As the number of online cohort-based courses grows at a steady pace, I thought I’d share a framework that I’ve developed to help answer the question, “Who’s course should I take?”
I call it Carpenters and Hammer Salesmen
Background: Teaching a Cohort-based Course
My last “real job” was to teach, manage, and deliver a cohort-based course. This was back when they were simply called bootcamps or accelerated-learning programs.
For three years, I managed the Software Engineering Immersive course for General Assembly in Washington, DC. While it was for a large company, cohorts tended to be pretty small and tightly knit. My task was to build the best curriculum in software engineering out there, and I hired, managed, and trained a team of instructors to help me.
While a lot of things from this experience are relevant when it comes to picking a cohort-based course, the most relevant was hiring instructors. In my time at General Assembly, I managed 12 different instructors, hiring most of them myself. I quickly learned to spot the difference between the ones who would succeed and become great teachers and the ones who wouldn’t.
The Difference
The good ones were carpenters. They were infinitely curious about their domain and saw teaching as an opportunity to share their love for their craft.
Because they were craftspeople, they often saw teaching as a brief detour from their career. Something to enrich their life and the lives of others for a bit, before going back to their craft.
They were happy to teach anything, provided it made sense, and they focused on building things of quality and molding more people to do the same.
The less good instructors were evangelists. They wanted to teach a specific set of tools or methods that they knew well and honestly believed were the best tools or methods for any job. It didn’t matter what technologies were in-demand and would get our students jobs. It mattered that we teach X, Y, and Z.
They sold hammers. They couldn’t teach you the nuance and complexity of crafting something because they didn’t know how. More importantly, they didn’t care to learn themselves.
Finding a Good Course
How does this relate to the increasing crop of new cohort-based courses people are launching?
Well not all of these courses will be good. And price and popularity are not good indicators of quality. The way to spot the good courses is to look for the carpenters. The easiest way to spot a carpenter is to think about what they’re known for.
We can look at two examples: David Perell and Tiago Forte.
Both David and Tiago teach wildly successful courses, but one is a whole lot better and more valuable than the other (I’ve taken both).
David Perell is a writer: he writes a lot. He publishes multiple essays of different lengths every week, a few longer-form articles every month, two newsletters, and a couple of really long, in depth articles every year. He is first and foremost a very prolific writer. He happens to teach a course on writing.
What does Tiago Forte do? He teaches a course on productivity and knowledge management.
What is he productive at?
Teaching a productivity course …
It sounds like I’m knocking Tiago and his course, Building a Second Brain — I don’t mean to. I’m trying to make an observation without criticizing, because a lot of people have found his course to be really valuable.
I took it. It was fine. It wasn’t nearly as strong of a course or as transformational of an experience as David’s writing class, Write of Passage.
Conclusion
David Perell is a prolific writer who teaches a class on writing. Tiago Forte teaches a productivity course with sessions on the absolute best way to organize the files on your computer, the only good note-taking app out there, and the only real way to effectively manage projects.
A hammer salesman has one goal: to sell you a hammer. Their incentive is to sell you one tool and to make you believe that every problem can be fixed by that tool.
A carpenter, on the other, hand is trying to sell you the product of their work. They use hammers, but they use other tools too. Their goal is to make their art, to teach you the process , and to sell you the output, not the tools they used.
Who would you rather learn from, the carpenter or the hammer salesman?