37/40 - Untapped Genius

There are some themes that you uncover in life and can never look away from. Discovering the untold opportunity in fighting to find, connect, and unlock the potential of untapped geniuses is one of the most important things in my life.

It all started as a response to the 2012 student riots in Chile, but it continued as a personal mission and what I expect will be seen as a lifelong obsession.

In 2012, a friend and I decided that the way in which innovators and entrepreneurs found out about their capacity and their personal legends in this world was significantly broken. The education systems used by most countries were antiquated and based on the industrial revolution where there were only really a few jobs you could have: harvest the source materials, transport them to the factory, push them through the factory, sell them after they were produced, do the financial and legal accounting for the sales of products made in the factories. Those were the jobs that existed and the school systems were set up to churn out qualified people for those jobs.

That is not at all how the world works today. The skills that will be needed for jobs in five years are not skills that anyone in the world has today. The future of education is built on the skills of adaptability, problem-solving, and leadership in the form of building consensus.

My friend and I set out to build a training and equipping curriculum that we wished we'd had had in our early twenties as we navigated our baptism by fire into the world of tech and finance.   Over the course of the next 7 years, we'd have over 1,400 students go through one of our in-residence or traveling seminar-style programs. These students ranged in age from 16 to 63 and were from 49 different countries.  The stories that came about from bootstrapping this community are still some of my favorite memories from this time in life.  I am still good friends with dozens of students and am in business with a handful to this day and sadly not with my friend, but that is a whole other blog post for another day.

The theme of Untapped Genius is something that I can't wait to continue to explore in the years to come. I have over 60 pages of notes about a new idea in this space that I hope to share one day very soon.