult to rely on last-minute cramming or shortcuts.

The teacher could see where students began, how their ideas developed, and whether they used feedback to improve the final product.

2. Cross-disciplinary friction

The map and the written history had to interact.

A change in one domain could create a problem in another.

If students moved a mountain range, they might need to rethink migration patterns. If they changed the location of a river, they might need to revise the location of settlements or trade routes.

This friction was productive because it forced students to recognize that knowledge is connected.

The geography was not background decoration. It became a cause of historical and cultural development.

3. The defense of the work

Students had to present their civilization and answer questions about their choices.

This created a powerful form of accountability.

It is difficult to hide behind polished language when someone asks:

• Why did your civilization settle there?

• How did this mountain range affect trade?

• Where did the population get fresh water?

• Why did the government develop in that form?

• What would happen if one of your resources disappeared?

The verbal defense transformed passive knowledge into active competence.

Students were not simply submitting something for the teacher to read. They were demonstrating that they understood the choices embedded in their work.

From Project-Based Learning to an Agentic Workflow

I now think of this kind of learning as an agentic workflow.

The word “agentic” can sound unnecessarily technical, but the basic idea is simple: learners are not merely receiving information and following instructions. They are making meaningful decisions about what they are trying to understand, how they will develop their ideas, and what they will do with the result.

The CARE Teaching Method gives this process a simple structure:

Clarify

Students identify what they are trying to understand, solve, question, notice, or create.

Before they search for a finished answer—or open an AI tool—they record their purpose, current understanding, and uncertainty.

Articulate

Students explain what they currently understand in their own words.

This might be a rough paragraph, a diagram, a short oral explanation, a prediction, or a notebook entry.

The first explanation does not need to be polished.

It needs to be theirs.

Refine

Students connect, compare, question, test, and improve their ideas.

They might use peer feedback, teacher conferences, counterarguments, additional sources, or an approved AI thinking partner.

But the learner remains responsible for deciding what to accept, reject, adapt, or verify.

Execute

Students turn refined understanding into something visible and useful.

They might write an essay, deliver a presentation, solve a problem, create a model, design a lesson, make a recommendation, or carry out an experiment.

Execution is where learning leaves the worksheet and enters the world.

This is why I often say:

AI gives students access. CARE teaches them what to do with it.

AI did not create passive learning. It exposed it.

Students were already copying textbook language, collecting disconnected notes, searching for answers, and submitting first drafts before generative AI became widely available.

AI simply made it easier to produce the appearance of learning.

The solution is not necessarily to ban every tool. It is to redesign the learning process so that students have to show their thinking before, during, and after outside assistance.

UNESCO’s guidance on generative AI in education emphasizes the importance of a human-centered approach, including critical thinking, ethics, inclusion, and human agency. UNESCO’s guidance on generative AI in education and research supports the idea that students should not simply receive AI-generated answers. They need the knowledge and judgment to evaluate and use these tools responsibly.

The goal is not to pretend that AI is absent.

The goal is to make sure AI enters downstream from thinking rather than replacing the beginning of thinking.

The Practical Problem

The framework may make sense. But knowing what good learning looks like and designing a complete multi-layered assignment are two different things.

Teachers do not need another abstract explanation of why process matters.

They need something they can adapt.

That is why I want the paid version of Learning to Learn Well to focus on practical, high-utility resources rather than simply offering more essays about education.

Paid subscribers will receive access to the classroom-ready materials connected to this post, including:

• The complete 7th-grade Island Exploration Project Mission Brief

• A three-week project timeline

• Student milestone and planning sheets

• A process-and-execution rubric

• A “My Thinking First” worksheet

• A digital integration guide

• Reflection questions for students

• A policy-flexible AI thinking-partner protocol

The purpose is not to give teachers a rigid script.

It is to reduce the planning burden involved in turning a promising idea into a usable lesson.

Paid Subscriber Toolkit: The Island Exploration Project

Project Mission Brief

Read more

The Growth at a Glance

In just the last 30 days, Learning to Learn Well has grown from 125 subscribers to more than 530.

That means 405 people have decided to join this newsletter in a very short period of time.

Of course, seeing the number grow is encouraging. But when I look at it, I do not just see a statistic. I see more than 500 people who made a small decision to spend some of their limited time and attention here.

That means much more to me than the number itself.

What the Number Represents

I have been writing Learning to Learn Well since January 2022. For most of that time, I have continued writing, thinking about ideas that might help people learn, work, teach, and grow, and then trying to express those ideas as clearly and honestly as I can.

Sometimes I publish something I believe will be especially useful, only for it to disappear quietly into the internet.

Other times, I publish something without knowing whether it will connect with anyone, and it becomes one of the most widely read pieces I have written.

That unpredictability is part of the process.

Writing is a learning experience for me. Every newsletter teaches me something about ideas, communication, and the people on the other side of the screen.

The People Who Helped This Reach More Readers

A lot of this recent growth has happened because of all of you.

Without your restacks, shares, comments, likes, and conversations, these posts would not have reached many of the people who have subscribed over the past month.

I would still keep writing because writing is something I genuinely enjoy doing. But I would not have had the opportunity to connect with so many new readers without the support of this community.

That is why I especially want to thank from Slow AI, as well as the StackHunters and , for helping bring visibility to Learning to Learn Well through their restacks.

In particular, Dr. Sam shared my post about becoming self-educated in the age of AI you can read right here:

The central idea of that post was that knowledge develops through the act of articulating and connecting ideas yourself, and that AI has made this principle newly urgent because these tools can now do so much of that articulation for us.

You can read his Substack here: Dr. Sam Illingworth’s Slow AI

Dr. Sam also tagged fellow StackHunters ReBe, Jennifer Houle, and Kevin Guiney for additional visibility.

Without that support and the people who helped the post travel further, I probably would not have reached many of you who are now reading this.

The Readers Who Make This Newsletter Possible

I want to thank the people who have read every post carefully.

Thank you to those who have restacked an article or shared it with a friend. Thank you to those who have left thoughtful comments, sent me a private message, or told me how an idea connected with something you were already thinking about.

And thank you to those of you who read quietly without ever commenting.

I know that many people prefer to observe rather than participate publicly. You may not restack, comment, or send a message, but your presence still matters. You are still an important part of this community.

Learning to Learn Well is not something I simply publish into an empty space. It exists through the people who read, respond, share, and support it.

Why I Keep Writing

Whenever I sit down to write, I usually imagine one particular person reading.

It might be a teacher trying to help students think more deeply. It might be a learner trying to understand something more clearly. It might be a parent, professional, or curious person looking for a practical idea to try.

Writing for one person helps me focus on making the ideas useful.

If a post helps one person think differently, make a connection, or take a meaningful next step, then there is a good chance that other people will find value in it too.

That is what keeps me writing.

An Invitation to Keep the Conversation Going

If there is ever a post that has been especially useful to you, feel free to share or restack it.

If there is something you disagree with or even something you dislike, you are also welcome to send me a message. I know it can sometimes be difficult to offer critical feedback, but I genuinely want to know what you are thinking.

Your responses help me understand which ideas are useful, which ideas need more explanation, and where the conversation should go next.

I also want to express my appreciation to those of you who have become paid subscribers. Your support helps me continue developing resources for teachers, learners, and families.

Whether you are a free subscriber or a paid subscriber, your presence here matters to me.

Thank You for Being Here

For every 500 subscribers, I want to take a moment to recognize the people who make this newsletter possible.

So, thank you.

Thank you for reading, sharing, responding, supporting, and simply being here.

Let’s keep learning, thinking, sharing, and growing together.

Leave a comment

How many useful ideas are currently waiting for your attention?

Maybe you have saved dozens of articles, highlighted pages in books, collected podcast recommendations, and started more personal experiments than you can remember. You may have a list of habits you want to develop, projects you want to begin, and directions you want to explore.

Each idea may be valuable.

But there is a point at which collecting possibilities begins to cost you dramatic change in your life.

While you are reading one more book, researching one more strategy, or waiting for a clearer answer, the problem in front of you may remain unchanged. The project stays unfinished. The decision stays unresolved. The opportunity passes. Your attention becomes divided between everything you might do and nothing you have fully chosen to do.

The danger is not simply that you have too many ideas.

The danger is that you may spend years preparing to act without ever giving one direction enough time to become real.

The question is not:

“How can I apply everything I learn?”

The more urgent question is:

“What does my life actually need right now, and which idea deserves my commitment?”

Begin with the need, not the advice

It is easy to encounter an interesting idea and immediately start imagining how to apply it.

You read about someone’s morning routine and wonder whether you should wake up earlier. You learn about a productivity system and begin reorganizing your calendar. You hear how someone built a successful business and start imagining whether you should follow the same path.

But before asking how to apply an idea, you need to understand the problem you are actually trying to solve.

This is harder than it sounds because we often describe our problems in vague language.

We say we need more discipline when the task may be too large or unclear. We say we need better time management when we may have accepted too many responsibilities. We say we need more information when we might actually be avoiding a decision. We say we need more motivation when the next step has not been defined clearly enough to begin.

The quality of the solution depends partly on the accuracy of the diagnosis.

If you misunderstand the problem, even excellent advice can take you in the wrong direction.

A productivity system may help when your work is disorganized, but it will not necessarily help if you are exhausted. A motivational book may be encouraging, but it will not solve a project that has no clear purpose. More research may give you additional knowledge, but it may not help you decide what to do with the knowledge you already have.

So begin with a question you can actually answer:

What am I trying to understand, solve, change, or create?

You do not need to phrase the question perfectly. You only need to give your attention somewhere specific to go.

The right tool depends on the difficulty

Different problems require different kinds of learning.

If you do not understand an idea, you may need a clearer explanation, a concrete example, or a conversation with someone who can approach it from another angle.

If you understand an idea but cannot remember it later, you may need retrieval practice and spaced repetition.

If you remember the information but cannot use it in a new situation, you may need practice, feedback, and an opportunity to apply it.

If you have too many possible directions, you may not need another strategy at all.

You may need to narrow your choices.

We would not open a toolbox and use every tool simply because we owned it. We would first look at the problem and choose the tool that would help. Learning deserves the same kind of judgment.

This is one reason I have been developing The CARE Teaching Method. CARE is not meant to be another system that people apply mechanically to every situation. It is a way of thinking about what needs to happen next.

You begin by Clarifying the purpose, problem, or question. Then you Articulate what you currently understand in your own words. You Refine the idea through questions, connections, evidence, feedback, and deliberate judgment. Finally, you Execute by writing, creating, testing, teaching, deciding, or acting.

The stages are simple, but they prevent you from rushing directly from exposure to action without understanding what the action is supposed to accomplish.

Sometimes you need to clarify.

Sometimes you need to explain what you already think.

Sometimes you need to challenge your assumptions.

Sometimes you need to pause the preparation and produce something that others can respond to.

When experimentation becomes avoidance

Experimentation is not the problem.

Experimentation helps you discover what interests you. It allows you to test possibilities, gather experience, and notice what gives you energy. Without experimentation, I may never have developed The CARE Teaching Method.

The problem begins when experimentation continues indefinitely.

At the beginning of a project, keeping several possibilities open can be useful. But eventually, remaining open to every possibility can make it impossible to give any one direction enough attention to produce meaningful evidence.

You keep reading, researching, planning, and exploring. You develop one idea for a while, then move to another. You imagine several possible businesses, careers, projects, or audiences. Each possibility seems reasonable, so choosing one feels unnecessarily restrictive.

But if you never narrow your choices, you may remain stuck in a loop of continuous experimentation.

You are always preparing to begin, but never staying with one direction long enough to discover what it can become.

I experienced this while developing my own work. For years, I explored education, reading, note-taking, artificial intelligence, writing, productivity, and personal development. These interests were connected, but they were also broad enough to keep me moving in many directions.

At a certain point, I had to admit that I did not primarily need another idea.

I needed focus.

I had spent years looking for better-paying work that would allow me to combine my experience, interests, and abilities in a meaningful way. But if no employer was going to create that opportunity for me, I realized that I might need to create it myself.

That was not a dramatic moment of entrepreneurial confidence. I did not suddenly know how to build a successful business.

It was a practical realization.

If I continued waiting for the perfect job to recognize exactly what I wanted to do, I might remain waiting for a long time. If I wanted to create an opportunity, I needed to develop something that another person could understand, use, and eventually value enough to pay for.

That required me to stop presenting myself as someone interested in everything connected to learning.

I had to choose who I was trying to help.

Narrowing makes an idea visible

For a while, I was tempted to make Learning to Learn Well for everyone interested in learning.

That seemed accurate. Students could benefit from better learning methods. Adults could use support with reading and note-taking. Professionals could apply ideas to their work. Teachers could use the framework in their classrooms.

All of that may eventually be true.

But it was not a clear place to begin.

When you try to speak to everyone, your message can become difficult for anyone to recognize. A general description of your interests may be accurate, but it does not necessarily tell another person how you can help them.

The idea became clearer when I narrowed the audience toward teachers and educators.

That decision was connected to the experience I already had. I had spent many years teaching, writing curriculum, designing lessons, assessing student work, and watching students struggle to explain their thinking.

Artificial intelligence made one of those struggles more visible.

Students could now summarize, generate, rewrite, and submit polished responses without necessarily developing their own understanding. But the deeper problem existed before AI. Students had always been able to copy textbook language, collect disconnected notes, memorize information temporarily, and complete assignments without carrying much learning forward.

AI did not create passive learning.

It exposed it.

The CARE Teaching Method gave me a way to help teachers redesign the learning process so student thinking becomes visible before, during, and after AI use.

The niche of The CARE Teaching Method did not make the idea less valuable.

It made the idea understandable.

I could explain that CARE was for educators who wanted students to use AI without surrendering their own thinking. The audience became clearer. The problem became clearer. The product became clearer.

And once the idea became clear enough for other people to recognize, it became possible to test.

This is what narrowing can do for you.

It does not necessarily close the rest of your life. It gives one direction enough space to develop.

You do not need to choose forever

Many people resist narrowing because they believe a specific decision will permanently define them.

If you focus on teachers, does that mean you can never help adult learners? If you study writing, does that mean you cannot later explore business or psychology? If you commit to one project, does that mean you have to continue with it forever?

These are understandable concerns.

But choosing a starting point is not the same as choosing an eternal identity.

A narrow focus gives you a specific audience, a specific problem, and a specific context in which to gather evidence. It allows you to discover what people actually need instead of continuing to imagine what they might need.

The same principle applies to personal learning.

You do not need to decide which ideas will define the rest of your life. You need to decide which idea deserves your attention during the season you are currently living.

Someone beginning a business may need to learn about audience clarity before studying advanced productivity systems. Someone preparing for a difficult conversation may need to practice listening rather than read another book about communication. Someone who is exhausted may need rest and fewer commitments rather than another morning routine.

A good idea can still be the wrong idea for your present situation.

The question is not only:

“Is this valuable?”

It is also:

“Is this valuable for the problem I am actually facing?”

That second question is where judgment begins.

The cost of remaining in the fog

In my earlier reflection on Jim Collins’s What to Make of a Life, I kept returning to the image of fog.

Fog is an appropriate metaphor for many periods of life. You may know where you have been, but you cannot clearly see what comes next. You may have experience, education, responsibilities, and genuine interests, yet still feel uncertain about which direction deserves your commitment.

When you are in the fog, trying to make a perfect long-term decision can create even more pressure. Because you cannot see the whole path, you assume you should not move at all.

But waiting for perfect clarity has a cost.

The longer you refuse to choose a direction, the longer you remain dependent on possibilities that have never been tested. You may keep telling yourself that you are gathering information, when you are actually postponing the moment when reality might challenge your assumptions.

You do not need to see the entire path before taking the next step.

You need to take a step that gives you more information.

Instead of asking, “What should I do with my entire life?” ask:

“What is the smallest action I can take that will help me understand this direction better?”

That might mean writing one article, redesigning one lesson, testing one routine, speaking with someone who already does the work, creating a small product, applying for one opportunity, or finishing one project before starting another.

The action should be small enough to complete but meaningful enough to produce evidence.

If you need to know whether people understand your idea, explain it to a real person. If you need to know whether you enjoy a kind of work, do a small version of it. If you need to know whether a strategy works in your circumstances, test it in one clearly defined situation.

A small action is not insignificant when it helps you see more clearly.

Commitment is how you create evidence

You cannot learn what an idea can become if you never give it a stable form.

A writer cannot discover whether an article resonates if they never finish and publish it. A teacher cannot understand whether a new classroom routine is useful if they never try it with students. A business owner cannot know whether an offer is valuable if no one can clearly see what the offer is.

Commitment does not mean refusing to change.

It means staying with one direction long enough to learn something meaningful from it.

This is the difference between a thoughtful experiment and constant switching. A thoughtful experiment has a question, a time frame, and some evidence you are looking for. Constant switching simply follows the newest possibility before the previous one has had time to teach you anything.

You might say:

“I will test this approach for two weeks.”

“I will complete and publish this article.”

“I will speak with five teachers about this problem.”

“I will create the smallest useful version of this product.”

“I will finish this project before opening another one.”

These decisions do not need to control your future permanently. They simply give the present enough structure for learning to occur.

Without that structure, you may confuse motion with progress.

Application is not obedience

We sometimes treat learning as though every good idea must eventually become a habit.

We finish a book and immediately search for the action step. We listen to a lecture and ask what routine we should adopt. We read something meaningful and feel guilty if we do not transform it into behavior by the end of the day.

But not every idea needs to become a habit.

Some ideas change the way we understand a situation. They give us a better question, a more generous interpretation, or a clearer explanation of something we have already experienced.

A novel may not provide a direct solution to a problem, but it may complicate our assumptions about another person. A book about grief may not give us a routine to follow, but it may help us understand someone we love. A history book may not tell us what to do tomorrow, but it may change the questions we ask about the present.

That is still application.

Application is not obedience.

You are allowed to modify an idea. You are allowed to use only one part of it. You are allowed to decide that something works for someone else but does not fit your responsibilities, energy, personality, or current season.

The goal is not to become someone who applies the greatest number of ideas.

The goal is to become someone who can judge which ideas deserve action.

Give the idea somewhere to go

Once you have identified a genuine need and selected an idea that might help, give that idea a possible destination.

It might become a paragraph, a lesson, a conversation, a decision, a personal experiment, a project, or a business opportunity.

It does not need to become all of those things.

When I was developing CARE, many ideas began as rough notes. Some came from teaching experiences. Others came from books about learning, writing, note-taking, and artificial intelligence. Some emerged from watching students struggle to explain their thinking. Others came from my own frustration with collecting information without always knowing how to use it.

The ideas did not all become part of the final framework.

Some became articles. Some became questions. Some were connected with other ideas. Some were rejected. A few gradually gathered enough support to become part of a product or process.

This is the thinking behind the CARE Note-Taking Method: From Notes to Action.

A note is not valuable merely because it preserves information. It becomes more useful when you clarify why you are paying attention, explain the idea in your own words, refine it through connections and questions, and decide what it might become.

The notebook captures the initial encounter. Articulation and elaboration develop the idea. Refinement tests and strengthens it. Execution gives the thinking a destination.

That destination might be a lesson, a piece of writing, a decision, an experiment, or a product.

The point is not to force every note into action.

The point is to stop treating every note as equally important.

If you save every idea but never decide what deserves development, your note-taking system can become another place where unfinished intentions accumulate.

A more urgent way to choose

The next time you encounter an idea that seems valuable, pause before adding it to your life.

Ask yourself:

• What problem am I actually trying to solve?

• Does this idea address that problem?

• What do I currently understand in my own words?

• What would this idea look like in my circumstances?

• What is the smallest way I could test it?

• What evidence would tell me to keep, adapt, or reject it?

These questions do not eliminate uncertainty.

They give uncertainty a structure.

They also force you to confront a difficult possibility: perhaps the next thing you need to do is not learn something new. Perhaps you need to use something you already know.

Look at the books you have finished, the notes you have collected, the projects you have postponed, and the ideas you keep returning to.

