The Wheel Of Modern Education | Gautam Khetrapal

So I'm particularly excited about this talk because it's happening inside a university and I'm about to convince you to quit it today. Awesome. That was it, really. It's a system that I'm about to share that I've been experimenting, exploring for the past seven years. And it all started from my own education. Now if you haven't noticed, I'm Indian. And just like every Indian, guess what I studied? Engineering. Computer science. Engineering. Just so you get your stereotypes right now, it's really crazy growing up in India. If you're growing up in India, you're either becoming a doctor, an engineer, or a family disappointment. And I decided I'm going to do engineering and not just any engineering university. I got enrolled in one of the best universities in India at that time. The day I found the result, my family found the result, they were so happy. I, I was getting calls from 50 different relatives congratulating me, saying, congratulations, Gautam, we are so proud of you. Just so happy for you. And for the first time I felt like, wow, I've made it right. And a week later, I received my tool for success. My brand new first ever Dell Inspiron laptop. That was a game changer. I played a lot of games on it. And as I was entering my university, I had my brand new laptop. I had my newfound freedom. So many new people to look forward to and a beautiful campus. Super excited. But that excitement didn't last very long. Fast forward a year. I couldn't even wake up in the morning. I was so demotivated, I couldn't walk into my classrooms. I would walk into my classroom and I would feel like I'm entering a prison. The classes were not. I didn't think I was learning something that was relevant to me. The classes were not engaging, the lectures were boring, and every single person around me was focusing on memorizing everything and blurting it out. At the end of the year in the examination, everybody saw it as a means to an end. As light at the end of a four year long tunnel, which is a successful job as an engineer. It didn't gel with me. I couldn't do it. First I felt like, oh, maybe I'm the weirdo in the class. How many of you know some weirdos in the class? There you go. First I felt that's who I was. Then I felt, maybe I've lost my edge and maybe I'm not set for success. And then I did what any other student would do. I started immersing myself in cultural activities and extracurricular activities, student clubs, just so I have something to show on my cv. And I stumbled upon this organization called isec. Have you guys heard of isec? How many of you? Fantastic. ISEC is the world's largest youth run organization that aims to develop youth leadership. I joined ISEC and that hit home for me. I was, I mean, it was incredible. Like I started doing the thing that I loved. I was with the people that I loved. And I was doing leadership training for some people. I was learning people management. I was helping underprivileged kids on some projects to discover their own passion. And I had a team of 12 different people from India. Four of them are family disappointments, by the way. And I started noticing something interesting. I started meeting incredible people from different education backgrounds. Engineers, architects, doctors, economic students, art students. All of them were feeling somehow education has failed them. For the first time, I felt that I was not alone. And the more I questioned it, the more I realized that this education degree would not be of any use to me. If you have your smartphones, if you Google right now, university makes me. If you Google that right now, you know the first four automatic answers. Anxious, depressed. Feel like a failure. Stupid. So I started questioning why. Why Google, by the way, the tech giant, right, that happens to hire a lot of engineers? 15% of their staff doesn't have a professional college degree. Why? Because our education system is outdated. It was built in the 1900s. It was built for the industrial age. It was built for people to prepare themselves to live and have a creative life in the industrial world. It's outdated now. I can prove it to you. How many of you have a smartphone here? Great. How many of you had the same smartphone two years ago? Some older generation people. Welcome back. If I had asked five years, nobody would raise their hand. If I had said 10 years, you'd be like, what, are you crazy? We want the latest operating system in our mobiles, in our laptops, in our home appliances. But the platform that impacts the entire humanity is more than 100 years old, hasn't been updated. We live in the information age. This old standardized education model is based on linearity, conformity and batching people. It's outdated. I would say it's almost getting obsolete, right? We live in the information age. Something that you learn in the beginning of the university is obsolete by the time you graduate. Peter Diamandis he said between 2016 and 2022 there will be as many technological changes, as many