Why Everyone Should Go Back to High School

No, I don't mean the questionable ethics and the dime sized zit on your nose.

What I mean is that they taught us lots of good stuff in high school, when few of us were listening.

I've spend the last few months re-learning the laws of Thermodynamics, the basics of reading poetry, the fundamentals of calculus.

The most useful knowledge is not specialized. It's the fundamentals that can be pieced together to make good decisions and form new ideas.

Albert Einstein famously said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

What is taught in high schools isn't lowbrow. In fact it was the stuff of history's super nerds. But we now understand concepts like algebra well enough to teach the principles to 9th graders.

Here's the thing: I just wasn't listening.

I was a sleep deprived, distracted, hormonal mess who got As by cramming for tests and copying homework.

I prided myself in getting the grades I needed with the least possible effort.

I've proceeded through my life from 17 to 27 thinking that what really mattered was super secret highbrow knowledge about how to code apps or how to write business plans or how to learn enough acronyms to sound like I knew what I was talking about.

But complexity is a collection of simple parts. In this case, the "complex" task of writing a business plan really just comes down to storytelling, rhetoric, and third grade arithmetic.

By taking the time to really learn the fundamentals, I can use them as mental tools in my toolkit to solve more complex challenges.

Take biology and natural selection. Some species, like squirrels and cockroaches, are generalists and can survive a wide range of conditions. Specialists like koalas and pandas rely on one plant each for food (eucalyptus and bamboo, respectively).

Specialists often enjoy less competition and an easier life, but they're screwed when their environment changes and the one plant they eat becomes less available.

Now this seems like a random factoid. But the core principle is that no new feature comes without a flaw. Every strategy has weak points.

I've spent the last few weeks thinking about whether the app studio I run with two partners should specialize into a specific industry.

At first, it seems like there's one right answer. But the lesson from biology is that both options can work, they're just different.

In the book Range, the author explains that the world's best problem solvers frequently use analogies from different fields to solve specific problems in their industry.

One famous example is the bullet train engineer who designed the nose of the train in the shape of a specific bird's beak he learned about in an Audubon club meeting. The resulting train design is faster, uses less fuel, and doesn't make an annoyingly loud noise when exiting tunnels.

The expression "we can take a lesson from [subject] here" is one that I wish we'd hear more often.