Which one is connected to a real need in your life right now?

Which one are you continuing to research because you are not ready to risk finding out whether it works?

Which possibility deserves your attention badly enough that you are willing to stop exploring everything else for a while?

You do not need to carry every good idea with you.

You need to recognize which ideas matter now, choose one that deserves your effort, and stay with it long enough to discover what it can become.

Your life will not be shaped only by the ideas you encounter.

It will be shaped by the ideas you choose to develop, test, and carry forward.

So I’d genuinely like to hear from you:

What good idea have you been circling without committing to, and what is the smallest concrete action you could take this week to finally test it?

Or, perhaps more honestly: what idea do you need to stop pursuing so you can give something else your full attention?

Leave a comment

If you would like to explore this process further, I’ve created two practical resources through Learning to Learn Well.

The CARE Note-Taking Method: From Notes to Action helps you move from rough notes and collected information toward clearer understanding, meaningful connections, and tangible action.

The CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit introduces the CARE Teaching Method—Clarify, Articulate, Refine, and Execute—as a practical framework for educators who want students to use AI without giving up responsibility for their own thinking.

Putting CARE Into Practice

For the past several editions of Learning to Learn Well (and over a decade of teaching), I have been developing an idea: What would learning look like if students, and the rest of us, were expected to do more than collect information or produce polished answers?

That question gradually became the CARE Method:

• Clarify what you are trying to understand or accomplish.

• Articulate what you currently think in your own words.

• Refine your ideas through questions, connections, feedback, evidence, and responsible AI use.

• Execute by turning what you have learned into something tangible.

I have written about different parts of this process, from note-taking and elaboration to AI-assisted learning and real-world application. But eventually, an idea has to leave the notebook and meet the people it is intended to help.

In other words, it is time for me to move into the Execute stage.

The CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit

Visit The CARE Shop

The first workbook is The CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit. It is a pilot resource for teachers who want to help students use AI without outsourcing their thinking.

AI did not create passive learning. Students could copy information, imitate model answers, and complete assignments without developing much understanding long before ChatGPT arrived. Generative AI simply made it easier to produce the appearance of learning.

The Starter Kit offers a more constructive response than either banning AI completely or allowing students to use it without clear boundaries. It helps teachers redesign one existing lesson, assignment, or mini-unit so that students leave a visible trail of their thinking.

The workbook includes lesson-redesign templates, pre-AI thinking activities, CARE Action Notes, Source Notes and Thinking Notes, mental-model tools, AI thinking-partner prompts, reflection pages, and a complete sample ELA lesson.

It is not intended to replace an entire curriculum or solve every question about AI in education. It is meant to help one teacher begin with one lesson and discover what becomes possible.

The CARE Note-Taking Method: From Notes to Action

Visit The CARE Shop

The CARE Note-Taking Method: From Notes to Action expands the framework beyond the classroom.

This workbook is for students, researchers, writers, creators, entrepreneurs, and lifelong learners: anyone who wants to do something with what they learn is meant to use this.

The process begins with rough notebook thinking, moves into elaborated digital notes, and then uses AI downstream as a tool for questioning, connecting, challenging, and organizing ideas. The final goal is not simply to build a larger archive of information. It is to turn developed thinking into a newsletter, lesson, research project, product, business experiment, decision, or other tangible result.

The notebook captures the spark. Elaboration gives the idea substance. AI can help refine it. Execution gives it somewhere to go.

I am especially curious whether readers would be interested in a separate cohort built around this method. Because it is not limited to teachers, that cohort could bring together people working on very different projects while following the same notebook-to-AI-to-action process.

Would that be useful to you?

Leave a comment

Or…

The First CARE Pilot Teacher Cohort

I am also beginning to plan the first CARE Pilot Teacher Cohort. My goal is to bring together approximately 20 Secondary Teachers (ELA or Humanities, but if you teach another subject and think you’d benefit from this, then you’re more than welcome) with Monday, August 3 as a tentative starting date.

The current plan is a four-week guided experience:

1. Find where student thinking disappears.
   Teachers will examine one current assignment and identify where students may be copying, skipping the thinking process, or moving too quickly toward a finished answer.

2. Build the Clarify and Articulate stages.
   Teachers will add a pre-AI thinking routine, Action Notes, and a process for helping students explain ideas in their own words.

3. Create a meaningful Refine process.
   Teachers will use questioning, mental models, feedback, verification, revision, and, where appropriate, AI to help students improve their thinking.

4. Execute a classroom-ready redesign.
   Each teacher will complete one CARE-based lesson, assignment, or mini-unit with a meaningful final product and implementation plan.

The cohort would include:

• live workshops,

• planning time,

• feedback on lesson designs,

• shared examples, and

• opportunities to learn from other teachers testing the method.

This will be a genuine pilot. I do not expect every page or process to be perfect yet. That is precisely why feedback matters.

Teachers can begin by downloading the Starter Kit, testing it with one lesson, and completing the accompanying Google feedback form. They will also be able to indicate their interest in joining the cohort.

After I collect the first round of feedback and prepare the improved materials for the second pilot, members of the founding cohort will receive those updated materials as well. Their classroom experiences, questions, and suggestions will directly influence what the CARE Method becomes next.

An Invitation to Help Build This With Me

These workbooks are not the conclusion of the CARE Method. They are its first real encounter with the people who may use it.

If you are a teacher, I would love for you to try the Starter Kit and tell me what feels useful, unclear, unrealistic, or missing.

If you are a student, writer, researcher, creator, or lifelong learner, I would love to hear whether the CARE Note-Taking Method helps you move from information to action and whether you would join a cohort built around that process.

The next version should not emerge from my ideas alone. It should emerge from what happens when people put those ideas to work.

Ready to Put CARE Into Practice?

If you are ready to move from reading about the CARE Method to testing it for yourself, you can choose the workbook that best fits your goals:

• For teachers: Purchase the CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit and begin redesigning one lesson so that student thinking remains visible before, during, and after AI use. Your purchase also includes The CARE Note-Taking Method: From Notes to Action as a bonus.

• For lifelong learners, writers, researchers, and creators: Purchase The CARE Note-Taking Method: From Notes to Action and begin building a practical system for turning rough notes into developed ideas, meaningful projects, and real-world action.

Whichever workbook you choose, I would love to hear what works, what needs refinement, and what you would like to see next. Your feedback will help shape the future of these resources and possibly the first CARE cohorts built around them.

Leave a comment

Most of the books I studied in English class told stories about people trying to live. Many of the books I began reading later tried to tell me how to live.

The first group included novels, plays, short stories, poems, and memoirs. Through them, I encountered characters who struggled with ambition, identity, belonging, fear, responsibility, injustice, love, loss, and the consequences of their choices. These books did not usually tell me directly what I should do. They invited me to enter another person’s world, observe what happened, and decide for myself what it might mean.

The second group included books about habits, productivity, communication, learning, creativity, psychology, decision-making, note-taking, purpose, career development, and personal growth. These books were more direct. Their authors identified problems, offered frameworks, told stories, summarized research, and proposed practical actions. Rather than asking only what a character’s experience revealed about life, they asked what the reader might do differently after closing the book.

Literature has shaped how I understand people, culture, language, and experience. Some of the books that have stayed with me most deeply were not practical guides to anything. They gave me stories, images, questions, and ways of seeing that I could not have received from a checklist or a five-step framework. A novel can remain unresolved in the mind for years. It can grow alongside us, revealing something different each time we return to it.

At the same time, when I look at many of the ideas that eventually changed how I study, take notes, manage projects, communicate, teach, write, and build something of my own, a surprising number came from books I encountered outside formal education.

I learned about different levels of reading from Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book. I began thinking differently about notes and the long-term development of ideas after reading Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes. I explored the idea of a digital knowledge system through Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain. Other professional-development and personal-growth books introduced me to mental models, systems thinking, deliberate practice, habit formation, reflection, purpose, feedback, attention, and the difficult process of turning knowledge into behavior.

Not every idea was useful. Some were useful only during a particular season of life. Others sounded convincing until I examined them more carefully. A few were common sense stretched into 250 pages because apparently common sense becomes more marketable when divided into twelve rules and accompanied by a mountain-climbing anecdote.

Still, taken together, these books gave me a language for discussing parts of life and learning that school had often left implicit.

That has led me to a question I have not been able to dismiss:

Why are self-help and professional-development books rarely read, discussed, challenged, and experimented with in English Language Arts?

I am not suggesting that schools should remove novels from the curriculum and replace them with Atomic Habits. I am not proposing that every student should begin the morning by reciting productivity affirmations while an English teacher checks whether everyone has properly optimized breakfast.

Literature should remain central to English Language Arts. Students need opportunities to read sustained narratives, encounter complex characters, appreciate language, wrestle with ambiguity, and enter lives beyond their own.

But I have begun wondering whether there is room beside literature for another kind of reading.

Could students learn to examine practical advice as seriously as they examine a poem, speech, novel, or argumentative essay? Could they identify an author’s claims, analyze the evidence, uncover the assumptions, compare competing perspectives, and test a modest idea in their own lives? Could English class help them distinguish meaningful guidance from confident nonsense?

More broadly, could students learn not merely to consume advice, but to judge it?

English Language Arts Is Broader Than Literature

When many of us imagine an English classroom, we picture literature.

We remember Shakespeare, short stories, poetry, literary terms, vocabulary quizzes, and essays about symbolism. Depending on the school and the decade, we may also remember diagramming sentences, identifying parts of speech, writing research papers, or searching desperately for a metaphor in a passage because the worksheet strongly implied one was hiding there.

Literature has become so closely associated with English class that it can be difficult to separate the two. Yet English Language Arts is broader than literary study alone.

In her overview of ELA, educator Michelle Boyd Waters examines definitions from schools, professional organizations, and state standards. She describes ELA as a field involving reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, language, and the analysis and production of many forms of communication. She also notes that the purpose extends beyond classroom performance toward critical thinking, informed citizenship, and lifelong learning. Interestingly, Waters reflects that despite this broad definition, her own experience of English education was heavily centered on classic literature and poetry.

The formal purposes of ELA already include many of the abilities students would need to examine practical nonfiction:

• understanding complex texts,

• identifying claims,

• evaluating evidence,

• analyzing rhetoric,

• comparing viewpoints,

• communicating clearly,

• conducting research,

• participating in discussion,

• writing for different purposes,

• and applying literacy beyond school.

A self-help or professional-development book is, among other things, an argument. The author identifies a problem, proposes an explanation, and recommends a response. The book may use data, expert testimony, personal stories, historical examples, analogies, case studies, emotional appeals, or some unstable mixture of all six.

That makes it surprisingly suitable for an ELA classroom.

Students could ask:

• What exactly is this author claiming?

• How is the problem defined?

• What evidence is offered?

• What evidence is missing?

• Whose experiences are presented as universal?

• Which rhetorical strategies make the advice sound trustworthy?

• What assumptions does the author make about success, happiness, work, money, relationships, or human behavior?

• Under what conditions might the advice work?

• Under what conditions might it fail?

These are not questions outside English Language Arts. They are central to it.

The problem may not be that practical nonfiction does not belong within the purposes of ELA. The problem may be that our cultural image of the subject has become narrower than its stated mission.

Adults are constantly surrounded by recommendations about how to live.

Some arrive in books. Others appear in podcasts, social media posts, advertisements, online courses, workplace seminars, videos, newsletters, and conversations. The advice may concern money, health, careers, relationships, parenting, education, productivity, technology, or personal identity.

Students will encounter these claims whether schools prepare them or not.

The question is whether they will learn to treat advice as something to be examined, or merely as something to accept, reject, purchase, repost, or forget.

Why Literature Still Matters

Before making space for practical nonfiction, it is worth being clear about what literature already gives students.

Literature does not usually reduce life to a lesson. That is one of its great strengths.

A strong novel does not present a character’s experience simply to prove Rule Number Four. A short story does not always settle the question it raises. A poem may resist immediate explanation. Literature asks readers to remain with uncertainty, contradiction, voice, image, and possibility.

Students encounter people whose lives differ from their own. They see how individuals are shaped by families, cultures, institutions, histories, desires, and circumstances. They watch characters misunderstand one another, rationalize poor decisions, discover unexpected courage, or remain trapped by flaws they cannot see. They experience consequences through story rather than instruction.

Literature also develops the ability to tolerate ambiguity.

Many practical books try to simplify. They take a complicated area of life and make it manageable through a model. That can be valuable. A model helps us notice patterns and decide what to do. But every model leaves something out.

Literature often restores what the model removes.

A book about habits might explain how routines form. A novel can show how a person’s routines are tangled with grief, family expectations, poverty, love, shame, culture, and chance. A book about communication might offer a useful framework for difficult conversations. A play can show how pride, power, history, and fear make that framework considerably harder to use than it appeared in Chapter Six.

Literature can expose the limits of advice because it portrays human beings refusing to behave like diagrams.

This is one reason I do not believe the solution is to replace literature with books about personal growth. Students already appear to receive fewer whole-book experiences than many people assume. A 2026 article in The 74, discussing a RAND report on secondary ELA classrooms, noted that nearly 90 percent of surveyed teachers assigned at least one complete fiction or nonfiction book during the year. However, about two-thirds assigned between one and four, while approximately one-quarter assigned five or more. The article also highlighted disparities: students in high-poverty schools, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities were less likely to receive sustained experiences with complete books.

That does not suggest that students are drowning in novels and urgently need rescue through a productivity manual.

It suggests that sustained reading should be protected.

A whole book requires readers to remain with ideas over time. They must remember earlier events, revise interpretations, notice patterns, and continue even when the meaning is not immediately available. The 74 article describes this as a form of cognitive persistence and argues that reading complete books develops capacities that fragmented passages cannot fully reproduce.

Practical nonfiction can require the same persistence when it is read as a complete argument rather than mined for isolated quotes. In both cases, the student must follow the author’s thinking across chapters, notice how ideas accumulate, and decide whether the ending fulfills the promise made at the beginning.

The strongest argument, then, is not that ELA should choose practical books instead of literature. It is that students may benefit from reading both.

Literature often asks:

What does it mean to be human?

Practical nonfiction often asks:

Given what we know, what might we try next?

The first question gives depth to the second. The second can give direction to the first.

Why Self-Help Books Remain Outside the Classroom

There are good reasons schools have been cautious about the genre.

The phrase self-help covers an enormous and uneven collection of books. It can describe serious works grounded in psychology, education, philosophy, behavioral science, or professional experience. It can also describe recycled clichés, pseudoscience, magical thinking, exaggerated promises, and advice based entirely on the fact that one unusually successful person did something and has now concluded that everyone else should do it too.

A business leader wakes at 4:30 each morning, builds a company, and writes a book suggesting that early rising caused the success. The contributions of timing, resources, opportunity, employees, family support, health, luck, and survivorship bias are politely asked to wait outside.

This creates an obvious selection problem for schools.

A novel does not need to give students reliable instructions for living in order to be valuable. A self-help book often presents itself as doing exactly that. Once an author begins recommending action, the accuracy and consequences of the advice matter differently.

Schools would need to ask:

Is the book age-appropriate?

Are its central claims supported?

Does it confuse correlation with causation?

Does the author exaggerate research findings?

Does it treat one cultural or economic experience as universal?

Does it promise personal control over circumstances that may be structural?

Does it enter mental-health or medical territory that should not be handled as casual classroom experimentation?

Those questions should not automatically exclude the genre. They may be the very reason to teach it.

Students need practice recognizing when an author’s confidence exceeds the evidence. They need to notice when a personal story is being used as proof. They need to learn that a scientific study mentioned in a chapter does not instantly baptize every conclusion that follows.

The genre also has a prestige problem.

Even the title of one of the articles that prompted this essay captures the tension: “Self-help books get a lot of hate, but there’s more to the genre than literary snobs allow.” The popularity of self-help exists alongside an enduring embarrassment about reading it. People buy these books in enormous numbers while often treating them as intellectually inferior to history, philosophy, or literature.

Some of the criticism is deserved. Much of the genre does oversimplify. Some books offer vague encouragement disguised as revelation. Others repeat one worthwhile idea until the reader begins to suspect that the publisher had a minimum-page requirement.

But dismissing the entire category creates its own intellectual shortcut.

Why is it considered respectable to analyze a fictional character’s disastrous decisions but somehow less respectable to analyze an author’s direct recommendations about making better ones?

The answer may be that fiction does not usually claim to provide a guaranteed solution. It leaves space for interpretation. Self-help books often appear to close that space. Their titles promise transformation, their covers announce certainty, and their marketing turns complicated human problems into solvable packages.

That is precisely why students should be taught to reopen the space.

Instead of asking whether a self-help author is simply right or wrong, students could ask where the advice is useful, where it is limited, and how it might be adapted. They could examine not only the content of the recommendation but the cultural idea of improvement behind it.

What does the author believe a successful person should become?

• More productive?

• More confident?

• More efficient?

• More disciplined?

• More employable?

• More independent?

• More financially secure?

• More peaceful?

• More socially connected?

Every self-development book contains some vision of the good life, whether the author acknowledges it or not.

Teaching these texts would therefore require caution. English teachers should not be asked to become therapists, life coaches, financial advisers, or judges of student character. Students should not be pressured to reveal private family, emotional, or health information. They should not be graded on whether they become more confident, organized, happy, disciplined, or productive.

The object of study would be the text, the argument, the evidence, the student’s reasoning, and the learning process.

A student should be free to conclude that a book’s advice is incomplete, unconvincing, culturally narrow, irrelevant to their circumstances, or simply annoying. That conclusion should be welcomed when it is supported thoughtfully.

The goal is not obedience to advice.

The goal is better judgment.

The Education System Is Already Full

There is also a practical obstacle: the curriculum is crowded.

English teachers are already expected to teach reading comprehension, writing, grammar, research, vocabulary, speaking, listening, analysis, discussion, source evaluation, test preparation, media literacy, digital citizenship, and whatever additional priority has arrived in the latest district initiative.

The solution cannot simply be to announce that schools have failed to teach personal development and should now add an entirely new unit, complete with new standards, assessments, committees, professional development sessions, and an online portal everyone will forget the password to by October.

Education systems are difficult to change because they are large, layered, and constrained. Curriculum decisions are shaped by standards, testing, schedules, approved materials, teacher workload, community expectations, budgets, and policy. Even a good idea can become cumbersome when translated into a system-wide requirement.

This is something I have written about before. Education is a behemoth. Large-scale change moves slowly, and sometimes the process of institutionalizing an idea drains the life from it before it reaches a classroom.

That does not mean teachers are powerless.

They may not be able to redesign the entire curriculum, but they can often reconsider the kinds of texts students encounter and the processes through which students engage with them.

A practical nonfiction component would not necessarily need to become a year-long course or even a complete unit. It could begin as:

• one student-choice book club,

• a collection of short excerpts around a shared claim,

• a practical book paired with a novel,

• an independent-reading option,

• a rhetorical-analysis assignment,

• a research project testing a popular claim,

• or one recurring question about how ideas move from a text into life.

The addition could be small.

The intellectual shift would be larger.

Instead of treating reading as complete when students have identified the main idea, the class could ask what should happen next.

The Strongest Criticism: Self-Help Books Often Do Not Help

One of the most compelling objections to self-help books is contained in the name.

They are supposed to help.

Yet many readers finish a book, feel briefly inspired, highlight several pages, and then return to their previous routines. The book enters a crowded shelf of abandoned transformations. For several days, the reader may possess the satisfying feeling of becoming a different person without suffering the inconvenience of behaving differently.

This is not only a problem with self-help. It is a problem with passive learning.

In “Why Self-Help Books Don’t Work (And How to Nevertheless Benefit From Them),” Jeroen Kraaijenbrink argues that one reason these books frequently have little effect is that readers remain responsible for deciding whether to act. There is usually no teacher, therapist, or coach requiring them to apply the advice or helping them reflect on what happens. The reader may understand the recommendation and still continue as before.

