[personaldev] The hypocritical self-help guru = The priest who downloads porn

[mattbell]

I had the amusing thought that many self-improvement gurus probably suffer from the same secret hypocrisy as the priests who rail against the sins of the flesh and then go home to download porn onto their computers.  Let's imagine such a self-help guru, who secretly struggles with procrastination and lack of focus even as they publicly preach their techniques for staying on top of things.  Would they be a good person to learn from?  No, because they're not being intellectually honest, so they have no ability to really evaluate their own performance.  Thus, it's worth looking for people who are able to admit their own failures and analyze them in a constructive way.  This blogger: ( http://dirtsimple.org/ )  who I learned about last weekend, appears to do just that.  He's someone who has struggled through a lot of things related to mental orientation and is public about his own continuing challenges even though he heads up some mind hacker's guild and has lots of people following his blog.

It's probably also not necessarily a good idea to try to learn organization from from someone who's always had a natural talent for organization.  One of the many interesting points brought up by the excellent book Refactor your Wetware is that experts are not necessarily the best people to teach a skill to novices.  Experts are so good that most of their skills are automated as intuition and not easily explainable in a verbal way.  Intermediates, on the other hand, are more able to teach novices because their skills are still declarative as opposed to intuitive.  Of course, there are experts who are good teachers, but that's because they have specifically studied the act of teaching and have looked at the skill acquisition paths that will work well for novices.  The book's analysis of these issues is based on the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition. 

Comments

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

I make the assumption that the teacher's using their own techniques, so if they claim it will help anyone get organized, then it's a strike against the techniques if they can't use them to self-organize.

The whole teach/research bundling in academia never made sense to me. Some great research professors weren't very good at teaching because teaching was not a priority to them. I agree with you about the ideal of the teacher, but since not all great research professors fit that ideal, I'm content to have the university hire both kinds and then let them focus on what they're best at.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

I think that's basically right.

With the university thing, I think you're definitely right for introductory classes, but in a lot of subject matters, even by the end of an undergraduate education, talented students will be pushing edges of things that are only barely understood or are still in the future of research, and I think it's valuable for them to have people who are active in research available to answer their questions and help them think about these issues for themselves. Clearly for graduate education this is essential (at least, for training people to be able to do research themselves).

To the extent that a university degree should prepare someone to push at the edges of knowledge and question and figure out things for themselves, it seems worthwhile to have people who do this professionally teaching them, even though such people may not be the best at teaching content, and motivating students that aren't already motivated. For those of course, it does seem essential to have people that are better teachers, as you suggest.