as we had between 1900s and 2000. That's more than 2000% growth. And that's just the beginning of the exponential curve. Many of the interesting jobs today that we have didn't exist five years ago. What do we do? We don't live in the age of standardization. We live in the age of customization. Let me tell you a story. Do you guys know this guy? Kevin Sysrome? So this guy worked in a marketing job. During the day, he would work in a marketing agency. And he will come back home, take out his computer and start with his computer, start programming. And he got so good at programming, he built an app called Bourbon. He later, after a few iterations, called that app Instagram. And at the age of 28, he sold that app for a billion dollars to Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg, a college dropout. We don't live in the age of standardization. We live in the age of customization. And everybody can teach themselves. No two people are the same. How many of you have siblings? How many of you have siblings? Perfect. Did your parents ever come up to you and said, hey, come here. Remind me, which one are you again? Never happens. Even if you're Indian. Doesn't happen. There's half a billion people there. Doesn't happen. No two people are the same. And neither should be their education journey. I had an uncle once. I mean, I still do, I hope, after I tell you this story. My uncle, who's also an engineer, obviously. His face resembles one of the biggest Bollywood actors, Aamir Khan. Pretty cool, right? So I'm sitting at home with my friend, and my uncle walks in and my friend looks at him, wow, you look like Aamir Khan. And to that he says, oh, no, no, he looks like me. We all want to be unique, at least the original copy. And we are unique. Start designing your unique education. And it's never been easier. Did you know that all the classes that MIT students are taking today, you can go online and take the same classes for free? Not just MIT, you can go on edx.org There's MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, some of the best universities in the world. Pick the courses you like, take them. Do you guys know Udemy? You can go on Udemy and learn basically everything from programming to photography. Right? Turn your passions into your professions. You can do that. Most of the courses are less than $200. I've purchased courses in their promotion for $15. Right? You can do that. Start educating yourself. And that's the first key. Just the only one. The next one. Here's how you take it to the next level. How many of you know this guy? Elliot? Bisnow no. 1. Great. So this guy was a young American entrepreneur living in US Starting out as a digital entrepreneur. At the age of 24, he felt really lonely. He didn't have. He had a lot of unanswered questions. What he did, he picked up his phone, started calling successful digital entrepreneurs in US and said, hey, guys, I stay in Utah. I'm inviting a lot of digital entrepreneurs. Why don't you come hang out with me? And you know what? I will pay for it. He took $50,000 on credit card debt and invited 50 different entrepreneurs for one trip. But then he was onto something. Next year, 200 people came and they paid. The year after, 700 people came and they paid. Today, he gave birth to what we call the Summit series. People like Richard Branson speak at that event today. And he was voted as the Coolest Entrepreneur by Inc. Magazine in 2009. Right. You know what he was doing? He was bringing together people with similar interests, similar pain points, and similar lifestyles. And that's the key. Find your tribe. We are social animals. We are naturally inclined to connect with people who are like us. Similar values, similar interests, similar belief system, and we thrive in that environment. That's where you share the latest practices. That's where you learn and you teach each other. You learn and grow with each other together as a tribe. And it's never been easier to find your tribe if you're a programmer. Today, you can go on topcoder.com and they basically turn programming into a massive online multiplayer game. Yes, they're competing, they're still making money, but they're learning and growing with each other, with the technologies and platforms we have today, there's a tribe for practically anything. Doesn't matter if you're a coder or if you're someone who just likes to get high on marijuana. Not kidding. There's a tribe called vbhi.org that supports international travelers to find safe ways to buy marijuana all over the world. Don't make notes. It's illegal. Okay? So there's a tribe for everything. On a serious note, you gotta find your tribe. And when you find your tribe, something interesting happens. On May 28, 2017, I landed in Barcelona about four months ago, and I joined 400 people from 50 different countries that said we will relocate to Barcelona for one month and we go deep into personal transformation. We got together and we had some of the most incredible teachers in the world teaching us and having workshops every