Kraaijenbrink proposes a slower form of reading inspired by lectio divina. Rather than racing through the text, the reader stops at meaningful passages, revisits them, and connects them to existing knowledge and experience. The central idea is that reading must involve internalization rather than simple exposure.

Whether or not that particular method belongs in a public-school classroom, the larger point is important:

Reading information is not the same as learning from it.

A student can summarize a chapter on habits without changing how they understand habit formation. A reader can explain a communication framework without using it. A teacher can assign a reflection that produces the appearance of insight without any real intellectual revision.

This is precisely why self-help books could become valuable educational texts.

Their limitations create a reason for active study.

Rather than assigning a practical book and asking students whether they liked it, a teacher could require them to follow the complete journey of a claim:

1. What problem does the author identify?

2. How does the author explain it?

3. What evidence supports the explanation?

4. What action does the author recommend?

5. What assumptions make the recommendation possible?

6. What circumstances might make it difficult or inappropriate?

7. What would count as evidence that it worked?

8. How might the advice need to be revised?

The book would no longer function as scripture or rubbish.

It would become a claim worth investigating.

Students could compare a popular self-development author with a research article. They could examine a favorable review beside a skeptical one. They could search for counterexamples, study the limitations of a cited experiment, or compare two authors who define the same problem differently.

A book about procrastination might argue that the problem is poor task design. Another might frame it as emotional avoidance. A third might focus on environmental distraction. A student’s role would not be to choose a guru. It would be to consider whether each explanation accounts for part of the problem.

The Practical Knowledge Students Often Encounter Too Late

One reason adults turn to these books is that they name problems formal education often leaves unaddressed.

Students learn content from many subjects, but they do not always receive explicit guidance about how to manage the process of learning itself. They may be told to study harder without being taught the difference between rereading and retrieval. They may be told to organize their time without examining how tasks, attention, energy, and environment interact. They may be told to accept feedback without learning how to decide which feedback is useful.

They are expected to make increasingly important decisions about courses, careers, money, relationships, technology, and personal responsibility while possessing uneven access to guidance.

Some students receive this knowledge at home. Their parents explain professional expectations, financial decisions, college systems, workplace communication, or how to seek mentorship. They grow up hearing adults discuss setbacks, careers, contracts, networks, and long-term choices.

Other students receive fragments.

Some receive almost nothing.

This is not because their families do not care. Many parents are navigating systems they were never taught to understand themselves. The world of work is changing, education pathways are becoming more varied, and advice that was useful a generation ago may no longer fit neatly.

Practical knowledge often functions as a form of social capital. Students who have access to adults with experience, time, confidence, and professional networks inherit more than information. They inherit models for how to interpret situations.

A thoughtfully designed ELA curriculum could help make some of those models visible.

Students could encounter age-appropriate texts about:

• learning and memory,

• attention and distraction,

• habits and routines,

• communication,

• feedback,

• decision-making,

• career exploration,

• creativity,

• money and incentives,

• failure,

• motivation,

• purpose,

• and the relationship between knowledge and action.

The class would not declare one system correct. It would give students practice evaluating systems.

This distinction is crucial.

The purpose is not to provide every student with the same philosophy of life. The purpose is to ensure that every student can recognize when a philosophy is being offered to them.

A Practical Nonfiction Laboratory

I would hesitate to call this a “self-help unit.”

That phrase sounds less like an English course and more like compulsory group therapy conducted beneath a poster reminding everyone to choose happiness.

A better name might be:

The Advice Laboratory

The guiding question could be:

What advice is worth trying, and how can we tell?

This framing preserves the connection to English Language Arts. Students are not receiving advice from the teacher. They are studying how advice is constructed.

A practical nonfiction laboratory could begin with shorter texts. Students might analyze an article, chapter, podcast transcript, speech, infographic, or excerpt from a professional-development book. Later, they could read a complete book through literature circles or independent choice.

The texts could represent different perspectives and levels of evidence. One author might draw from research. Another might rely on personal experience. A third might blend storytelling, studies, and rhetorical confidence so smoothly that the seams become difficult to see.

Students could investigate four layers.

The problem

What does the author say is wrong?

Authors gain attention by naming a frustration readers recognize. The description of the problem may be accurate, exaggerated, selective, or deliberately emotional.

Students could examine the language used to make readers feel understood. Does the author create urgency? Fear? Hope? Shame? Relief? Does the book suggest that the reader has been approaching life incorrectly until this fortunate encounter with Chapter One?

The explanation

Why does the author believe the problem exists?

This is where the underlying model appears. A book about productivity may blame distraction, unclear priorities, lack of systems, emotional resistance, or modern technology. Each explanation directs attention toward a different solution.

Students could map the causal chain:

Because the author believes X, the author recommends Y.

Then they could ask whether the evidence actually supports that relationship.

The recommendation

What does the author want the reader to do?

The recommendation should be stated precisely. “Be more disciplined” is not a usable action. “Place your phone in another room during a 25-minute work session” is testable.

Students could distinguish between vague inspiration and specific practice.

They could also examine feasibility. Advice that works for an independent entrepreneur may not work for a teenager following a school schedule, caring for siblings, sharing a bedroom, working a part-time job, or managing a learning difference.

The result

What would demonstrate that the recommendation helped?

This question is often neglected. A person may try a new routine and feel more in control, but complete no additional work. Another may become more productive while also becoming more anxious. A strategy may work for three days and become unsustainable by the second week.

Students could decide what evidence matters and what trade-offs should be considered.

This is where practical reading becomes genuine inquiry.

From Reading Advice to Testing It

The most distinctive part of this approach would be experimentation.

Students would not test every kind of advice. Topics involving health, medication, trauma, diagnosis, eating, family conflict, or other sensitive areas would require professional guidance and should not become casual classroom assignments.

The safest experiments would involve small, low-risk changes connected to learning, communication, organization, creativity, or attention.

A student might test:

• using retrieval practice instead of rereading,

• placing a phone outside the study area,

• breaking a large assignment into smaller visible steps,

• keeping a short distraction log,

• changing how feedback is recorded,

• trying a five-minute planning routine,

• explaining an idea aloud before writing,

• or using a different note-taking method for one lesson.

The student would begin by making a prediction. What does the author claim will happen? What does the student expect?

During the experiment, the student would collect simple evidence. This could include observations, completion records, reflections, or comparisons with a previous approach.

At the end, the student would not answer only, “Did it work?”

The better questions would be:

What changed? What did not? What made the strategy difficult? Was the author’s explanation accurate? Which part of the idea was useful? What would need to be adapted? What new question emerged?

This process would transform self-help from passive consumption into critical, experiential literacy.

Students would learn that applying an idea does not mean surrendering judgment to it. Experimentation can be a form of criticism. A strategy that sounds convincing on paper may fail under real conditions. That failure does not necessarily prove the idea is worthless, but it gives the learner better information.

The student becomes a participant in the argument.

How My Own Reading Led Toward the CARE Teaching Method

This question is personal for me because my reading journey eventually became part of my teaching philosophy.

The CARE Teaching Method did not emerge from a single education book or one sudden classroom revelation. It developed from years of teaching, curriculum writing, tutoring, taking notes, studying learning theories through my Master of Education degree, reading professional-development and self-help books, and experimenting with ideas in my own work.

Each source gave me a different part of the picture.

My formal study of education introduced theories of learning, cognition, reflection, feedback, scaffolding, and transfer. Classroom teaching showed me how untidy those theories become when twenty-five students enter the room with different skills, motivations, histories, and needs. Curriculum writing taught me to think about sequence, clarity, assessment, and the relationship between an objective and the work students actually do.

My independent reading introduced frameworks that did not always appear directly in teacher preparation. Books about note-taking made me consider how ideas develop over time. Books about habits and productivity made me think about the distance between intention and action. Books about communication and decision-making gave me models that could be used beyond a single assignment.

Eventually, these ideas began to connect.

I realized that a large amount of education is built around receiving information and producing a final response. Students read, listen, search, or watch. Then they answer a question, write an essay, complete a project, or take a test.

What often remains invisible is the development between those two points.

• What did the student think at the beginning?

• What did they misunderstand?

• Which idea did they make their own?

• What connections formed?

• Which feedback did they accept?

• Which feedback did they reject?

• What changed between the first and final version?

• Where did the student exercise judgment?

This problem existed before generative AI, but AI made it impossible to ignore. Students can now produce polished writing, summaries, outlines, explanations, and responses before they have developed much of their own thinking.

AI did not create passive learning.

It exposed it.

The CARE Teaching Method grew from the belief that the learning process needs to become more visible. Students move through four connected stages:

Clarify

Students identify what they are trying to understand, solve, question, notice, or create. They establish a purpose before searching for an answer.

Articulate

Students explain their current thinking in their own words. They reveal what they understand, what they remember, what example they can give, and where their explanation remains incomplete.

Refine

Students connect, question, test, compare, research, receive feedback, identify counterarguments, and revise. AI may enter here as a questioning or feedback partner, but it responds to thinking the learner has already begun.

Execute

Students use their refined understanding to write, create, teach, solve, decide, design, perform, or act. The final product becomes evidence not just of what information they found, but what they did with it.

The framework is especially relevant to practical nonfiction because self-help books often fail at the exact point CARE is designed to address.

The author presents an idea. The reader recognizes something useful. The reader highlights it. Then the idea goes nowhere.

CARE creates movement.

1. The student clarifies what the author is addressing.

2. They articulate the advice in their own words.

3. They refine it through evidence, counterargument, comparison, and reflection.

4. Finally, they execute by applying, teaching, adapting, or creating something from the idea.

Self-help books often give readers advice.

CARE gives learners a process for deciding what to do with it.

For teachers interested in applying this kind of visible learning process, I recently created The CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit.

1. It includes a lesson-redesign process, student thinking sheets,

2. Action Notes,

3. a mental-model selector,

4. AI thinking-partner prompts,

5. reflection tools, and

6. a complete ELA lesson example.

The kit is designed to help teachers begin with one lesson rather than attempting to reconstruct their entire curriculum before Monday morning.

The Starter Kit is not specifically a self-help literature unit, but the same process could be used to design one.

Visit the Learning to Learn Well Shop

A Possible Classroom Unit: Can a Book Change a Habit?

Imagine a three- or four-week secondary ELA inquiry titled:

Can a Book Change a Habit?

Students would begin by choosing an age-appropriate practical text or selected chapter related to learning, attention, organization, communication, creativity, or another low-risk topic.

The class would not begin by asking whether the book is good.

It would begin by clarifying the promise.

What problem does the author claim to solve? Who is the intended reader? What change is being offered? How does the author define success?

Students would record their initial beliefs before reading deeply. This gives them a starting point against which later change can be observed.

During the Articulate stage, students would explain the author’s central argument without copying the author’s language. They might create a source note, causal diagram, short presentation, or audio explanation.

A prompt could be:

In my own words, the author believes that ____. The strategy is supposed to work because ____. The strongest example or evidence is ____. The part I still cannot explain clearly is ____.

This stage matters because students can easily repeat an author’s vocabulary without understanding the model underneath it. Explaining the idea in personal language reveals what has actually been learned.

During the Refine stage, students would complicate the argument.

They could locate a research source connected to the claim. They could read a critical review. They could compare two authors who give different advice about the same problem. They could identify a population or circumstance the original author neglected.

Suppose the original text argues that successful people wake early. Students might examine whether the evidence demonstrates causation, whether individual sleep patterns differ, whether the recommendation assumes control over work and family schedules, and whether the deeper principle is really early rising or protected time.

The goal is to locate the useful idea inside the packaging.

Students could then design a modest experiment. Rather than attempting to transform their personalities, they might test one specific action for a week.

Before the experiment, they would identify:

• the action,

• the prediction,

• the evidence they will collect,

• possible obstacles,

• and boundaries for stopping or adapting it.

Afterward, they would analyze the result.

Their final product might be an argument essay, podcast, presentation, infographic, letter to the author, or revised advice guide written for teenagers.

The student might conclude:

• The author’s central principle was useful, but the recommended method was unrealistic.

• The strategy worked only after I changed the environment.

• The advice helped with starting but not with finishing.

• The author underestimated emotional resistance.

• The book described the problem accurately but offered weak evidence for the solution.

• The idea was more useful when combined with another framework.

Pairing Practical Nonfiction With Literature

Perhaps the most promising model is not a separate practical-nonfiction unit at all.

It is pairing practical books with literature.

Literary and practical texts can approach the same human problem from different directions.

A novel might explore ambition through character, conflict, and consequence. A practical book might offer a model for defining goals. Students could examine what the model explains and what the novel reveals that the model leaves out.

A story about isolation could be paired with an essay about belonging or community. A novel concerned with identity could be placed beside a text about personal change. A play about failed communication could enter conversation with a professional-development chapter on listening, persuasion, or difficult conversations.

Possible pairings could revolve around questions such as:

What does ambition do to a person, and how should success be defined?

Why do people repeat destructive patterns, and can habits be deliberately changed?

How does society shape identity, and how much power does an individual have to reinvent themselves?

What causes communication to fail, and can a framework prevent misunderstanding?

How do people respond to failure, and what makes failure productive rather than merely painful?

Is purpose discovered, created, inherited, or revised?

The literature would resist the practical book’s simplification. The practical book would make certain choices and processes more explicit.

Students could then ask:

Does a story teach us something about life that direct advice cannot?

Does direct advice give us something a story leaves unstated?

This could become a powerful comparison because the genres carry different expectations.

When reading literature, students are accustomed to ambiguity. When reading practical nonfiction, they may expect an answer. Placing the texts together helps students understand that models are useful precisely because they simplify, but human lives exceed every model.

The literary text reminds students that people are not problems to be optimized.

The practical text reminds students that reflection can sometimes lead to action.

The key is not to reduce literature to a collection of life hacks. Macbeth should not become “Seven Leadership Errors Scottish Executives Must Avoid.” (although it does have those lessons). A novel deserves to be studied as art, language, history, culture, and human experience.

Practical nonfiction should enter the conversation without taking it over.

Boundaries That Would Matter

Any serious classroom use of self-help or professional-development texts would require clear boundaries.

First, the books must be treated as arguments, not authorities.

Students should be able to accept, reject, adapt, or investigate the advice further. A teacher should not present a commercially successful author as possessing the final answer to motivation, happiness, relationships, success, or identity.

Second, the topics must be age-appropriate.

Texts involving mental illness, trauma, medication, eating, addiction, or other clinical issues cannot be handled as ordinary behavior experiments. Those areas require qualified professionals, careful policies, and respect for student privacy.

Third, students should not be required to disclose personal struggles.

A learner could apply a communication model to a fictional scenario, test a study strategy on neutral academic material, or analyze a hypothetical case. Participation should not depend on revealing family conflict, emotional distress, finances, health, or relationships.

Fourth, the curriculum should include a range of perspectives.

If every selected book defines success as maximizing income, efficiency, or individual achievement, the class is teaching a philosophy even while pretending merely to teach skills.

Students should encounter questions about community, ethics, responsibility, relationships, inequality, culture, rest, and meaning alongside books concerned with achievement.

Fifth, commercial popularity should not be mistaken for intellectual quality.

A bestselling book may be useful, misleading, or both. Its popularity is itself worth analyzing. What longing does the book address? Why does its promise appeal to readers? How do the title, cover, anecdotes, and author biography create trust?

Finally, the teacher’s role should remain as an educational guide.

The teacher guides reading, reasoning, evidence, discussion, and reflection. The teacher does not diagnose students or decide what kind of person each student should become.

These boundaries do not weaken the concept.

They are part of what makes it educational.

What Would This Add to ELA?

A practical nonfiction strand could connect several parts of ELA that students sometimes experience as separate.

• Reading would provide the source idea.

• Rhetorical analysis would reveal how the idea is presented.

• Research would test its credibility.

• Discussion would introduce alternative perspectives.

• Writing would require students to form a judgment.

• Experimentation would connect the text to experience.

• Reflection would reveal how understanding changed.

• The final product would communicate something worth sharing.

Students would still learn to identify claims, cite evidence, analyze language, compare sources, and revise writing. But those skills would be placed inside a larger intellectual movement.

The question would no longer be only:

Did you understand the book?

It would become:

What did the book lead you to question, connect, test, revise, or create?

That is the deeper purpose I see in the CARE Teaching Method as well.

This does not mean every book must immediately produce behavior. Some books need time. Some ideas become useful years after they are encountered. Some reading experiences matter because they enlarge the inner world rather than producing a visible outcome.

Learning should not become a relentless demand to convert every page into measurable productivity.

Still, students deserve opportunities to experience the movement from idea to application.

They should learn that reading can be more than receiving information or completing an assignment. It can become a conversation between a text, the world, and the learner’s developing judgment.

Beginning Without Rebuilding the Entire System

I do not expect English departments to replace their curriculum maps next week.

Nor do I think every teacher should rush out and assign whichever self-help title currently occupies the airport bookstore’s largest display.

The more realistic possibility is experimentation. One teacher might add a practical-nonfiction book club. Another might pair a short self-development chapter with a novel. Another might ask students to investigate a popular claim from social media and trace it back to its evidence. Another might allow practical nonfiction as an independent-reading category. Another might redesign one existing rhetorical-analysis assignment around a book that offers direct advice.

This is how many useful educational ideas begin.

Not through immediate transformation of the entire system, but through a small, thoughtful change followed by observation and refinement.

Teachers could ask:

Did students engage seriously with the text?

Were they able to distinguish claims from evidence?

Did the practical context strengthen rhetorical analysis?

Could students identify limitations without simply dismissing the author?

Did experimentation deepen understanding?

Did the process create meaningful writing and discussion?

Which topics felt appropriate?

Which boundaries need strengthening?

The answers would guide the next version.

That is more responsible than either declaring that self-help books have no place in school or announcing that they contain the missing curriculum for life.

Stories, Advice, and the Lives Students Are Building

Literature gives students opportunities to enter lives they have never lived. It allows them to encounter ambition, jealousy, love, grief, injustice, failure, courage, and contradiction before experiencing all of those things for themselves.

Practical nonfiction offers something different. It gives readers explicit claims about how people might learn, work, communicate, decide, change, or live.

One form asks us to interpret experience.

The other asks us to act on an idea.

Perhaps English Language Arts does not need to choose between them.

Perhaps students should learn to read stories deeply and advice skeptically. They should be able to appreciate language, follow an argument, question an author, test a claim, revise their judgment, and decide what deserves to become part of their lives.

Maybe the question is not whether self-help books belong beside literature because they possess the same literary value.

Maybe the better question is whether students should graduate knowing how to evaluate the advice that will inevitably try to shape them.

What might change if students left English class able not only to identify a theme, but also to examine a piece of advice before allowing it to become one of the themes of their lives?

References and Further Reading

“Self-help books get a lot of hate, but there’s more to the genre than literary snobs allow.” NBC News.
Read the shared article

Pondiscio, Robert. “Report Finds Books Aren’t Vanishing From Schools. But That’s Not the Whole Story.” The 74, May 14, 2026.
Read the article

Waters, Michelle Boyd. “Understanding English Language Arts: A Comprehensive Overview.” reThink ELA, March 28, 2025.
Read the article

Kraaijenbrink, Jeroen. “Why Self-Help Books Don’t Work, and How to Nevertheless Benefit From Them.” Inkl, originally published July 5, 2019.
Read the article

Hutson, Matt. The CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit. Learning to Learn Well, 2026.
View the Starter Kit

When I began reading What to Make of a Life by Jim Collins, the title did not feel like an abstract philosophical question.

It felt personal.

I had recently started working full-time as an English teacher at Washington Connections Academy. After returning to the United States following fourteen years in Indonesia, I had spent months trying to find stable work, rebuild my professional life, and help my family establish itself in a country that was familiar to me but no longer felt entirely familiar.

I had crossed one of the largest transitions of my life. I had left behind a place where I had built a career, formed relationships, raised my daughter, and developed an identity as an educator. Then I returned to the United States expecting, perhaps too optimistically, that my experience and education would help me move smoothly into the next stage.

Instead, I entered what Collins calls the fog.

