By JLai, Angela Son, Alizeh Iqbal and Jen Yip
For most of us, how to love and how to teach are things we had to figure out on our own. And yet we’re hardwired to learn by example, mimicking our best lovers and teachers and passing on their lessons almost subconsciously.
Unfortunately, we can’t offer you lessons on love.
But once a month, the Renaissance Collective hosts a TeachMe for our community to share our passions and pursuits. It’s our collective mastery passed along in 5-minute presentations. And it’s a great way to be a student again, while experiencing a wide range of pedagogical techniques.
This month, we learned about adverse selection, meditation, making fast career transitions, improving data visualizations, and building trust with strangers. And notably, the subjects taught proved as meaningfully distinct as the teaching styles of our members.
Here are some of our favorite takeaways:
Adverse Selection
David King (DK), founder of Highlighter and a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur and angel investor, shared a lesson about how adverse selection makes its way into most everything in life — from all-you-can-eat buffets to startup investing and hiring.
The TL;DR? It’s good to always harbor a bit of paranoia about adverse selection. For example, if an entrepreneur asks you to invest or if another investor offers you an intro to an entrepreneur, you should ask yourself why this person chose you out of a pool of other potential investors — even if that’s an uncomfortable question. Is it for your domain expertise? What do they know about your personal brand? You can combat adverse selection in hiring and investing by building a strong personal brand.
Lesson in pedagogy: By asking the audience to identify the common thread between 3 seemingly unrelated things, DK captured everyone’s attention and kept us guessing throughout his lesson. The “guesswork” developed an unresolved tension that piques curiosity, encouraging information to stick better. It was like one of those films with separate but interwoven storylines that has you guessing how the threads will come together in the end, holding your attention captive til the end.
Meditation
Amit Mukherjee, investor at NEA, shared lessons from his personal experience with meditation. Amit’s own journey started with a retreat at Spirit Rock, and over the past few years, he’s developed a practice of a daily 40-minute meditation. His advice to kick-start a practice of your own? Learning to meditate is like building a muscle, so even two minutes of focused breathing is a good starting point. Don’t worry about being too strict about when and where you meditate and find a community that can provide you guidance and support through the journey.
Lesson in pedagogy: Amit guided everyone through a short meditation exercise. There’s nothing like trying something for yourself, in the presence of an expert, to learn it. The same way you couldn’t learn to swim just by reading about it, by actively teaching breathing and meditative techniques, Amit ensured everything stayed in “muscle-memory.”
Fast Career Transitions
Angela Son, former McKinsey consultant and head of Strategy and Ops at Parallel Domain, shared a lesson from her professional experience on how to make a career transition to a new industry in a new country (she’s Canadian) in record time — just a month after deciding which areas to research.
Lesson in pedagogy: Angela started her presentation with a slide that showed how she dramatically changed her life in the course of a few months. She anchored on an impressive end result before diving into the details of how she accomplished that feat. Like a film told in flashbacks, Angela teased with an end result to whet the interest of an audience to learn the whole story.
Improving Data Visualizations
Daniel Hui, an architect from Harvard, shared with us his love of stunning data visualizations along with some tactical lessons for creating your own.
He started his presentation with a slide that looks hauntingly familiar to the former consultants and bankers among us: a crowded, complicated chart accompanied by lots of tiny text (see top slide below). He then pointed out how color and text hierarchy are simple yet effective tools to highlight, contrast, or compare the most important information on a slide. Keeping your color and font schemes simple helps your audience extract a story from the data at a glance. The improved slide (on the bottom of the picture below) uses shades of blue to indicate different segments of the market -- while all of the different shades of blue combined represents a higher-priority category over a more neutral group shown in grey. In the bottom slide, bolded text at a larger size is also used to represent hierarchy over smaller text and leads the eye to focus.
Lesson in pedagogy: Dan began by aligning with our distaste for awful presentations. He showed us a slide we all agreed is bad. This established a collective starting point from which he improved, through a rubric he shared in his presentation. By building agreement around what’s ‘bad’ and then showing us a logical progression to ‘good,’ he guided us through a new way to approach a common problem.
Earning Trust with Strangers
Chris Chamars has a knack for fitting in and making friends anywhere in the world. He’s lived in 5 different countries and speaks 4 languages. His mom is a Greek ambassador and, after graduation, Chris spent 2 years in Moldova with the Peace Corps. He shared some lessons he’s learned on how to earn the trust of strangers. His tried-and-true advice? Learn to listen without judgement, be aware of what your body language communicates, and entertain other perspectives even if they’re very different from your own.
Lesson in pedagogy: Chris began his presentation with quotes from famous leaders, authors, artists, and thinkers including Brené Brown, Eckhart Tolle, Jimi Hendrix, and Aristotle. Aligning the audience around a common starting point (people we know and respect) is similar to Dan’s pedagogy above, but Chris appealed to aspirational leaders as a means of building credibility. The importance of social proof in establishing credibility is yet another lesson in earning the trust of strangers -- one that Chris left unspoken but demonstrated well in his approach to teaching.
We hope you enjoyed this flight of knowledge, and we’d love to see you at our next TeachMe!