single day. This is Vishal Lakhiani, founder of Mindvalley. He's teaching us on advanced goal setting. This is Lisa Nichols, the star of the documentary the Secret. She's been on Oprah many times. She's teaching us the art of storytelling. Some of the most incredible speakers, UK's number one hypnotherapist, the guy who sold 20 million books, the CMO for billion dollar company. Guy who trains Hollywood actors on fitness, and the guy, the monk he trained the sarcast of Dr. Strange. These are the kind of workshops that we were having. And get this. In the evenings and on the weekends, we partied in the streets of Barcelona. We connected with our tribe. We had spaces to connect deeply and meaningfully with our people. And we call this experiment Mindvalley University. Now, what if this was part of your university? Would that be exciting? Yeah. These are what I call deep immersions. Deep immersions are like, you know, have you guys been to Disneyland? Yeah. Have you noticed at the end of the day, kids are really sad, some are crying, some parents are trying to drag them off and they go, no, daddy, no. You know why that happens? Because they just experience a deep immersion. Deep immersions are powerful. They are like highly inspiring, fun, exciting moments that you experience. And deep immersions are basically when you come together with your tribe and go deep into a particular topic for a very short period of time. It could be from like one day to like five days and then stir some emotions, have a lot of fun and create a lot of lasting memories, right? And these are your conferences, your events, your summits, your TEDx is a deep immersion. You come together as a tribe, right? Your deep immersions are extremely important and that's the third key and your deep emergence. Go back, add into self education. When I came back from Barcelona, I came back with a list of seven different books, three different online courses, and three classes I'm taking in Kuala Lumpur right now. Because I got those things, got those ideas right, added back into my self education, and this becomes the wheel of modern education. Self education, my tribe and deep immersion. And here's the thing. The smartest people in the world, the outliers, the game changers, the moonshot takers, they never quit their education. They simply escape the outdated education system. These are your Mark Zuckerbergs. These are your Elon Musk. These are your Richard Branson. These are your Mark twins. These are your Einsteins. And we quote them, we admire them, we want to be like them. And then we go back into our old classrooms, right? Think about this. How could university be only for four years? How could learning end after four Years. How could learning ever end? Einstein, one of the greatest minds of our time, said, when you stop learning, you start dying. It's not just an esoteric coat, has a physiological application, has a psychological application. Funnily enough, he's also the one who said this. The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. And it's about time we change that. It's about time we become the dean of our own never ending university. And that we can do with the wheel of modern education. Now here's the thing. This is a template that you can apply in your life today. Like this is mine. I'm a digital marketer. I'm learning digital marketing. I have six, seven books on it. There's many online courses increasing learning capacity because I'm a learning freak. And then I took a course on Udemy that statistically increased my learning capacity by 80%. You can do that? It's a $20 course. Learn French. I'm 21% fluent in French right now. Three years ago that thing was learn Spanish. Then what happened? I fell in love with a French woman. She's right there. I changed it because I can. And that's the whole idea. The these are all the things that help me personally, professionally, or both. These are my tribes, these are my people. These are the ones I find everywhere, my deep immersions, my afes, Mindvalley University. The example that I gave you, Burning Man, Internet Summit, Business Freedom Academy. These are the environments that I learn in up until 2017. And this is the wheel of modern education. And this is a template. Take it, apply it, put it in your own form. You can start anywhere, right? But here's my pain point. If you look at most of the students today, like majority of the people in the world, the depression, by the way, student depression has increased by 37% in the last decade. The suicide rates are increasing year after year after year. And it's because of the gap that people are feeling more and more every single year, right? And, and I think we need to change that. That should be our moonshot, right? With this wheel, when you take control and sit in the driving seat of your own education, it never ends. Your education becomes a game and your world becomes your playground. And you become like that kid in Disneyland of education who never wants to leave. And this time you won't have to. Thank you.