I knew where I had come from, but I could not clearly see where I was going. I had found work, but I was still trying to understand whether that work represented a destination, a bridge, or simply another step in a much longer process. I was grateful to be moving forward, yet I still felt as though I were rebuilding from the ground up.

The timing of the book could hardly have been more appropriate.

Collins describes What to Make of a Life not as a conventional self-help book but as a book about self-knowledge. It does not hand us a tidy formula for planning the next thirty years, presumably because human beings have already produced enough five-step systems that quietly assume life will obey a spreadsheet. Instead, Collins and his research team studied the long arcs of 34 lives across more than 2,800 combined years of experience. The project took ten years of research and two years of writing. From those lives, Collins identified recurring patterns involving cliffs, fog, inner fire, personal encodings, responsibility, relationships, money, and the gradual development of self-knowledge.

The book asks a difficult question:

What do you make of a life when the path you were following suddenly ends, changes, or stops making sense?

It does not assume that this question appears only once. We may confront it at twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty. We may encounter it after success or failure, after receiving an opportunity or losing one, after moving somewhere new, finishing a major project, leaving a profession, raising a family, experiencing illness, losing someone, or discovering that the life we worked hard to build no longer fits who we are becoming.

The question returns because life is not linear.

Neither is learning.

And that connection may be the most important lesson I took from the book.

A Life Is Not a Straight Line

We often tell life stories in a way that makes them appear much neater than they were.

Someone discovers a talent, develops that talent, finds a career, encounters a few obstacles, perseveres, and eventually becomes successful. Once the story has reached its satisfying conclusion, every earlier event looks as though it were pointing toward that outcome.

Real life rarely feels that coherent while we are living it.

While you are in the middle of a transition, you do not know which event will matter later. You do not know whether the job you accepted will become a career, introduce you to someone important, teach you what you do not want, or simply pay the bills while you build something else. You do not know whether a failed project will disappear into the wilderness or become the experience that prepares you to recognize your most important idea.

We construct the pattern afterward.

That is also how learning works. New knowledge does not arrive in a perfectly ordered sequence and politely attach itself to the appropriate section of our minds. We encounter an idea, misunderstand part of it, connect it to an old experience, forget it, rediscover it, and sometimes return years later with enough life behind us to understand what it was trying to teach us.

A book you read at twenty-five may become a different book at forty-five because you have become a different reader.

A note you write today may mean something else six months from now because the situation that produced it has changed. The words remain the same, but you bring a different constellation of experiences to them.

I saw this happening while reviewing my notes from What to Make of a Life. Some were rough observations dictated while listening to the audiobook. Others were elaborations written later. In one early note, I wrote that I felt disconnected from my inner fire. I had moved back to the United States, struggled through an exhausting job search, and could not identify the work that would bring my abilities, interests, responsibilities, and economic needs together.

Months later, I returned to that note and added something different.

By then, I had begun developing the CARE Teaching Method. I had published several pieces about it, watched educators respond to the ideas, and started to recognize a thread connecting years of teaching, curriculum writing, reading, note-taking, reflection, and experimentation with AI.

The first note captured uncertainty.

The second captured emerging direction.

Together, they showed movement that I might not have recognized if I had written the first thought, closed the document, and never returned to it.

This is one reason I have become so interested in elaboration and action-oriented note-taking. Notes are not merely containers for information. They can become records of our changing understanding. When we revisit them, we do not simply recover what we once thought. We compare our past interpretation with our present one.

That comparison creates self-knowledge.

A saved note is not automatically a useful note. A useful note is one that continues to enter into conversation with your life.

The Cliffs That Divide a Life

Collins uses the cliff as a metaphor for an event that changes the trajectory of a life.

Some cliffs are obvious. A death, diagnosis, divorce, retirement, relocation, dismissal, financial collapse, or sudden end to a career can divide life into a before and an after.

Other cliffs are less dramatic from the outside but equally significant to the person experiencing them. A project ends. A role that once provided meaning becomes routine. A child leaves home. A long-pursued goal is finally achieved, leaving behind the unsettling question of what comes next.

One of the examples Collins examines is the death of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. His death did not simply leave the remaining musicians with an empty position to fill. It ended the particular configuration of people, relationships, energy, and creative chemistry that had made the band what it was. The remaining members faced a cliff. They could not continue as though nothing fundamental had changed.

Robert Plant eventually continued making music, but continuing did not mean recreating the past indefinitely. He experimented, collaborated, explored different sounds, and declined opportunities that would have paid handsomely but trapped him in endless repetition of what had already made him famous.

That is one of the difficult truths about cliffs:

Moving forward may require us to stop trying to reconstruct what existed before the fall.

When I moved from the United States to Indonesia in 2011, I crossed one cliff. I entered a new country, began teaching, and gradually built an adult life there. At first, I did not know that the move would shape the next fourteen years. I simply took the next available opportunity and learned from it.

Moving back to the United States in 2025 became another cliff.

The difference was that I was no longer a young adult beginning with few responsibilities. I returned with a wife, a daughter, years of experience, graduate education, a teaching certificate, and expectations about what that experience should make possible. I was approaching a stage of life in which I thought I ought to be established, a dangerous word that often means we have begun comparing our complicated interior lives with the visible outcomes of other people.

The move challenged more than my employment situation. It challenged my understanding of myself.

In Indonesia, I knew how the educational environment worked. I had professional relationships, experience within particular school systems, and a clear identity as a teacher. In the United States, the same experiences were present on my résumé, but they did not automatically translate into belonging, stability, or opportunity.

That is what makes a cliff so disruptive. It does not merely change our external situation. It can remove the frame that once allowed our abilities to make sense.

The natural response is to search for immediate certainty. We want to know what the move means, whether the decision was correct, what we should do next, and how long the difficult part will last.

Life generally refuses to provide those answers on demand.

Instead, the cliff is often followed by fog.

Fog Is Not Failure

The chapter on fog became the center of the book for me because it describes a condition that is common but difficult to explain.

Fog is not necessarily a crisis. You may still be working, caring for your family, meeting obligations, and appearing functional. From the outside, your life may even look successful.

Internally, however, the path has become difficult to see.

You may not know what kind of work you should pursue. You may feel that an important part of you is going unused. You may have several possible directions but no clear reason to choose one over another. You may know that your current situation is temporary without knowing what should replace it.

Fog can arrive after something terrible happens, but it can also follow something good. Achieving a long-term goal may remove the structure that organized your life. Success answers one question while creating another: now what?

Collins studied people who entered fog through many different routes. Some experienced illness or loss. Some reached the end of a career. Some lost public standing. Some completed the work around which they had built their identity. Some chose a new direction and discovered that it did not provide the clarity they expected.

The causes differed, but the experience shared a pattern. The old route was no longer available, and the new one had not yet become visible.

Collins himself has said that every subject in the study experienced fog while recovering from a cliff. Their ability to move through it did not come from possessing a perfect plan. It came through continued engagement with life, growing self-knowledge, and gradual movement.

This matters because we often interpret fog as evidence that something is wrong with us.

We assume that competent adults should know what they are doing. We expect ourselves to identify a purpose, design a plan, execute it efficiently, and move forward without appearing confused. Then, when life becomes uncertain, we treat the uncertainty as a personal defect.

But uncertainty is not always evidence of poor preparation. Sometimes it is the honest condition of entering unfamiliar territory.

You cannot have complete clarity about an experience you have not yet lived.

When I first returned to the United States, I applied for hundreds of jobs. I had taught for more than a decade, earned a master’s degree, completed certification, written curriculum, and worked with students across different grade levels and educational systems. I thought these experiences would lead naturally into a new role.

Instead, months passed.

Every application created a small cycle of expectation and disappointment. A role would appear to fit my background. I would revise my résumé, write another cover letter, submit the application, and wait. Frequently, nothing happened. Occasionally, an interview created hope before the opportunity disappeared.

After a while, the process began to affect how I interpreted my own experience. I was not merely asking, “Why am I not getting this job?” I was asking, “What is my experience actually worth here? Where do I fit? Have I misunderstood my abilities? Did I make the wrong decision by returning?”

Fog changes the scale of our questions.

A practical difficulty becomes a judgment about the whole life.

That is one reason fog can become dangerous. We may make a rushed decision, not because it is wise, but because any direction feels better than uncertainty.

The Difference Between Movement and Escape

When we are uncomfortable, action feels like relief.

Sometimes that action is exactly what we need. Remaining motionless while waiting for complete certainty can keep us trapped indefinitely.

But action taken only to escape fog can lead us into a life we did not choose carefully.

Looking back, I can see that my decision to return to the United States emerged partly from an earlier fog. I felt that my career in Indonesia had reached a plateau. I was getting older, and I worried that if I did not make a significant change, I would remain professionally stuck.

The move appeared to offer a clear direction.

In reality, it exchanged one kind of uncertainty for another.

That does not necessarily mean it was the wrong decision. Decisions cannot be evaluated only by whether they remove discomfort. A difficult transition may still open possibilities that would never have existed otherwise. Returning gave my family opportunities, brought us closer to relatives, allowed me to enter new educational spaces, and eventually pushed me to think more seriously about the work I want to build.

But the experience taught me to distinguish between two kinds of movement:

1. Movement that helps us learn

2. Movement that merely helps us avoid feeling uncertain

The two can look identical from the outside.

You may accept a job, launch a business, enroll in a program, move to a new city, or begin a major project. The action itself does not reveal whether you are exploring wisely or fleeing discomfort.

The difference often becomes visible through the questions you are willing to ask.

Am I moving toward something I understand more clearly, or simply away from something uncomfortable?

• What evidence supports this decision?

• What responsibilities will the decision create?

• What am I expecting this change to solve?

• Which problems will probably follow me?

• What could I test before making the decision irreversible?

These questions do not eliminate uncertainty, but they slow the leap from discomfort to commitment. They create a small amount of productive friction between impulse and action.

This is one of the strongest connections I see between Collins’s work and the CARE Teaching Method. Before students accept an answer, we want them to clarify the problem, articulate what they currently think, refine that thinking through evidence and feedback, and then execute.

Adults need the same process.

We are merely more skilled at disguising our first reaction as a carefully reasoned conclusion.

You Do Not Need to See the Whole Path

One of the most useful ideas in the book is what Collins calls simplex stepping.

When you are lost in fog, you cannot plot a precise route across terrain you cannot see. You can, however, take a small step, observe what happens, adjust, and take another.

The purpose of the first step is not to solve your entire life.

It is to generate information.

That distinction changes how we approach uncertainty. Instead of asking, “What should I do for the next twenty years?” we can ask, “What is one action I could take this week that would help me understand myself or the situation more clearly?”

A step might involve:

• speaking with someone who works in a field you are considering;

• writing a short essay about an idea that keeps returning;

• volunteering for a project that uses a neglected skill;

• taking a course without committing to an entirely new career;

• creating a small version of a product;

• teaching one workshop;

• applying for one type of role and noticing the response;

• reading a biography of someone who navigated a similar transition;

• returning to an old interest and seeing whether the energy is still there;

• recording what gives you energy and what consistently drains it.

These are not dramatic acts. That is precisely why they work.

We tend to imagine that major life changes require major declarations. We announce a new identity, design a complex plan, purchase the appropriate supplies, reorganize our digital tools, and experience a thrilling forty-eight hours in which the new life seems practically complete.

Simplex stepping is less exciting but more honest. It recognizes that clarity frequently follows action rather than preceding it. You do something small enough that failure will not destroy you. You pay attention. The result tells you something. Then you adjust.

This resembles deliberate learning. A student does not become a strong writer by receiving a perfect explanation of writing. The student attempts a paragraph, receives feedback, recognizes a weakness, revises, and gradually develops judgment.

A teacher does not design an excellent course by imagining every detail in isolation. The teacher plans, teaches, watches where students struggle, changes the explanation, tests another activity, and improves through repeated contact with learners.

A business idea develops in the same way. You identify a problem, create the smallest useful response, place it in front of people, listen carefully, and revise.

This is how I have begun approaching the CARE Teaching Method. I do not yet know every product, workshop, book, cohort, or classroom application that may eventually emerge from it. Trying to design the entire ecosystem before testing the first useful resource would be another form of hiding.

So I am working in steps.

1. Write the central idea.

2. Share it with educators.

3. Notice what resonates.

4. Build a starter resource.

5. Invite teachers to use it.

6. Study what happens.

7. Refine the language.

8. Create the next version.

The goal is not to pretend the fog has disappeared. The goal is to keep moving without lying to yourself about how much you can see.

Turning Yourself Into a Subject of Study

Simplex stepping becomes much more useful when it is paired with careful observation.

Collins describes a practice he called the Bug Book. He imagined himself as though he were a scientist studying an unusual creature named Jim. Instead of judging every experience as good or bad, he tried to observe his own behavior, energy, choices, and patterns.

• What kinds of work absorbed him?

• Which situations brought out his strongest abilities?

• When did he feel energetic?

• What repeatedly frustrated him?

• What kind of contribution did he naturally try to make?

• What did he continue doing even before it brought recognition or money?

Over time, the observations revealed that he was deeply suited to research, questioning, analysis, teaching, and writing. The Bug Book did not hand him an instant purpose. It accumulated evidence from which a pattern gradually became visible.

Most of us do something very different.

We study ourselves emotionally.

A difficult day becomes proof that we have chosen the wrong career. A successful day becomes proof that we have finally found our purpose. A compliment makes us feel capable. A rejection makes us question the previous fifteen years. Our conclusions rise and fall with the emotional weather.

Emotions matter. They often reveal values, unmet needs, and important signals. But they are unreliable as the only source of evidence. A meaningful project can contain exhausting days. A poor fit can occasionally produce praise. Fear can accompany growth, while comfort can accompany stagnation.

The Bug Book encourages a different stance:

Notice first. Interpret carefully. Judge slowly.

This approach connects directly to the way I have been thinking about note-taking.

A conventional journal often captures what we feel in the moment. That can be valuable, especially when we need to express or process something. But a self-knowledge notebook can go further. It can help us identify patterns across time.

You might record:

Energy

• What activity made me feel more alert after doing it?

• What left me depleted?

• Was the problem the work itself, the environment, the people, the pace, or the lack of autonomy?

Absorption

• When did I lose track of time?

• What kind of problem held my attention without requiring constant external pressure?

• What did I keep thinking about after the formal work ended?

Ability

• What seemed unusually natural to me?

• What do other people repeatedly ask me to help them understand or do?

• Which skills have improved because I continue returning to them?

Contribution

• Who benefited from the work?

• Did I feel that the result mattered to someone?

• Was I creating, explaining, organizing, solving, encouraging, leading, repairing, or discovering?

Friction

• What kind of difficulty felt meaningful?

• Which difficulty merely felt pointless?

• What challenge made me want to improve rather than escape?

Economics

• Could this work help support my responsibilities?

• What conditions would make it sustainable?

• What could I combine with it while it develops?

The purpose is not to score every day and turn existence into a performance dashboard. Humanity has already demonstrated an impressive ability to convert anything meaningful into a color-coded productivity system.

The purpose is to collect evidence.

One observation tells you little. Fifty observations may reveal a pattern.

This is elaboration applied to the self. You capture an experience, explain it, connect it to other experiences, test your interpretation, and decide what the pattern might suggest.

In CARE language, you:

• Clarify what you are trying to understand about yourself.

• Articulate what happened in concrete language.

• Refine your interpretation by comparing it with other evidence.

• Execute a small experiment based on what you learned.

Then the outcome of that experiment becomes material for the next cycle.

The notebook does not tell you who you are.

It helps you notice who repeatedly appears.

Encodings Need the Right Frame

Collins uses the term encodings to describe the durable capacities and inclinations that form a person’s distinctive construction.

They are not simply skills listed on a résumé. A skill can be learned because a job requires it. An encoding appears more deeply connected to the kind of work, problems, roles, and environments that bring someone fully alive.

Collins describes these capacities as a constellation rather than a single gift. A person may be encoded for spatial reasoning, performance under pressure, teaching, analysis, storytelling, persuasion, design, empathy, physical coordination, leadership, systems thinking, or some unusual combination.

The surrounding frame determines whether those capacities become visible.

Astronaut John Glenn, for example, did not appear extraordinary in every conventional school setting. Collins’s research describes him struggling in high school chemistry and failing to distinguish himself in varsity athletics. When Glenn entered a cockpit, however, a different frame activated capacities involving spatial reasoning, physical precision, and calm under pressure. The person had not suddenly acquired a new mind. He had entered an environment capable of revealing what had been difficult to see elsewhere.

This idea matters far beyond career planning.

It should change how we think about students.

A student who struggles in one subject, format, or environment is not necessarily a weak learner. The current frame may not reveal the student’s strongest encodings.

Some students think more clearly through discussion than through timed writing. Some need to build, test, draw, perform, debate, or teach before the knowledge becomes visible. Some can produce sophisticated ideas but struggle with the mechanical demands of getting them onto paper. Others perform well on assignments but have difficulty applying the same knowledge outside the familiar structure of school.

Schools often mistake performance within a narrow frame for the total measure of a person.

A student receives a grade and gradually begins to interpret it as an identity. Good at school becomes intelligent. Poor at school becomes unintelligent. Fast becomes advanced. Slow becomes deficient.

But speed, compliance, memory, writing fluency, and test performance represent only part of human capability.

The better question is not only, “How well did this student perform?”

It is also:

What does this environment allow us to see, and what might it be hiding?

That question applies to adults as well.

Someone may appear average in a highly controlled job and exceptional when given autonomy. A person may struggle within a large institution but thrive while working directly with clients. Someone may be a competent classroom teacher but become most alive while designing curriculum, mentoring other teachers, researching learning, or writing about education.

This helps me make sense of my own tension with education. I enjoy teaching, but I have often felt constrained when my role requires me to deliver a system designed by someone else without enough room to explore, create, or question it.

The work that most consistently activates me involves education, but not always in the conventional form of standing in front of a class.

I feel energized when I am:

• trying to understand why students are not learning;

• connecting ideas from books with classroom practice;

• designing structures that make thinking visible;

• writing explanations;

• building lessons or frameworks;

• helping teachers see a familiar problem differently;

• turning scattered research into something practical;

• experimenting with how AI can support rather than replace thought.

That is a constellation.

Teaching is part of it, but teaching alone does not describe it.

This also helps clarify the old argument between being a specialist and being a generalist. The choice may be less absolute than it appears.

Many people who seem broadly talented are not pursuing unrelated interests at random. Their abilities orbit a central concern.

Leonardo da Vinci explored anatomy, mechanics, observation, and art, but these interests strengthened one another. The breadth was organized by a deep fascination with how the visible world worked and how it could be represented.

The goal, then, may not be to choose between knowing one thing and knowing many things. It may be to identify the central question that organizes your range.

For me, that question may be:

What once looked like a collection of separate interests begins to look more like a constellation.

The One Big Thing and the Inner Fire

Discovering a constellation of encodings does not mean every interest should receive equal attention.

At some point, breadth needs direction.

Collins returns to the importance of finding the work that concentrates our abilities and feeds what he calls the inner fire. The inner fire is not constant excitement. No meaningful pursuit remains thrilling every hour. It is the deeper source of energy that makes a person willing to continue through difficulty, obscurity, repetition, and slow progress.

One story in the book describes a student becoming so absorbed in an academic task that, when she reached the end, she temporarily could not remember her own name.

It sounds absurd until you consider the experience of being completely immersed in a problem. Attention can become so concentrated that the ordinary signals of identity and time move into the background.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described this kind of absorption as flow. Collins’s idea of inner fire extends beyond individual moments of concentration. It concerns the activity or role that repeatedly draws a person back into deep engagement across a life.

The question is not simply, “What do I enjoy?”

Plenty of activities are enjoyable.

A stronger question is:

What kind of work makes difficulty feel worth enduring?

That is where money becomes complicated.

We need money. Meaningful work does not remove housing costs, healthcare, food, transportation, education, or family responsibilities. Passion is easier to celebrate when the electricity remains connected.

