Four Wisdom’s for your Future…
One of the greatest things I have experienced in teaching is encountering, “Students that are smarter than the faculty, including myself”. I have been fortunate (Plain Lucky) to have some go super nova tech in Silicon Valley.
For our final encounter I wanted smarter than me involved, so I had guidance from an under 30yo, WMU ex-student, who is now a “Maker” of AI, making serious bank – think 7 figures, working for company you use everyday.
BTW…this ex-student is the most humblest and compassionate person, he doesn’t work for the money (That is a class in and of itself). I was on his Honors College Thesis committee – Total Class Act Dude.
Here is his four – (I borrowed) for the road…
Insight: Glass Onion and Think and Question are bookends!
Glass Onion – AI vs AGI – Visual/Spatial Intelligence – Think and Question
Perhaps the most important part of this module is: Think of a Glass Onion every-time someone gets excited about tech changing the world, saying it’s different this time, or telling you that the end is near…
Great Strategist and Great Technologist Ask Great Questions!
No pop-psych. No corporate fluff.
This is how people actually learn to ask high-value questions in tech, strategy, and science.
1. Read people who ask better questions than you.
You cannot improve your questioning in a vacuum.
Study thinkers who are known for it:
– Richard Feynman (why does it do that?)
– Claude Shannon (what’s the minimum information needed?)
– Ed Catmull (what failure are we not seeing?)
– Clayton Christensen (what job is the user hiring this for?)
– Jeff Bezos (what won’t change?)
Absorb their patterns.
Then imitate them ruthlessly.
2. Practice writing questions, not answers.
Once per day, write three questions about something you think you understand.
No answers.
Just questions.
This counteracts the school conditioning of “find the right answer.”
3. Build tolerance for not knowing.
Most people avoid real questions because they can’t stomach uncertainty.
The better your tolerance for ambiguity, the better your questions become.
If you need certainty, you’ll never see the frontier.
One-sentence version:
You learn to ask great questions by noticing anomalies, attacking assumptions, isolating mechanisms, and training yourself to tolerate not knowing long enough for insight to appear.
I need a Hard Stop!!!!
Before I commit the worst evil of teaching…. “Inert Ideas”
“What we should aim at is to teach students to think, not to load them with inert ideas.”
Alfred Whitehead (1929)
An inert idea is a piece of information that a student can memorize but cannot use, connect, or apply. It sits in the mind like dead weight—recited for an exam, useless in real thinking or problem-solving.
Whitehead’s exact framing:
- An idea is inert when it is “received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.”
In plain terms:
- Knowledge that doesn’t change how you see or do anything.
- Facts that never activate.
- Content that stays abstract, isolated, and unlinked to real contexts.
This is the kind of learning Whitehead said was worse than useless because it tricks students into thinking they’ve learned when they haven’t gained any capacity to act or understand.
Think and Question = 42 = ?
Examine (think and Question) this sign has two sides it says everything about Strategy and Technology. (People in picture are not relevant to the “story”.)