But when money becomes the first and only arrow guiding our decisions, it can gradually separate us from the work that gives life energy.

Collins describes the importance of flipping the arrow of money. Instead of allowing money to dictate the entire direction of life, people can arrange their economics to support the work they believe matters.

This does not mean ignoring income. It means asking money to serve the life rather than asking the life to serve money.

Robert Plant’s post-Led Zeppelin career illustrates the distinction. He could have spent decades accepting the highest-paying opportunities to repeat familiar songs for audiences seeking nostalgia. Instead, he continued exploring music, releasing new work, collaborating, and protecting his freedom to experiment.

That decision was possible partly because he had already achieved financial success. We should not pretend everyone faces identical options. Still, the principle applies at smaller scales.

You can ask:

• What amount of money is actually enough for this stage of life?

• Which financial obligations are necessary, and which are tied to expectations I have never examined?

• What kind of work gives me both economic stability and enough time or energy to develop something meaningful?

• Could I maintain a stable role while experimenting with a second path?

• What would I refuse even if it paid more?

• What freedom am I trying to purchase with money, and am I sacrificing that freedom in the process of earning it?

I want work that supports my family comfortably. I also want time to write, develop the CARE Teaching Method, create resources, and remain present in my daughter’s life. A job that offers more money but consumes all available time may solve one problem while creating several others.

This is not an argument for romanticizing struggle. Financial insecurity narrows attention and makes long-term creation more difficult. Personal economics matter because inner fire needs oxygen.

The goal is not to choose meaning instead of money.

The goal is to build an arrangement in which money protects the conditions that allow meaning to continue.

Write for One Person

The stories of writers in Collins’s book reinforced something I have gradually learned through writing Learning to Learn Well.

Barbara Tuchman followed questions that genuinely interested her. Toni Morrison wrote the books she wanted to encounter rather than trying to reverse-engineer whatever she imagined the market would reward.

They wrote for readers, but their work began with an interior necessity.

1. Something made them curious.

2. Something felt unfinished.

3. Something inside needed a form.

When I think too much about what everyone will think, my writing becomes weaker. I begin anticipating reactions before I have fully expressed the idea. I compare my work with what other people are publishing. I try to predict what will spread, which is a splendid way to produce something cautious, generic, and strangely lifeless.

My best writing usually begins with an audience of one.

Sometimes that person is a teacher trying to understand why a familiar classroom practice no longer works. Sometimes it is a learner who has read many books but feels that little has changed. Sometimes it is a parent wondering how to prepare a child for a world that looks different from the one in which the parent grew up.

Sometimes the reader is me.

Writing for myself does not mean ignoring the audience. It means beginning with a real question rather than an imagined performance.

When I help another person think more clearly, I also clarify my own thought. When I explain an idea, I discover what I do not yet understand. When someone responds, challenges the argument, or applies it differently, the idea develops beyond its original form.

Teaching works in much the same way. I teach for the student, but the act of teaching also changes me. It requires me to reorganize knowledge, notice confusion, create examples, and confront the limits of my explanation.

Contribution and self-development are not opposites.

Helping someone else can become one of the strongest ways of building yourself.

This connects with what I wrote recently about Beethoven in the following edition to Learning to Learn Well:

What drew me to Beethoven was not simply that he loved music or became one of history’s great composers. It was that he seemed to contain more than ordinary conversation could express. He had to take everything he studied, observed, believed, and suffered through and find a form capable of carrying it to another person.

His problem was not a lack of material.

It was finding a form strong enough to carry the material.

Many of us experience a variety of different versions of that struggle. We have ideas, experiences, questions, and observations, but they remain unshaped. We feel that something matters without yet knowing how to communicate it.

A voice does not appear fully formed.

We build it through repeated attempts to carry the material.

The same may be true of a life.

You do not discover a completed self waiting beneath the surface. You discover patterns, test forms, accept responsibilities, enter relationships, create work, and gradually build a life capable of carrying what matters most to you.

For me, the CARE Teaching Method may be one of those forms.

It gives structure to ideas I have been circling for years: students need to think before they copy, explain before they polish, connect before they submit, and apply before they move on. Notes should not merely store information. AI should not replace the learner’s first thought. Teachers should be able to see how understanding develops, not merely inspect the final product and hope it is authentic.

Clarify. Articulate. Refine. Execute.

The framework seems simple, but it carries material accumulated through years of teaching, curriculum writing, tutoring, reading, note-making, and trying to understand what genuine learning looks like.

Perhaps this is what it means to find a form capable of carrying the material.

Not to invent something disconnected from your previous life, but to recognize what your previous life has been preparing you to build.

Success Is a Process, Not an Arrival

One of the traps of fog is believing that everything will finally make sense once we reach a particular outcome.

• Once I get the job, I will feel secure.

• Once the book is published, I will feel legitimate.

• Once the business earns a certain amount, I will feel successful.

• Once the idea receives recognition, I will know that the work mattered.

Outcomes matter. We should finish things, measure progress, and create real results. But no outcome permanently resolves the question of what to make of a life.

Every achievement eventually becomes part of the ordinary landscape.

The new job becomes Monday morning.

The published book becomes the previous book.

The finished project creates space for another question.

Success therefore cannot be only an end state. It must include the quality of the process we are living now.

• Are you engaged by the work?

• Are you improving?

• Are you contributing?

• Are you becoming more capable of handling the responsibilities you have chosen?

• Are you building relationships worth maintaining?

• Are you developing judgment?

• Are you preserving enough energy to continue?

This is why Michael J. Fox’s story in the book stayed with me. His Parkinson’s diagnosis created a cliff that he initially kept private while trying to understand what it meant for his work and life. He continued acting, eventually spoke publicly, and later became deeply involved in advocacy and research funding.

But another part of his story concerns the structure of work. A regular television schedule offered something the larger, more prestigious film world did not always provide: predictable time with his family.

From the outside, the more cinematic and lucrative opportunity may appear to be the obvious definition of success.

From inside a life, the calculation is different.

A role that allows you to do meaningful work and return home for dinner may be more successful than one that increases visibility while removing you from the people for whom the success supposedly matters.

Responsibility changes the meaning of ambition.

When you are responsible only for yourself, you can optimize for experience, risk, income, or recognition. When you have a family, students, employees, collaborators, or a community depending on you, success becomes relational.

Your decisions shape other lives.

This is why Collins’s idea of choosing responsibilities is so important. Meaning does not come only from freedom. It often comes from freely committing ourselves to people and work that place demands on us.

A responsibility chosen with care can focus a life.

Parenthood does this. Teaching does this. Building something that others genuinely use does this.

The work may be difficult, but the difficulty is organized by commitment.

That is different from carrying obligations that were imposed without reflection or continuing work that consumes us only because we are afraid to disappoint people.

The goal is not a life without burden.

It is a life with burdens worth carrying.

Contribution Matters More Than the Medal

Recognition is strange.

We want evidence that our work matters, but the forms of recognition most visible to society are not always connected to the people the work actually serves.

Awards, rankings, titles, follower counts, bestseller lists, and promotions may indicate something meaningful. They can create opportunities and help worthwhile work reach more people.

They can also become substitutes for the work itself.

One story in Collins’s book involves Chuck Colson, who received public recognition for his later work but placed greater value on evidence that his writing had reached and affected prisoners. The formal honor mattered less than knowing that people for whom the work was intended had found something useful in it.

That distinction has stayed with me as I think about Learning to Learn Well and the CARE Teaching Method.

Recognition feels encouraging. When a newsletter travels farther than expected, receives thoughtful responses, or appears on a rising list, it signals that the ideas may be connecting.

But the deeper purpose cannot be the ranking.

The purpose is the teacher who changes an assignment and begins seeing more of a student’s thinking.

It is the learner who stops copying notes and starts developing ideas. It is the person who rereads an old reflection and notices that they have changed. It is the student who believed they were not intelligent discovering that the original frame was too narrow to reveal what they could do.

The medal is not the work.

The response is not the work.

Even the framework is not the work.

The work is what becomes possible in another person’s life because the idea was expressed clearly enough to be used.

This is also why I have become skeptical of the language of legacy.

Legacy sounds noble, but it can become another form of self-importance. We imagine how people will remember us after we are gone, as though we will be present to supervise their interpretation.

A better focus is contribution in the present.

• What can I make more useful now?

• Whom can I help now?

• What responsibility can I fulfill now?

• What idea can I explain more clearly now?

• What system can I improve now?

A meaningful legacy may emerge from those choices, but it becomes a by-product rather than the object of worship.

You cannot control how the future remembers you.

You can control whether the work in front of you is honest, useful, and worthy of the time it requires.

Face Forward, but Circle Back

One of Collins’s teachers described approaching life as though sitting forward in a saddle. The direction of travel is ahead. Continually turning backward makes it difficult to ride.

I agree with the principle, but I would add one qualification.

We should face forward while periodically circling back.

The past cannot become the place where we live. Nostalgia can persuade us that an earlier stage was better simply because its uncertainties have already been resolved. We remember the stable parts and forget how confused we felt while building them.

But the past contains evidence.

It shows which interests returned, which responsibilities we accepted, which environments helped us flourish, and which forms of work repeatedly brought out the best in us.

Circling back is not the same as retreating.

It means revisiting earlier encodings with a more mature understanding.

Something you loved as a child may contain information about what still gives you energy. A subject you abandoned because it seemed impractical may connect with a present problem in an unexpected way. A skill developed in one profession may become the foundation for work in another.

Collins calls this pattern extending out and circling back. People move into new territory, discover additional capacities, and then reconnect with earlier abilities or interests. The next stage becomes a recombination rather than a total replacement.

That is how I now see my path through teaching, writing, curriculum, reading, and educational technology.

• I am not leaving teaching behind in order to become a writer. I am extending writing out from teaching.

• I am not abandoning curriculum work in order to develop a learning framework. I am circling back to years of curriculum work and asking what underlying process I was trying to create.

• I am not turning note-taking into a separate productivity hobby. I am connecting it to the way students and adults build self-knowledge, develop ideas, and create practical work.

The pieces do not need to compete.

They need a structure that allows them to reinforce one another.

This is also why rereading matters. When you revisit a book, notebook, project, or past interest, you are not repeating the original experience. You are bringing the present self into contact with earlier material.

That contact can produce something neither version of you could have created alone.

Great Work Can Happen Late

One of the most encouraging findings in Collins’s book concerns the possibility of doing significant work later in life.

Popular culture remains fascinated with early achievement. We celebrate the young founder, prodigy, athlete, artist, or creator who seems to arrive fully formed while everyone else is still trying to locate the correct charging cable.

But many forms of work improve through accumulated experience.

Research becomes deeper because the researcher has encountered more questions.

Teaching becomes more perceptive because the teacher has watched more students misunderstand in different ways.

Writing becomes more layered because the writer has lived through enough contradiction to distrust easy explanations.

Leadership can become wiser because the leader has made decisions, endured consequences, and learned that confidence and correctness are not identical.

Collins found that many people continued producing consequential work well past the age when society expects creative decline. Some generated a large portion of their contribution after fifty.

This does not mean we should postpone meaningful work until then. Later achievement is usually built on decades of practice, relationships, curiosity, and accumulated knowledge.

The point is that earlier effort is not wasted merely because it has not yet produced its most visible result.

A person at forty-two is not beginning with nothing.

They are beginning with everything they have learned, attempted, misunderstood, endured, and developed so far.

The question is whether that accumulated material can be organized into the next form.

This gives me hope.

I do not want to wait until fifty to begin creating. I want to use the next years to deepen the work. But it helps to know that life does not close simply because the early version of success did not arrive on schedule.

There is no universal schedule.

Some people discover one central role early and remain in it for decades. Geneticist Barbara McClintock spent much of her life investigating related problems in maize genetics. Others live several distinct but connected lives, as John Glenn did while moving through aviation, public service, and space exploration. Collins argues that neither pattern is inherently better. The important question is whether the current frame brings a meaningful set of encodings into use.

Your path may be continuous.

It may be serial.

It may contain long periods that look unproductive from the outside but are quietly accumulating material.

Life is not over while you are still capable of observing, choosing, learning, contributing, and beginning again.

Questions Are Better Than Premature Answers

The final lesson I took from What to Make of a Life is that strong questions may serve us better than definitive answers.

I once believed I was unusually slow to find a clear direction. I looked at people who seemed settled in their professions and assumed they possessed a certainty I lacked.

The book dismantled some of that assumption.

People across wildly different fields and levels of achievement enter fog. Actors, scientists, writers, athletes, entrepreneurs, teachers, and public figures experience periods in which they cannot clearly interpret what is happening or what should come next.

Success does not free us from emotional complexity, nor do money, recognition, or talent guarantee certainty, meaning, or the right direction. The real distinction is not that some people somehow avoid the fog, but that they keep learning while moving through it. They ask better questions, pay attention to patterns, stay connected to others, and take small, deliberate steps. They protect the work that keeps their inner fire alive, make practical financial choices, accept responsibilities that matter, and remain willing to enter new environments or return to earlier strengths. Most importantly, they keep creating long enough for the shape of their lives to become clearer.

That is a less dramatic answer than discovering a single purpose engraved somewhere inside us.

It is also more useful.

Self-knowledge does not arrive as one magnificent revelation. It accumulates through attention.

A CARE Practice for Moving Through the Fog

After finishing the book and reviewing my notes, I began wondering what a practical self-knowledge routine might look like.

Not a formula for solving a life.

A way of remaining active, reflective, and honest while the larger direction is still forming.

The CARE framework offers one possibility.

1. Clarify the present situation

Do not begin with, “What should I do with the rest of my life?”

The question is too large to produce useful movement.

Begin closer to the ground:

• What feels unclear right now?

• What changed?

• What responsibility must I protect?

• What decision am I actually facing?

• What do I know?

• What am I assuming?

• What kind of information would help?

Fog becomes more manageable when we name its immediate shape.

2. Articulate what you currently understand

Write before searching for someone else’s answer.

Describe the situation in your own language. Record what gives you energy, what concerns you, what you hope will happen, and what you fear.

Do not try to sound wise.

The purpose is to make your thinking visible.

You might write:

I am trying to understand whether my current work is a long-term direction or a bridge. I value the stability it provides, but I feel most energized when I am writing, designing learning resources, and helping educators think differently. I do not yet know whether those interests can become economically sustainable.

That is not a solution.

It is a human starting point.

3. Refine through evidence and connection

Now examine the interpretation.

What experiences support it?

What contradicts it?

What pattern appears across earlier roles?

What might a trusted person notice that you do not?

Which parts are facts, and which are emotional conclusions formed during a difficult week?

Return to old notebooks, projects, feedback, and moments of deep engagement. Look for the constellation rather than one impressive incident.

AI can help at this stage, but it should respond to your thinking rather than generate an identity for you. Give it your observations and ask it to identify patterns, challenge assumptions, or propose questions. Do not ask it to announce your purpose like a machine dispensing a digital fortune cookie.

4. Execute one simplex step

Choose an action small enough to complete and meaningful enough to produce evidence.

Write the article.

Contact the person.

Teach the workshop.

Build the first page.

Read the biography.

Apply for the role.

Test the activity.

Return to the neglected skill.

Then record what happened.

Did the step create energy?

Did it reveal ability?

Did it produce useful feedback?

Did it bring you closer to people who share the concern?

Did it make the next step clearer?

Execution does not end the process. It supplies the material for another round of clarification.

This is learning applied to a life.

What My Notes Taught Me

When I first took notes on this book, I thought I was recording Jim Collins’s ideas.

Looking back, I can see that I was also recording a transition in myself.

The rough notes captured the fog more honestly than a polished summary could have. They included uncertainty, repetition, tangents, hope, frustration, and questions I could not yet answer.

Then I returned to them.

I explained the ideas again.

I connected them with my move, my work, my family, my writing, Beethoven, note-taking, elaboration, real-world learning, and the CARE Teaching Method.

Some of my earlier conclusions changed.

Others became stronger.

A pattern emerged.

That is what I want note-taking to become.

Not the storage of sentences, but the development of a relationship with ideas. Not a graveyard of highlights, but a living record of how learning changes our judgment and action.

1. The rough note is the beginning.

2. Elaboration allows us to discover what the note means.

3. Connection places it within the larger system of our lives.

4. Action tests whether the idea can become useful.

5. Reflection reveals what changed.

6. Then we circle back.

This process does not remove fog immediately, but it prevents the fog from becoming empty time.

You are still learning inside it.

You are still gathering evidence.

You are still becoming capable of recognizing the path when it begins to appear.

The Next Honest Step

I do not think What to Make of a Life gave me a final answer to its title.

I am not sure that was ever the purpose.

It gave me a more useful way to live with the question.

A life is shaped by cliffs we choose and cliffs we never asked to encounter. Those cliffs are followed by fog, and fog cannot always be escaped through one decisive act. We move through it by observing ourselves, protecting our responsibilities, entering new frames, building relationships, taking simplex steps, and noticing which forms of work keep the inner fire alive.

We do not need to know everything we will become.

We need enough self-knowledge to recognize what deserves another step.

For me, the next stage appears to remain rooted in education, but the frame is expanding. Teaching, writing, curriculum design, note-taking, learning theory, AI, and the CARE Teaching Method are beginning to support one another.

I am still testing that direction.

I am still trying to build the economics around it.

I am still learning what form can carry the material.

That does not mean I have failed to find the path.

It means I am walking it.

Perhaps the question is not:

What am I supposed to do with my entire life?

Perhaps the better questions are:

• What is this stage asking me to notice?

• Which parts of me are not being brought into the frame?

• What work makes my eyes light up?

• Which responsibilities are worth choosing?

• What is one honest step I can take before the fog clears?

You may not be able to see the whole path from where you are standing.

A life is not built by seeing the whole path.

It is built by taking the next meaningful step, paying attention to what it reveals, and keeping the inner fire alive long enough to discover where it leads.

If young people are expected to create their own path through a rapidly changing world of work, when are we going to begin teaching them how to build one?

For most of childhood, young people are told what to do.

Go to school. Complete the assignment. Get good grades. Follow the rules. Prepare for the test. Ask permission. Stay on track. Do what is expected.

Then graduation arrives, and the message changes almost overnight.

Now you are an adult.

Choose a career. Pay your bills. Understand taxes, contracts, health insurance, and retirement. Build professional relationships. Manage your money. Decide whether to attend college, enter a trade, freelance, start a business, work for a company, or somehow combine several of those options at once.

Use AI responsibly.

Find meaningful work.

Create a stable life.

Try not to make any expensive mistakes while figuring everything out.

A thoughtful preparation system might have been useful before this ceremonial release into the economic wilderness, but humanity seems to enjoy suspense.

We spend years preparing students to complete schoolwork, but far less time preparing them to direct their own lives. We teach them how to follow a rubric, but not always how to make a decision when no rubric exists. We show them how to answer questions selected by someone else, but not always how to decide which questions are worth asking.

We tell them to prepare for the future while much of the education system remains organized around a working world that is already disappearing.

That is the problem I keep returning to.

The Future of Work Is Already Here

Much of my thinking around this topic was sparked by Find Your Workverse by Michelle Duval and Dan Negroni. I had not even finished the book when I began writing this article. I was only around Chapter 5, and much of the advice was still fairly general.

But one idea from Chapter 3 stayed with me.

The authors describe a future in which people may move between full-time employment, freelance projects, startup work, side businesses, remote roles, and careers that do not fit neatly inside one title. People may combine several kinds of work or move more frequently between industries.

That future could offer tremendous freedom.

Young people may be able to:

• Combine several interests instead of choosing only one.

• Work with people and organizations around the world.

• Build independent sources of income.

• Learn new skills without waiting for formal institutions.

• Use AI to create work that once required an entire team.

• Design careers around their abilities rather than a single job title.

But freedom without preparation becomes confusion.

That is the part we do not discuss nearly enough.

I currently teach many Grade 9 students at Washington Connections Academy, and through that work, I get a genuine picture of how young people are preparing for what comes next. Some students are already working part-time jobs. Some help support their families. Some are trying to pass their classes while dealing with responsibilities that many adults would find difficult to manage.

Others have no clear direction yet. They are simply trying to get through the next assignment, the next unit, or the next semester.

Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they struggle.

Some students appear highly motivated, while others seem almost completely disconnected from the material.

It would be easy to blame the students. The reality is far more complicated.

Some of their attitudes come from what they have experienced at home. Some have parents who talk openly about careers, money, college, work, mistakes, and long-term planning. Others have parents who care enormously but do not know how to guide their children through a working world that looks very different from the one they entered.

Some families are simply trying to survive.

They may not have the time, financial stability, professional network, or career knowledge needed to provide their children with a detailed map of adulthood.

The school system is supposed to help close that gap. Yet schools often remain focused on grades, testing, content coverage, compliance, and traditional career pathways. Students learn how to complete requirements but may receive very little guidance on how to evaluate a job opportunity, understand a contract, manage irregular income, build a professional network, or use AI without surrendering their own judgment.

Then they turn eighteen, and everyone acts surprised when they do not know what to do next.

The Question Became Personal

The book discusses work and careers that may exist around 2035.

That year initially sounded distant. Then I realized that it is approximately when my own daughter will graduate from school.

It made me question:

• What kind of working world will she enter?

• Will she be expected to choose one career, or will she need to build a portfolio of different roles and income streams?

• Will she work for one company, several clients, herself, or some mixture of all three?

• Will she know how to recognize a good opportunity from an exploitative one?

• Will she understand the difference between short-term income and long-term growth?

• Will she know how to use AI as a tool without allowing it to make every important decision for her?

Most importantly, who will teach her? Of course, I will do my best to, but what about all the other kids out there with no one to inform them about all this information?

Parents should play a role. Teachers should play a role too. Mentors, counselors, employers, and communities also have something to contribute.

But responsibility often becomes blurred. Parents assume schools are preparing students for adult life. Schools assume families are teaching practical skills. Teachers may hesitate to influence a student’s career choices because they do not want to tell them how to live. Counselors may be responsible for hundreds of students.

Meanwhile, young people piece together their understanding of work through social media, influencers, advertisements, success stories, and whatever examples happen to exist around them.

Young people do not need adults to choose their entire future for them. They do not need a teacher assigning them one permanent career identity or a parent planning the next twenty years of their life.

They need adults who gradually teach them how to choose.

1. The World Gen Z Is Actually Entering

My perspective on this has also been shaped by my own return to the United States.

I moved back in 2025 after living in Indonesia for approximately fourteen years. Even though I returned in middle age with teaching experience, a graduate degree, certification, curriculum-writing experience, and a fairly clear sense of what I could offer, I still felt surprisingly new to the American working world.

The economy had changed while I was away.

Hiring had changed. Entire categories of remote, contract, freelance, platform-based, and AI-assisted work had expanded. Even the language people used to describe careers had shifted.

When I began applying for jobs, I noticed that many opportunities fell into a few broad categories.

Some were traditional positions located in major cities with high living costs. Others were described as remote but required the applicant to live in one specific state, metropolitan area, or time zone.

The word remote often sounded far more flexible than the reality. You could work from home, provided your home happened to be located in one of four approved cities where rent required a minor act of financial mythology.

Many other opportunities were temporary contracts, freelance assignments, or project-based roles. The work itself might be meaningful and professionally valuable, but it often lacked the long-term stability traditionally associated with a professional career.

There might be:

• No guarantee that the contract would continue.

• No employer-supported health insurance.

• No retirement contribution.

• No paid leave.

• No clear pathway into permanent employment.

• No certainty about what would happen six months later.

That uncertainty is difficult enough for someone returning with years of experience.

I can only imagine what it feels like for a young person entering the workforce for the first time.

Project Work Can Become an Education

I do not want to dismiss contract work, freelance projects, side businesses, or startup roles. These experiences can create extraordinary learning opportunities.

In a traditional entry-level role, someone may spend months completing a narrow set of tasks. In a startup or smaller project team, that same person may be asked to communicate with clients, organize information, manage deadlines, learn unfamiliar technology, solve problems, and contribute beyond the limits of a formal job description.

That can become exhausting.

It can also build a much wider range of abilities.

A side project may teach someone how to identify a genuine need, explain value, receive feedback, manage money, revise an idea, and create something another person is willing to use or purchase.

A freelance role may help someone discover that they are not only a writer but also a researcher, editor, strategist, teacher, and project manager.

A short-term contract can introduce a person to an industry, professional relationship, or skill that changes the direction of an entire career.

This type of work becomes a form of practical education because the outcome affects someone beyond the worker.

The work has an audience.

It has a purpose.

It needs to function in the real world.

That is very different from many school assignments, which are completed, graded, returned, and eventually lost inside a folder that no human being will ever willingly open again.

AI Will Expand the Possibilities

Artificial intelligence may make this working world even more open.

A young person can use AI to learn unfamiliar concepts, organize ideas, prepare for interviews, improve communication, research industries, create prototypes, analyze feedback, and build early versions of products or services.

Someone with limited resources may be able to perform work that once required a larger team.

A small business owner can receive support with market research, planning, writing, customer communication, and administration. A freelancer can automate repetitive work and spend more time on decisions that require human judgment.

A student can explore possible career pathways, practice professional communication, or receive feedback on an early idea.

But these opportunities make ethical and effective AI use essential.

Young people must learn when AI is supporting their thinking and when it is replacing it. They need to verify information, protect private data, evaluate bias, disclose how tools were used, and remain responsible for the final outcome.

Knowing how to generate an answer will not be enough.

They must decide whether the answer is accurate, appropriate, ethical, useful, and connected to what they are actually trying to accomplish.

That is why education cannot treat AI as either a magical solution or a forbidden shortcut. Students need guided practice while the consequences are still manageable, before their income, employment, or professional reputation depends on the quality of their judgment.

The Question Beneath the Opportunity Is Stability

My main concern is not that Gen Z will have too many options.

My concern is whether those options will allow them to build stable lives.

Where will the next paycheck come from? How will they save for retirement? How will they access affordable healthcare? How will they qualify for housing if their income changes every month? How will they support children, parents, or other family members?

What happens when one contract ends unexpectedly?

What happens when three different roles all demand immediate attention during the same week?

Someone can appear professionally successful while carrying enormous financial uncertainty. They may have several clients, an active online presence, interesting projects, and no reliable idea of how much money they will earn two months from now.

That is not always freedom.

Sometimes it is simply instability distributed across several calendars.

Three poorly paid roles do not necessarily create more security than one good role. They may simply create three sets of meetings, deadlines, emails, and administrative tasks.

The risk of burnout is real.

A person might work full-time, complete freelance projects at night, and build a side business on weekends. That arrangement may be useful for a limited period. It could help someone reduce debt, test an idea, or move into a new industry.

But it is difficult to build a healthy life if that level of activity becomes permanent.

Young people should not be taught that exhaustion is the price of ambition.

Flexibility Matters Only When It Creates Choice

The difference between opportunity and insecurity often comes down to choice.

Someone with stable income, savings, valuable skills, and strong professional relationships can use freelance work strategically. They can reject poorly paid projects, select opportunities that build their career, and take time to develop something of their own.

Someone living from one payment to the next has much less freedom. They may accept unreasonable deadlines, unclear expectations, or low rates because refusing the project feels more dangerous than completing it.

Both people may technically be freelancers.

Only one has meaningful control over the arrangement.

Students need to understand this distinction. Flexibility is not automatically valuable because work can be completed from a laptop or because someone can choose their own hours.

Flexibility becomes valuable when it provides greater control over time, income, development, and long-term direction.

Otherwise, the language of freedom may simply hide a system in which workers carry most of the risk while organizations enjoy most of the flexibility.

The Goal Should Be Sustainable, Purposeful Work

I do not want young people to reject freelance work, entrepreneurship, startup positions, or contract projects. There is far too much value in those experiences.

They can build confidence, adaptability, practical skill, professional relationships, and a clearer understanding of what kind of work someone wants to pursue.

But those experiences should help build toward something.

A short-term project should ideally build a skill.

A freelance role should provide evidence of ability.

A startup position should offer meaningful learning, responsibility, or ownership.

A side business should solve a genuine problem rather than exist only because the internet has convinced everyone that sleep is an underused revenue stream.

The larger goal is not to stay busy.

It is to build a foundation.

That foundation may eventually come from a strong full-time role, a reliable collection of clients, a successful business, or some combination of those paths. The form may differ, but the purpose remains the same: to create enough security to support yourself, care for a family, plan for the future, and eventually pass useful knowledge to the next generation.

Removing the old path without teaching students how to navigate the new one is not liberation. It is abandonment with motivational branding.

2. The Preparation Gap

The more I think about the working world Gen Z is entering, the more obvious it becomes that the education system should have changed a long time ago.

The difficulty is that education is an enormous system. The more regulations, standards, policies, testing requirements, and layers of administration that are added, the slower the whole thing becomes. It begins moving like a giant behemoth that everyone knows needs to turn, but no one can agree on who is allowed to touch the steering wheel. By the time one change has been researched, reviewed, approved, funded, implemented, and evaluated, the world outside school has changed again.

This does not mean education is useless. Schools still provide knowledge, structure, relationships, opportunities, and vital support for young people.

But too much of the system still operates according to assumptions that no longer match the world students are preparing to enter.

Students are often rewarded for:

• Following directions.

• Producing the expected answer.

• Meeting deadlines chosen by someone else.

• Working inside predefined subject areas.

• Completing assignments that disappear after grading.

• Avoiding mistakes.

• Waiting for someone else to evaluate their work.

That may help them survive school.

I am not convinced it prepares them to survive adulthood.

When Compliance Replaces Discovery

Teachers work inside systems built around pacing guides, standards, assessments, reporting requirements, and accountability measures. Even teachers who want students to explore and create often feel constrained by what must be covered, tested, documented, and completed.

Learning can slowly become more about compliance than discovery.

Students are told what to read, which question to answer, how many paragraphs to write, when the work is due, and what counts as a correct response.

The teacher decides the purpose, structure, deadline, and criteria. The student’s job is to determine what the teacher wants and produce it as efficiently as possible. This can create a “my way or the highway” culture even when no teacher intends it.

Clear expectations matter. Students do need structure. They should learn how to follow directions, meet deadlines, and complete work responsibly. But if that becomes the dominant experience of education, students may never learn what to do when no one has already defined the task. They become good at completing assignments while remaining unsure how to choose a direction, define a problem, or make a decision independently.

The modern working world is filled with situations where the instructions are incomplete, and no rubric exists.

A client may not know what they need.

A manager may provide conflicting feedback.

A new tool may appear that no one in the organization has used before.

A project may fail halfway through.

Someone may need to decide whether an opportunity is worth the risk.

Those situations require judgment, not merely compliance.

The Real World Is Not Divided Into Subject Blocks

Schools also separate knowledge into tidy subject areas.

Students move from English to mathematics to science to social studies as though each subject belongs inside its own sealed container.

The real world rarely works that way.

Starting a business may involve communication, mathematics, technology, research, design, ethics, and an understanding of human behavior.

Teaching a lesson may involve subject knowledge, storytelling, psychology, data, communication, and technology.

Solving a community problem may involve history, science, writing, budgeting, collaboration, and public speaking.

The world does not separate itself into forty-five-minute periods.

Yet students often learn writing without connecting it to leadership, project proposals, marketing, entrepreneurship, or professional communication. They study percentages without connecting them to taxes, investing, budgeting, interest, or retirement.

They study technology without considering how it changes privacy, ethics, work, and human relationships.

This is one reason STEAM education can be valuable. At its best, it allows students to combine skills around a real problem. They do not simply memorize information. They use it.

Unfortunately, these experiences are still not the norm in many classrooms. Too much learning remains centered around short answers, multiple-choice tests, and assignments designed mainly to prove that content was covered.

Students become good at preparing for the next test.

Then the test ends, the grade is recorded, and the knowledge often disappears with it.

What I Have Seen in Public Education

After teaching in a Washington public school for only about six months, I can already see how this affects students.

Many know how to move through a course without becoming deeply connected to what they are learning. They understand the mechanics of submission. They know how to click through lessons, complete quizzes, locate the minimum required information, and move on.

Some are extremely successful at this.

But success inside the system does not always mean students can explain why the work matters.

A student may complete an assignment correctly but struggle to transfer the skill to another situation. They may write a response because the prompt requires it, but have no idea how that kind of communication could matter outside the classroom.

Some students become so accustomed to being told exactly what to do that open-ended work makes them uncomfortable. Ask them to choose a topic, define a problem, or create something original, and they may freeze. This does not mean they lack ability.

It often means they have been trained to search for the expected answer. That becomes especially dangerous in the age of AI because AI can produce the expected answer very easily.

If the goal is simply to generate a correct paragraph, summarize a text, or complete a worksheet, students can outsource that process within seconds.

The answer is not to ban every tool and retreat toward more controlled testing.

The deeper answer is to design learning around things that are harder to outsource:

• Judgment

• Reflection

• Experience

• Decision-making

• Connection

• Revision

• Action

Personal Experience Is Becoming More Valuable

One of the most important changes brought about by AI is that polished language is no longer enough, as AI cannot capture the student’s experience, which is why they need to double down on bringing that personal aspect out.

It cannot replace what the student noticed, misunderstood, struggled with, questioned, rejected, changed, or decided. Personal experience is creating a new kind of currency.

The goal of education should not be to train students to produce perfect work, but work that looks human.

The goal should be to help them develop judgment that remains human.

3. Parents Cannot Be Expected to Solve This Alone

It would be easy to place the responsibility entirely on parents.

Families should teach children about work, money, professional communication, investing, career decisions, networking, AI, and the dozens of other things they will need to understand.

Parents know their children better than anyone else, so surely this preparation should begin at home.

Parents should talk with children about work, mistakes, decisions, money, and the kind of life they hope to build. They should gradually involve young people in real conversations instead of waiting until graduation to reveal that adulthood involves insurance, contracts, deadlines, taxes, and people expecting replies to emails.

But families cannot solve this alone.

Many parents are preparing their children for a working world they never experienced themselves. They may care enormously while having very little idea what that future will actually look like.

That does not make them irresponsible.

It makes them human beings attempting to guide someone through a landscape that continues changing beneath their own feet.

Traditional Advice Still Matters

I do not believe traditional career advice should be thrown away.

There is still value in telling young people to:

1. Earn a useful degree, certification, or qualification.

2. Find a good organization.

3. Work hard.

4. Stay out of serious trouble.

5. Build a strong reputation.

6. Manage money carefully.

7. Invest for the future.

These are not outdated ideas.

A degree can still open doors, especially in professions where specific credentials matter. A strong organization can provide training, relationships, stability, and experience. Hard work still matters, although it should not be confused with allowing an employer to consume every waking hour.

Young people should also learn how to invest rather than only being told to save. Saving is necessary for emergencies and short-term goals, but saving alone may not build long-term financial security.

Many people from previous generations were never taught much about compound growth, retirement accounts, or investing. Schools rarely taught those topics in a practical way either.

Someone today may earn a degree, work hard, avoid trouble, and still enter a job market filled with temporary contracts, automated screening systems, remote competition, unstable industries, and job advertisements asking for three years of experience before anyone is willing to provide the first year.

Parents Are Preparing Children for a World They Did Not Enter

Many parents entered adulthood before personal branding, remote collaboration, freelance platforms, the creator economy, and AI-assisted work became major parts of professional life.

Some of these things existed twenty years ago, but not at the same scale.

A person could build a professional reputation in the past, but they were less likely to be expected to maintain an online presence, build a public portfolio, publish ideas, communicate across multiple platforms, and prove their abilities before being invited to an interview.

The hiring process has changed too.

Thousands of applicants may now be screened by software before a human being reads their résumé. They may complete several rounds of interviews, sample projects, asynchronous videos, personality assessments, and unpaid tasks before receiving a decision.

A Résumé Is No Longer Enough

Young people increasingly need to show what they can do, not merely list what they have studied.

A degree and résumé still matter, but real-world evidence matters too. A student may have completed a course in design, coding, writing, education, or business. That tells an employer something. A portfolio showing what the student actually created tells the employer much more.

Can the student explain the problem they were trying to solve? Can they describe the decisions they made, the feedback they received, what failed, and what changed? Can they connect that experience to a new opportunity?

Those abilities can turn a thin résumé into something much more convincing. Freelance work, internships, school projects, volunteering, contract roles, and part-time employment can all contribute evidence.

Imagine that a student completes an instructional-design internship at Amazon and later interviews for a learning-design position at Nvidia. The interviewer may ask how the Amazon experience would help them succeed in the new role.

The degree may have helped the candidate reach the interview, but their ability to explain their experience will help them get the job.

Personal Branding Is About Making Value Visible

The phrase personal branding can sound artificial.

It brings to mind people turning every ordinary event into a leadership lesson or placing motivational quotations beside photographs of themselves holding coffee.

But personal branding does not need to mean transforming yourself into a business mascot.

At its best, it means making your value visible.

It means showing:

• What you know

• What you can do

• What problems you can solve

• What you care about

• How you work with others

A person can claim to be creative, hardworking, organized, collaborative, or skilled at problem-solving. Those words appear on so many résumés that they have nearly become decorative.

The better question is simple:

What have you done that shows it?

A strong communicator can present evidence to a real audience. A student interested in business can show a service they designed, tested, and improved. Someone interested in education can create a lesson, tutoring resource, or instructional video.

Real projects give students something to discuss.

They create the experiences from which professional confidence grows.

Unequal Access Creates Unequal Preparation

Some students already receive informal career education.

They hear adults discuss salaries, investments, contracts, job applications, and workplace expectations. Their families may help them find internships, introduce them to professionals, or explain how networking works.

Other students have no access to this.

Their parents may work extremely hard but have limited professional networks. They may be new to the country, unfamiliar with the education system, or focused on immediate financial needs. If career preparation is left entirely to families, students with the strongest networks will continue receiving the strongest guidance.

Schools cannot provide every student with the same family network, but they can create more equal access to mentors, professionals, authentic projects, internships, and practical career education.

The goal is not to blame parents, teachers, or schools.

The goal is to create a shared support structure.

Young people do not need adults to plan their entire lives.

They need adults who help them learn how to plan.

4. What Students Actually Need to Learn

If schools are going to prepare young people for the world they are actually entering, then we need to become clearer about what students need to learn beyond academic content.

Mathematics, science, literature, history, writing, art, and cultural knowledge remain essential. Students need knowledge before they can think deeply. You cannot analyze a subject you know nothing about, regardless of how often a school writes critical thinking into its mission statement.

But knowledge by itself is not enough.

Students also need to know what to do with what they learn.

In one section of Find Your Workverse, it discusses four connected capacities that parents and teachers can help young people develop across subjects:

1. Critical thinking

2. Big-picture thinking

3. Ethical judgment

4. Purpose

In my own observations over the years, I found that these terms are used so often in education and self-help that they can begin losing their meaning.

Everyone claims to teach critical thinking.

Every company claims to care about ethics.

Every speaker tells young people to find their purpose.

The useful work begins when we decide what these ideas actually look like in practice.

Critical Thinking: Learning to Judge What Is in Front of You

Critical thinking involves far more than asking students questions.

Questions matter, but critical thinking requires evaluation and analysis. It means examining claims, identifying gaps, recognizing assumptions, comparing explanations, and deciding what deserves trust.

It also means recognizing hyperbole when an opportunity sounds so perfect that someone is probably about to sell you a course while standing beside a rented sports car.

Students are growing up in a world where answers are everywhere. Search engines, AI, social media, influencers, advertising, and online courses provide immediate information and advice.

The problem is no longer access.

The problem is judgment.

Students need to examine who is making a claim, what evidence supports it, what information is missing, and what the source gains if someone believes it.

This matters directly in work.

A freelancer must evaluate clients, contracts, advice, and business opportunities. A job applicant must recognize when a supposedly flexible role actually requires constant availability. An employee using AI must determine whether the output is accurate and appropriate rather than accepting it because the language sounds confident.

Schools could help students analyze:

• Misleading job advertisements

• Conflicting sources

• AI-generated career recommendations

• Freelance contracts

• Social-media claims about income

• College advertisements that hide total cost

• Business ideas with concealed risks

The purpose should not be to guess the teacher’s answer.

Students should explain how they reached their judgment.

Big-Picture Thinking: Understanding What the Work Is Building

Critical thinking helps students judge what is in front of them.

Big-picture thinking helps them understand where it fits.

Some people naturally see broad patterns. Others focus more closely on details. Both abilities matter, which is one reason collaboration remains so important. Still, every student needs practice stepping back and asking what their work is building.

Schools often train students to think in isolated assignments.

• Complete the essay.

• Finish the project.

• Pass the course.

• Earn the credit.

• Move to the next grade.

The same pattern can continue into adulthood. Someone may accept a job, then a contract, then a freelance project, and later another role in a different industry. They develop many abilities but remain unsure what larger direction those experiences are creating.

Big-picture thinking involves noticing which skills repeatedly appear across your strongest work, which problems continue holding your attention, and what other people trust you to help them do.

It also means asking whether a project is creating long-term value or merely filling time.

A useful project should ideally leave behind skills the student can use:

• A stronger skill

• Evidence of ability

• A useful professional relationship

• A reusable process

• Greater confidence

• A clearer direction

• More ownership or independence

A meaningful portfolio can help students recognize these patterns. It should not show only polished final products. It should include drafts, feedback, revisions, mistakes, problems solved, and connections across experiences.

A portfolio is not only evidence.

It can become a map.

Ethics: Deciding What We Should Do With Our Abilities

Ethical judgment has become especially important in the age of AI.

Technology allows people to do things faster than institutions can create rules for them.

Students will enter workplaces filled with difficult decisions.

Should a company replace employees with AI to reduce costs? Should an app collect more personal data to improve its recommendations? Should a freelancer accept well-paid work that conflicts with their values? When does AI assistance become a replacement?

Ethics involves recognizing who benefits, who carries the risk, whose voice is missing, and what might be lost in exchange for speed, efficiency, or profit. The fastest decision is not always the best one.

Efficiency may conflict with care.

Profit may conflict with trust.

Convenience may conflict with independence.

People are trusted with meaningful responsibility not only because they complete tasks quickly. They are trusted because others believe they can make sound decisions when the answer is unclear.

Ethical judgment often determines how much responsibility they eventually receive inside it.

Purpose: Finding Something Worth Continuing

Purpose is another word that has been stretched thin by the self-help industry.

Young people are told to follow their passion and discover the one perfect calling they were born to pursue. That creates enormous pressure for someone who may still need reminders to bring a charger to charge their laptop.

Purpose should not mean to find one perfect career at seventeen because purpose takes time to build.

It can begin with curiosity, concern, or a problem someone wants to help solve and then grow from there.

In Jim Collins’ book What to Make of a Life he calls purpose encodings, which are actually the raw psychological ingredients that make purpose possible. Encodings are the internal, innate capacities already hardwired inside you, awaiting discovery. Uncovering and clarifying your encodings is a lifelong process and usually takes years of trial, error, and intentional self-observation to map your encodings.

When I was younger, I thought I might become a music educator. Music mattered to me, and I could imagine building my career around it.

I did not follow that direction.

Looking back, I am glad my life unfolded differently. Had I remained on that path, I may never have moved to Indonesia or spent fourteen years teaching abroad. I would not have developed the same understanding of culture, education, language, curriculum, and learning that now shapes my work after returning to the United States. But that experience right there shows me that maybe teaching is my encoding because my discovery took about 30 years’ worth of experimenting.

My purpose did not arrive as one clear calling.

It developed through experience and changed as I changed.

An interest becomes more useful when it connects to a problem, a person, or a contribution.

Purpose is not simply about feeling inspired.

It is about directing effort toward something that matters.

How the Four Capacities Work Together

These four abilities strengthen each other.

1. Critical thinking helps students understand a problem.

2. Big-picture thinking helps them see how it connects to a larger system.

3. Ethics helps them contribute responsibly.

4. Purpose gives them a reason to continue.

Without critical thinking, purpose can become blind enthusiasm. Without big-picture thinking, students may work hard without understanding where the work is leading. Without ethics, ambition can become exploitation. Without purpose, students may become highly capable at work they do not care about.

Together, these capacities help students move from completing tasks to directing their own learning and careers.

5. Career Education Should Be a Process, Not a One-Time Event

Career education often arrives too late and in a form that is far too shallow.

A student completes an interest survey, attends a career fair, listens to a few adults describe their jobs, and then is expected to choose a college major or career pathway.

They cannot replace years of guided exploration.

You cannot spend most of a student’s education telling them what to study, what answer to provide, and how to earn the grade, then expect one afternoon in a gymnasium filled with folding tables and company brochures to help them decide what to do with the rest of their life.

Career development should begin gradually and continue across grade levels.

Elementary School: Exploration

Elementary students do not need to choose a career. Most don’t even know all the details that go into actual work. They might joke around about wanting to become a veterinarian, astronaut, athlete, YouTuber, firefighter, or all five because that’s what they hear at school or from other family members.

The purpose should be exploration rather than commitment.

Students can:

• Learn about different kinds of work.

• Connect school subjects to real-world problems.

• Notice developing interests and strengths.

• Complete small collaborative projects.

• Learn that abilities improve through practice.

Children should understand that work involves more than earning money. It can involve solving problems, helping others, repairing systems, creating things, caring for communities, and turning ideas into something useful.

Middle School: Experimentation

Middle school is where exploration can become more deliberate.

Students begin developing stronger interests, values, and working preferences. They start noticing whether they enjoy working independently or with a group, whether they prefer structure or open-ended problems, and whether they are drawn toward people, ideas, systems, technology, or hands-on work.

They also begin asking why school matters, sometimes through the highly expressive method of staring silently at a blank screen and refusing to begin.

Schools can use that question as an opening.

Middle school students could:

• Try short projects connected to different fields.

• Interview adults about their careers.

• Reflect on interests, strengths, and working preferences.

• Learn basic budgeting, investing, debt, and tax concepts.

• Study digital reputation and data privacy.

• Begin a skills portfolio.

They should hear honest career stories, including mistakes, changes in direction, and the parts of work adults did not expect.

High School: Real Experience

High school should connect students to the world outside school.

Students are approaching decisions with real financial and personal consequences. They may choose college, work, military service, apprenticeships, certifications, freelancing, entrepreneurship, or some combination of these paths.

They need more than grades and family expectations.

High school students should have access to:

• Internships and mentorships

• Job shadowing

• Client-based projects

• Volunteer experiences

• Professional communication practice

• Financial education

• Contract and benefits literacy

• Responsible AI use

• Portfolio development

• Multiple postsecondary pathways

6. Students Need Guided Independence

One of the biggest mistakes adults make is assuming independence appears the moment support disappears.

It does not.

If a student spends most of childhood being told what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and what the correct answer should look like, suddenly removing guidance at eighteen does not create independence.

It creates confusion.

Parents and schools often fall into one of two extremes. Adults either manage nearly every important decision or eventually step away and expect young people to figure everything out alone.

Overprotection prevents students from practicing judgment.

Abandonment expects them to possess judgment they were never allowed to develop.

The better approach is guided independence.

Independence is not created by removing support. It is created by transferring responsibility gradually.

A useful progression includes four stages.

1. Adults Model Decisions

Adults should explain how they evaluate opportunities, risk, money, consequences, and trade-offs.

A parent considering whether a teenager should accept a part-time job might discuss the wage, transportation, schedule, safety, school responsibilities, and whether the experience will build useful skills.

Students need to see the reasoning, not only the final decision.

2. Adults Make Decisions With Students

At this stage, adults still provide structure, but students contribute ideas and begin weighing trade-offs.

It is faster to make decisions for young people. It is also easier.

But efficiency is not the only goal.

If adults always provide the answer, students never learn how the answer was reached.

3. Students Decide With Feedback

Students begin choosing a direction and explaining their reasoning. Adults provide feedback without immediately taking control.

Some mistakes need to happen.

A student may choose a project that is too broad, underestimate the time required, or apply for something before their portfolio is ready.

These experiences become evidence.

The adult’s role shifts from director to coach.

4. Students Act Independently and Reflect

Eventually, students should make decisions, carry them out, and evaluate the outcome. Adults remain available, but ownership belongs to the student.

Reflection turns experience into learning.

Students consider what went well, what they underestimated, what feedback they received, and what they would change next time.

This is how writing, research, and AI use should be taught too. Students first observe a process, then practice it with support, then make decisions with feedback, and finally act independently.

Scaffolding is valuable.

It is also supposed to be temporary.

7. A CARE-Based Model for Career Readiness

Career readiness should not be reduced to a personality test followed by a list of occupations that supposedly fit the student.

Those assessments may help students notice preferences, but telling a fourteen-year-old that they are an “investigative type” or “creative communicator” does not prepare them to build a career.

It gives them a mildly flattering label and sends them back into the same school routine.

Students need experiences that reveal ability through action.

This is where the CARE Teaching Method becomes useful.

CARE stands for:

1. Clarify

2. Articulate

3. Refine

4. Execute

I developed CARE to help students move beyond passive learning and turn ideas into understanding, judgment, and action.

The same process can help students explore careers, build abilities, and create evidence of what they can do.

A Real Example: When Writing Left the Classroom

One of the strongest examples from my own teaching came from a sixth-grade student I worked with in writing.

She entered the Inklings writing competition and won second place in poetry.

This was not merely another assignment that disappeared after grading.

She developed an idea, shaped it through language, revised it, submitted it to a real competition, and received recognition from people outside the classroom.

That is real-world learning.

This student did exactly that.

She took an idea, developed it, and produced a finished piece that reached an authentic audience.

What also stood out was the level of her writing. Although she was only in sixth grade, her work appeared closer to what I might expect from a strong eleventh- or twelfth-grade student.

That exposes one limitation of schooling.

Students are grouped mainly by age, but their abilities do not develop according to one neat schedule. One sixth grader may need significant help developing a paragraph. Another may already be producing sophisticated poetry at a high-school level.

The system often asks both students to complete work designed for an imagined average learner who may exist mainly inside the pacing guide.

The competition gave this student something school does not always provide: a challenge that matched her actual ability.

Instead of simply being told she was advanced, she had the opportunity to prove it.

Students should not only be told what they are good at.

They need opportunities to build evidence.

Clarify: What Am I Trying to Accomplish?

The student first needed to move beyond the vague task of “write a poem.”

She had to consider what she wanted to express, what feeling she wanted the reader to experience, and what kind of language could carry that meaning.

Clarification gives work direction.

In career exploration, a student might move from “I like writing” to “I want to learn how to create writing that produces a strong emotional response.”

A student interested in business might ask whether they can create a small service that solves a real problem.

Someone interested in technology might try to build something that makes a task easier.

The student does not need to choose a permanent career.

They need a meaningful next experience.

Articulate: What Can I Do, and What Evidence Shows It?

Many young people possess abilities they cannot yet explain.

When asked about their strengths, they reach for generic words such as hardworking, creative, or good with people.

Those phrases mean little without evidence.

The sixth-grade student did not need to claim she was a talented writer. She had written a poem strong enough to earn second place in a real competition.

That is evidence.

She could explain the idea, decisions, revisions, feedback, and what she learned from the experience.

That kind of articulation eventually becomes useful in portfolios, applications, interviews, and professional conversations.

Refine: How Can Feedback Improve the Work?

Real work rarely arrives perfectly on the first attempt.

Students need experience receiving feedback, judging what is useful, and revising without losing ownership.

For the poem, refinement may have involved improving imagery, rhythm, clarity, word choice, or emotional impact.

Not every suggestion needed to be accepted.

Part of refinement is learning that feedback is information, not a command.

AI can also support this stage when used carefully. A student might ask AI where the poem becomes unclear or where imagery feels repetitive.

But the tool should not replace the poem with something more polished and less personal.

The student remains the writer.

Execute: Put the Work Into the World

The final stage is where learning becomes real.

The student submits the poem.

The designer shares the portfolio.

The aspiring teacher tutors someone.

The student interested in business tests the service.

The student interested in technology builds the prototype.

Execution does not guarantee success.

It creates evidence.

The student learns what happens when an idea meets reality.

Even if the poem had not placed, the process would still have mattered. She would have created something, submitted it, received outside evaluation, and learned how to improve.

That is far more meaningful than leaving the poem inside a school folder after receiving a score.

CARE Turns Career Readiness Into a Cycle

Career readiness should be a repeated cycle:

• Clarify an interest, skill, or problem.

• Articulate current ability and evidence.

• Refine through feedback, testing, and reflection.

• Execute through a real project or contribution.

Afterward, students begin again with stronger knowledge of themselves.

That is how a career gradually forms.

Not through one perfect decision.

Not through one college major.

Not through one counselor explaining that a quiz suggests the student might enjoy working with data.

It forms through experiences that reveal what someone can do, what they care about, and where their abilities might become useful.

8. What Schools Can Begin Doing Now

Schools do not need to redesign the entire education system before Tuesday morning. That would be nice, naturally, but education tends to move at the speed of a committee waiting for approval from another committee.

Meaningful change can still begin inside existing classrooms.

Schools could start by:

• Replacing one purely academic assignment with a real-world project.

• Asking students to identify the audience and purpose of their work.

• Requiring students to explain what changed between drafts and why.

• Including AI evaluation and disclosure in assignments.

• Inviting professionals to discuss mistakes and career changes, not only job titles.

• Teaching taxes, contracts, benefits, budgeting, investing, and freelance rates.

• Helping students translate school experiences into portfolio evidence.

• Assessing judgment and reflection alongside the final product.

The goal is not to turn every classroom into a business incubator.

Students still need literature, history, mathematics, science, art, culture, imagination, and ideas with value beyond immediate employment.

But they also need help connecting that knowledge to life.

9. Teachers, Parents, and Mentors Must Share the Work

No single teacher, parent, counselor, or mentor can prepare a young person for every possible future.

Students need a network of guidance.

• Teachers can help students think critically, express ideas, make decisions, connect knowledge, and complete meaningful projects.

• Parents and caregivers can discuss real financial and career choices, share mistakes, introduce children to different professions, and gradually involve them in planning.

• Mentors and community partners can show how work functions outside school, provide authentic feedback, and help students imagine pathways beyond their immediate surroundings.

This shared approach also reduces inequality.

Some students grow up surrounded by adults who understand careers, investing, college, communication, and networking.

Schools and communities cannot give every student the same family background, but they can make more of this hidden knowledge visible.

Freedom Requires Preparation

The world Gen Z is entering may offer extraordinary possibilities. Young people may work remotely, build businesses, collaborate internationally, use AI, and combine several kinds of work.

But possibility without preparation becomes confusion.

We cannot tell students that traditional career paths are disappearing, encourage them to become flexible and entrepreneurial, and then leave them to learn through exploitative jobs, financial mistakes, online influencers, and algorithmic advice.

They need practice judging opportunities, understanding risk, building skills, communicating value, using AI responsibly, and connecting work to something meaningful.

The purpose of education is not to predict the exact career each student will have.

It is to help young people enter uncertainty with enough knowledge, judgment, experience, and support to build their own direction.

That preparation can begin with one real project, one honest career conversation, one financial lesson, one mentor, or one meaningful decision that the student is trusted to make and reflect upon.

If young people are expected to create their own path through a rapidly changing world of work, when are we going to begin teaching them how to build one?

Many of us have learned how to collect information.

We highlight books. We save articles. We bookmark videos. We copy useful passages into notebooks, Google Docs, or note-taking applications. We may even create carefully organized folders filled with material we plan to use someday.

But someday has a terrible attendance record.

The problem is not always that we need more information. The problem is that we do not have a clear process for turning the information we already have into something tangible.

A note may preserve an idea, but preservation is not the final purpose of learning. The goal is to use what we read, observe, experience, and study to create something that did not exist before.

That creation could be an essay, lesson, presentation, experiment, business offer, improved workflow, engineering design, difficult conversation, personal decision, or solution to a real problem.

This is where smart notes can become action notes.

An action note does more than record what you learned. It identifies what the idea could change, what you could create from it, and what you will do next.

It helps move your thinking off the page and into the world.

A Smart Note Develops an Idea

In How to Take Smart Notes, Sönke Ahrens presents note-taking as part of the thinking and writing process rather than a separate activity that happens before the real work begins.

Writing does not merely document finished thinking. Writing helps create the thinking.

When you explain an idea in your own words, you discover what you understand. When you compare it with another idea, you notice agreements and contradictions. When you connect it to your experience, you begin to see how it might be used. When you try to turn it into a project, you discover what is still missing.

A smart note should therefore do more than answer:

What did the source say?

It should also explore:

• What does this mean?

• Why does it matter?

• What does it connect to?

• Where could it be useful?

• What does it challenge?

• What could I make, change, test, or improve because of it?

This is where a note starts developing a life beyond the source that inspired it.

The Missing Step: Turning the Note Toward Action

A person can create intelligent, well-written, highly connected notes and still never do anything with them.

The notes may be thoughtful. The system may be organized. The dashboard may be beautiful enough to make productivity influencers quietly emotional.

But if the ideas never influence a decision, project, lesson, experiment, product, or piece of writing, the system remains incomplete.

That is why I am beginning to think about a category of notes I call action notes.

An action note is a developed note that points toward a possible use.

It does not mean that every idea must immediately become a major project. Some action notes may lead to a ten-minute change. Others may remain available until enough related notes gather around them and reveal a larger direction.

The important difference is that an action note contains movement.

Instead of ending with:

Feedback helps people improve.

An action note might continue:

In my next writing lesson, I will ask students to identify one piece of feedback they accepted, one they rejected, and how their final draft changed as a result.

The original statement stores an idea.

The action note creates the beginning of a classroom practice.

Instead of writing:

Customers are more likely to buy a product that solves a specific problem.

An entrepreneur might add:

I will interview five teachers and ask which part of AI-era writing instruction currently creates the most confusion or additional work.

Now the idea has become a research action.

Instead of writing:

Repeated system failures may reveal a problem in the process rather than an individual mistake.

An engineer might add:

I will review the last six failure reports and classify whether each problem came from design, materials, instructions, environment, or operator behavior.

The note has moved from observation toward investigation.

A Six-Step Action-Note Process

The following process can help turn a rough note into something that supports practical work.

1. Capture the Initial Idea

Begin with a fleeting note.

This may be a sentence from a book, a question from a meeting, an observation from class, a customer complaint, a problem with a design, or a thought that appears while you are doing something else.

Do not try to perfect it immediately. Capture enough information that your future self will understand why it mattered.

A weak fleeting note might say:

Students need more reflection.

A stronger version would say:

Students often revise after receiving feedback, but they are rarely asked to explain what they changed or why.

The second version preserves the tension that made the idea interesting.

2. Put It Into Your Own Words

Return to the note while the context is still fresh.

Explain the idea without copying the source’s wording. This forces you to test whether you understand it or merely recognize it.

Ask:

• What is the main point?

• How would I explain it to another person?

• What part seems most important?

• What does the idea mean in my context?

Writing in your own words begins separating your thinking from the original source. It turns borrowed language into personal understanding.

3. Elaborate on the Idea

Next, expand the note.

Explain why it matters, add an example, connect it to prior knowledge, and identify any unanswered questions.

A practical elaboration structure is:

1. The idea: What did I learn or notice?

2. The meaning: What does it mean in my own words?

3. The significance: Why does it matter?

4. The connection: What does it relate to?

5. The gap: What is still unclear or missing?

6. The possibility: Where could I use it?

Elaboration acts as a doorkeeper. Not every fleeting thought needs to enter your permanent system.

If you cannot explain, connect, question, or use a note, it may not need further development. The goal is not to preserve everything. The goal is to preserve and develop the ideas that can grow.

4. Identify a Possible Output

Now ask the question that turns a smart note toward action:

What could this become?

Possible outputs include:

• a paragraph or essay

• a classroom activity

• a discussion question

• a revised workflow

• a prototype

• a research experiment

• a newsletter section

• a business offer

• a presentation

• a video

• a checklist

• a conversation

• a change in behavior

• a better decision

Do not limit “output” to something large or public.

A student’s action note could lead to a stronger thesis statement.

An educator’s note could become a five-minute reflection routine.

An entrepreneur’s note could become a customer interview question.

An engineer’s note could become a testable design modification.

The action should fit the idea.

5. Write the Smallest Useful Next Step

Large projects often remain unfinished because the note points toward a vague ambition rather than a clear action.

“Write an article” is not a useful next step.

“Place my five notes about elaboration into a possible article sequence” is much clearer.

“Improve the course” is vague.

“Review the first three lessons and identify where students produce evidence of their own thinking” gives you somewhere to begin.

“Develop a new product” may sit untouched for months.

“Write a one-paragraph description of the customer problem and send it to three potential users” creates movement.

A strong action note should contain a next step that can be completed, observed, or tested.

Use this sentence:

Because of this idea, my next useful action is to __________.

That one line can rescue a note from years of decorative imprisonment.

6. Return the Result to Your Notes

Execution is not the end of the process.

After you take action, return to the original note and record what happened.

Ask:

• What did I try?

• What happened?

• What worked?

• What failed?

• What surprised me?

• What would I change?

• What new question appeared?

• What should happen next?

This turns the result into new thinking.

A teacher might discover that students can identify which feedback they followed but struggle to explain why they rejected other suggestions.

An entrepreneur might discover that teachers describe a different problem from the one the product was originally designed to solve.

An engineer might discover that the apparent design problem is actually caused by unclear operating instructions.

The project produces feedback. That feedback creates new notes. Those notes improve the next version of the work.

This is how the work carries you forward.

Organize Notes by Use, Not Only by Topic

Most note systems organize information by subject.

A note may be placed under education, engineering, marketing, psychology, or productivity. That can be useful, but topics alone do not always tell us what to do with the idea.

A topic tells you what the note is about.

A context tells you where the note might be useful.

A note about feedback could connect to:

• revising a student essay

• improving an employee evaluation

• testing a product

• reviewing an engineering prototype

• responding to customers

• adjusting a personal habit

The note becomes more valuable when it can travel between contexts.

When you save an action note, consider adding a few possible uses:

Possible uses: writing instruction, student reflection, product development, revision systems, coaching.

This makes the note easier to rediscover when you begin a relevant project.

Let Projects Emerge From Your Notes

We often think a project must begin with a complete plan.

Choose the topic. Create the outline. Establish every deadline. Then begin the research.

But useful projects can also develop from the bottom up.

As you continue taking notes, certain ideas will return. Several notes may gather around the same question. You may notice a contradiction between sources, a problem that keeps appearing, or a connection between subjects that initially seemed unrelated.

That cluster can become the beginning of a project.

A student may notice that several notes connect economic inequality with access to education. That cluster could become a research question.

A teacher may notice that many classroom problems connect to students being unable to explain their choices. That could become a new reflection routine.

An entrepreneur may notice repeated questions about how teachers can use AI without replacing student thinking. That could become a workshop, resource, or product.

An engineer may notice that several technical failures share a human-factors component. That could lead to a redesigned process or interface.

Instead of brainstorming only from whatever happens to be in your mind at that moment, you can practice what might be called slip-box storming.

Ask:

What have I already been building, questioning, connecting, and developing over time?

That question produces stronger projects because it treats thinking as a process rather than a performance.

A Reusable Action-Note Template

Use the following structure when an idea seems worth carrying forward:

Source or Situation

Where did this idea come from?

The Idea in My Own Words

What does it mean?

Why It Matters

What problem, possibility, or question does it reveal?

Connections

What prior ideas, experiences, or notes relate to it?

Tensions or Gaps

What is missing, uncertain, or contradictory?

Possible Uses

Where could this idea be applied?

Tangible Output

What could this become?

Next Useful Action

What specific step will I take?

Result and Reflection

What happened after I acted?

You do not need to answer every section with equal detail. The template exists to guide thinking, not to become another form that must be completed for the sake of proving that forms can reproduce.

Bring Action Notes Into the Classroom

This edition began with a simple frustration: too many notes become storage.

We highlight passages, collect quotes, save summaries, and build elaborate digital systems, but the ideas often remain untouched. They never become a connection, a question, a lesson, a piece of writing, or something we actually use.

A smart note becomes an Action Note when it helps us do something with what we have learned.

That same principle shaped The CARE AI-Ready Classroom Starter Kit, which I created for educators who want students to develop ideas before turning to AI or producing a polished final answer.

The Starter Kit helps teachers redesign one existing lesson around four stages:

Clarify what students are trying to understand, question, notice, or create.

Articulate their initial thinking in their own words.

Refine their ideas through notes, evidence, feedback, mental models, discussion, and responsible AI use.

Execute their learning through meaningful writing, teaching, problem-solving, discussion, creation, or action.

The kit includes Physical Action Notes, Source and Thinking Notes, a notebook-to-second-brain workflow, a “My Thinking First” page, AI reflection tools, ten thinking-partner prompts, a Mental Model Selector, and a complete sample ELA lesson redesign.

You do not need to build an elaborate note-taking system or redesign your entire curriculum. Begin with one lesson and help students leave a visible trail showing how an idea began, developed, connected, changed, and became something original.

Explore The CARE AI-Ready Classroom

Don’t just help students collect information. Help them work with it until it becomes something.

Build a Body of Work, Not a Storage System

The purpose of action notes is not to create a perfect archive.

It is to build a body of work.

Over time, your notes should help you write more clearly, teach more effectively, ask better questions, test stronger ideas, and solve more meaningful problems.

Your notebook should not only show what you have consumed.

It should show how your thinking has changed.

Your digital system should not only contain what other people have said.

It should contain your explanations, connections, disagreements, experiments, results, and developing ideas.

You are writing when you take a note.

You are writing when you explain an idea.

You are writing when you connect two thoughts.

You are writing when you notice a contradiction.

You are writing when you revise your first impression.

And you are completing the learning process when that writing helps you do something differently in the world.

Nobody ever truly starts from scratch.

Every note, experiment, lesson, draft, failure, question, and completed project can become material for the next piece of work.

Capture the idea.

Put it into your own words.

Elaborate on it.

Connect it.

Give it a possible use.

Take the next useful action.

Then return to the result and continue the cycle.

That is how notes stop being storage.

That is how thinking on paper becomes practical work.

And that is how what you read, learn, and experience can become something tangible, useful, and uniquely yours.

Several years ago, in 2019 to be exact, I listened to Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford. I ended up connecting with the book so deeply that I wrote a long Facebook post filled with notes, reflections, and ideas in my own words. What drew me to Beethoven was not simply that he loved music or that he became one of the greatest composers in history. It was that he seemed to have so much inside of him that other people could not understand. The only way he could truly reach them was through his work. He had to take everything he believed, studied, suffered through, and observed about human nature and turn it into a form that other people could experience.

I felt as though I had found someone who understood a struggle I had been trying to make sense of in myself: the long, uncertain process of discovering your voice and turning what is inside you into something other people can understand.

At the time, I believed I was simply writing about Beethoven. Looking back, I can see that I was also writing about my own process of becoming. I was trying to understand how a person develops a distinctive voice, learns to trust it, and finds a form through which it can reach other people.

That process does not belong only to composers, writers, or artists.

It is also part of becoming an educator.

Teachers do not enter the classroom with a fully developed philosophy, identity, or voice. We build them gradually through the books we read, the lessons we teach, the mistakes we make, the students we learn from, and the ideas we continue refining over time.

The Myth of Finding Yourself Early

We often talk about finding your voice as if it is hidden somewhere inside of you, waiting to be discovered fully formed. You take the right class, read the right book, meet the right mentor, or have one life-changing realization, and suddenly everything becomes clear.

For some people, perhaps it does happen quickly. They seem to understand who they are, what they believe, and what kind of work they want to produce almost instantaneously. For many others, it takes quite a long time. Their voice develops slowly through experience, confusion, imitation, experimentation, failure, reflection, and revision.

Beethoven did not begin as the Beethoven we now recognize. He studied existing traditions, absorbed the influence of earlier composers, experimented with familiar forms, and gradually pushed those forms into something more personal. His unmistakable voice emerged through years of work, especially during the period surrounding the Eroica Symphony and the compositions that followed. It was not one sudden discovery. It was a long accumulation of choices.

In 1802, when Beethoven was thirty-one and increasingly aware that his hearing loss might be permanent, he wrote what became known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. In it, he described his isolation and despair, but also explained that his art kept him from ending his life because he still felt there was work within him that had not yet been brought into the world.

This is deeply human. He had not yet completed the work that would define him, but he felt the possibility of it was still within him. His purpose was not completely visible, even to himself. He had to keep working toward it.

Educators often experience a less dramatic version of the same uncertainty. We enter teaching with ideas about the kind of teacher we want to become, but those ideas are usually incomplete.

• We borrow strategies from mentors.

• We repeat routines that worked for our own teachers.

• We follow curriculum guides, school expectations, teaching frameworks, and evaluation rubrics.

Some of these help us, but others pull us away from what we actually believe about learning.

Over time, we begin asking different questions. What do I want students to remember from my classroom? What kind of thinking am I trying to develop? Which parts of my teaching genuinely belong to me, and which parts am I performing because I think a teacher is supposed to act that way?

These questions are not signs that we have failed to find our identity. They are part of how that identity is formed.

Research on teacher professional identity describes it as something continually shaped by beliefs, emotions, experience, relationships, and the environment in which a teacher works. It is not a permanent label that appears when someone earns a teaching credential. It changes as teachers reflect on their actions, encounter new students, take on different roles, and reconsider what good teaching means.

Your Teaching Voice Is Built in Fragments

One of the most fascinating things I learned about Beethoven was the way he composed. A finished symphony may sound inevitable, as if it arrived in his mind as one complete and perfect piece. His sketchbooks show something very different.

He collected fragments. A rhythm might appear before the melody. The ending might come before the beginning. A small theme could be written, crossed out, altered, moved, expanded, and connected to something else. Some sketchbooks contain the detailed development of tiny musical ideas, while others include longer drafts that attempt to establish the continuity of an entire piece. The pages can appear crowded, disorganized, and even chaotic.

This feels very much like teaching.

A teacher’s philosophy rarely appears as one complete statement. It develops in fragments. One piece comes from a lesson that went unexpectedly well. Another comes from a student who could explain an idea aloud but struggled to put it into writing. Another comes from a failed activity that looked impressive in the lesson plan but produced very little actual thinking. Another comes from a book, a colleague, a conversation, or a moment when a student asks a question that changes the direction of the entire class.

At first, these experiences may seem disconnected. Over time, themes begin to appear.

Perhaps you repeatedly notice that students understand more when they explain ideas in their own words. Perhaps you realize that discussion improves when students have time to write before speaking. Perhaps you discover that students need fewer instructions and more meaningful questions. Perhaps you become increasingly interested in feedback, revision, project-based learning, student independence, or helping learners connect academic knowledge to their lives.

Those recurring observations are not random. They are the fragments of your teaching voice.

The problem is that many educators do not have a system for collecting them. We finish a lesson, move to the next class, respond to emails, grade assignments, attend meetings, and begin planning again. The experience disappears before we have time to understand what it was trying to teach us.

You do not need to write a complete teaching philosophy after every lesson. You only need to notice one piece. What worked? What surprised you? Where did students become confused? What did you change while teaching? What would you keep, remove, or refine next time?

A small observation can become the beginning of a much larger idea.

Form Must Carry the Material

One line from my old notes continues to stay with me: details do not make up the total work. The material matters, but the form determines how the whole person is affected.

A Beethoven symphony is not powerful simply because it contains many good notes. The notes are arranged into a form that carries the listener through tension, movement, conflict, release, and transformation. Each individual detail serves the experience of the whole.

Teachers face the same challenge. We may have valuable content, strong resources, interesting examples, thoughtful discussion questions, and carefully designed slides. But a collection of good materials does not automatically become a meaningful learning experience. Before we decide what students will read, watch, discuss, or create, we first need to clarify what the learning is actually meant to accomplish.

This is where the first stage of CARE becomes essential. To Clarify is to identify the purpose of the lesson before filling it with activities. What are students trying to understand? What question should guide their attention? What confusion, problem, or idea are they working through? What should they be able to explain, reconsider, or do by the end that they could not do at the beginning?

Without that clarity, lessons can become collections of disconnected notes. Students complete the reading, answer the questions, watch the video, and submit the assignment, but they may never understand how the pieces fit together or why the learning matters. The activities may all be educational in isolation, yet the lesson still lacks a clear center.

Clarifying the purpose gives the material its form. Once the teacher knows what students are trying to understand, the other decisions become easier to make. What question brings students into the lesson? What information do they actually need? Where should they pause and explain an idea in their own words? When should they encounter difficulty? How will feedback help them refine their thinking? What should the final task reveal about how their understanding has changed?

This is the difference between covering content and designing learning. Covering content asks whether the information was presented. Designing learning asks whether the form of the lesson helped students make sense of it.

A teacher may possess knowledge far beyond the current understanding of the students. The goal is not to reduce the idea until it becomes meaningless. The goal is to clarify the essential meaning and then create a form that makes its depth accessible. You must bring people toward your level by building a path they can actually follow.

That requires knowledge of the subject, but it also requires knowledge of people. It means understanding attention, confusion, motivation, prior knowledge, emotion, language, and the limits of working memory. It means recognizing that students cannot experience the whole composition while we are still handing them disconnected notes.

Clarify gives the lesson its direction. The materials, examples, discussions, and activities then become more than separate details. They become parts of a coherent learning experience, each one helping students move toward a clearer understanding of the whole.

Let the Work Reveal the Educator

We sometimes believe that we must define ourselves before we can create meaningful work. In reality, the work often helps us discover who we are.

Beethoven worked on more than one composition at the same time. Ideas moved, developed, disappeared, and returned in new forms. He did not wait until he fully understood himself before beginning. He composed his way toward that understanding.

Educators can do the same.

You may not yet have a perfectly articulated philosophy of education. You may still be unsure whether your deepest interest is literacy, inquiry, student agency, curriculum design, technology, inclusion, assessment, or something you cannot quite name. That does not mean you must remain still until the answer arrives.

Teach the lesson. Try the routine. Write the reflection. Design the project. Share the idea. Study what happens.

Your professional identity becomes clearer when you can see the patterns across the work you have already produced. The same questions keep returning. The same values keep influencing your decisions. The same kinds of problems continue to hold your attention.

Self-authorship is the gradual ability to build an internal foundation for your beliefs, identity, and decisions rather than depending entirely on external authorities to define them. It does not mean ignoring research, mentors, standards, or other people. It means learning from them while developing the judgment to decide what you believe and why.

Teaching will always involve external expectations. There will be standards, policies, evaluations, trends, new technologies, and wonderfully urgent initiatives that everyone must apparently adopt by next Tuesday. A strong professional identity helps a teacher evaluate these demands without either blindly accepting or automatically rejecting them.

You begin to ask: Does this help students think more clearly? Does it support the kind of learning I believe matters? How could I adapt it to my students and context? What evidence would show that it is working?

The Work That Is Still Inside You

When I look back at that old Facebook post, I can see that I was trying to understand something I did not yet have the language to explain.

I was writing about Beethoven, but I was also thinking about purpose, creative identity, learning, philosophy, and the difficulty of translating what is inside you into a form that other people can understand. Many of the ideas I work with now were already there in fragments. They had not yet become a complete framework, business, newsletter, or educational philosophy. But the theme was present.

That is why our unfinished thoughts matter.

You may be closer to your voice than you think. It might already exist in your lesson notes, your frustrations, the books you underline, the activities you keep redesigning, and the questions you continue asking long after the professional development session has ended.

A CARE Practice for Developing Your Voice

This week, choose one recurring teaching question and write a single page about it. Explain what you currently believe, describe one classroom experience that shaped that belief, and identify one small change you will test in your next lesson. Do not wait for the full symphony. Begin with the fragment and let the work carry you forward.

Choose one question about teaching that you cannot stop thinking about. It might be:

• How can I help students explain ideas in their own words?

• How can feedback lead to real revision?

• How can I make learning feel connected to life outside school?

• How can students use AI without surrendering their thinking?

• How can I create more student independence without removing support?

Then work through the CARE process.

Clarify: What exactly are you trying to understand about this question? Where does it appear in your teaching, and why does it matter to you?

Articulate: Write what you currently believe in your own words. Do not try to sound academic. Explain it as you would to a trusted colleague.

Refine: Test the idea through reading, conversation, classroom evidence, and feedback. Look for exceptions. Notice where your belief is incomplete or where your practice does not yet match it.

Execute: Change one part of one lesson. Try the idea in a tangible form and observe what happens.

This is how a teaching philosophy becomes more than a statement written for an interview or evaluation. It becomes a living composition built through practice.

Then share this edition with one educator who may still be wondering whether they have found their voice. Sometimes people do not need another strategy. They need permission to keep becoming.

One of the biggest mistakes we make when learning is assuming that recognition is the same as understanding.

We read a sentence. It sounds familiar. We nod along. We highlight it. Maybe we even copy it into a notebook or digital document and feel productive for a day or two.

But copying an idea is not the same as understanding it. Recognizing an idea is not the same as being able to use it, and storing an idea is not the same as making it part of your own thinking.

This is where elaboration can make a huge difference.

Elaboration is the act of taking an idea and expanding it in your own words. It means explaining what the idea means, why it matters, what it connects to, where it might be useful, and what it makes you think about next.

In other words, elaboration is where reading becomes thinking, and thinking becomes writing, teaching, creating, or real-world action.

Elaboration Turns Information Into Understanding

When we read, it is easy to borrow the author’s language and mistake it for our own understanding.

The author explained the idea clearly, so we feel like we understand it. But when we try to explain it without looking back at the page, everything suddenly becomes foggy.

That is why writing in your own words is so important.

When you write an idea in your own words, you have to slow down. You have to decide what the idea actually means. You have to choose the most important part. You have to connect it to something you already know. You have to make it make sense to yourself.

That process is elaboration.

It is not just “taking notes.” It is developing the idea.

A copied note preserves information.

An elaborated note builds understanding.

Elaboration Is the Doorkeeper

Not every note deserves to become part of your larger thinking system.

Some notes are quick sparks. They matter for a moment, but later you come back and think, “Why did I even write this down?” This is one of the many humbling experiences of being a person with a notebook.

That does not mean the note was useless. It just means it may not need to move forward. In this sense, elaboration can act like the doorkeeper. If you can return to a quick note and elaborate on it, the idea may be worth developing. If you can explain it, connect it, question it, apply it, or imagine where it might be useful, then it probably deserves more attention. But if you cannot do anything with it, let it stay where it is.

The purpose of a strong note system is not to save everything.

The purpose is to save the ideas that can grow.

A Simple Elaboration Process

Here is a practical way to turn a rough note into a stronger thinking note.

1. Restate the Idea in Your Own Words

Start by closing the book, article, video, or source.

Then ask:

What is the main idea here?

Do not copy the author’s sentence. Do not try to sound impressive. Just explain the idea as clearly as possible in your own language.

For example, if the source says something complicated about learning through retrieval, you might write:

“Learning gets stronger when I practice bringing an idea back from memory instead of only rereading it.”

That is not fancy. That is the point.

If you can say it simply, you are closer to understanding it.

2. Explain Why It Matters

After restating the idea, ask:

Why does this matter?

This step forces you to move beyond summary.

A summary tells what the author said. Elaboration asks why the idea is worth keeping.

You might write:

“This matters because students often think studying means looking at notes again, but real learning happens when they try to recall, explain, and use the idea.”

Now the idea has a purpose. It is not just floating there, waiting to be forgotten like most New Year’s resolutions.

3. Connect It to Something You Already Know