In this talk Zach Sims recounts his decision to leave Columbia after three years and uses his experience to critique the growing "TL;DR" shortcut mindset that pervades modern education and society. He argues that dropping out should not mean stopping learning; instead, learners should combine reading with hands‑on practice—a "learning by doing" approach. Sims highlights how passive consumption of condensed content (e.g., SparkNotes, bite‑size media) undermines deep understanding, and he calls for publishers, entrepreneurs, and educators to create active learning experiences that blend theory with real‑world application. He points to current technologies—iPads, social platforms, and interactive tools—as enablers of this shift, and cites Codecademy as an example of practice‑based coding education. Ultimately, he urges that while one can drop out of college, one should never drop out of education, and the industry should support lifelong, experiential learning.
Chapters
Ei, so, I'm Zach. I was originally supposed to give a talk on learning by doing, but I just dropped out of college, so I figured I should tell you all what the right way to drop out of college is. Because you read about it in the media all the time. Peter Thiel's paying everyone $100,000, and somehow I missed out on that one. But it seems to be all the rage recently. So Mark Zuckerberg, who you see on the COVID of almost every magazine, it seems as if the formula is really simple, right? Drop out of Harvard, become a billionaire. But the truth is, it's really not that easy, and I'm not a billionaire yet, so, you know. Hopefully something will happen to bring us there. But this sort of goes to what Americans recently have realized is TL;DR culture, which is the notion of "too long, don't read." So what people are missing out on is what's in between dropping out of Harvard and then what comes after that, which is, you know, becoming a billionaire for someone like that. This is sort of symptomatic of the fact that Americans, and pretty much everyone else in the world, are looking for shortcuts in everyday life. You know, when I was in college, you could read The Odyssey or you could read the SparkNotes. And I'll have you guess, you know, what most people ended up doing in that case. So this whole notion of keeping things really compressed is having an adverse effect on our society and the way we learn. It's causing people to think that they can just take shortcuts to move through pretty much everything. So whether that's content on a website like Reddit, or whether it's, you know, a textbook in college, people don't want to read everything. They just want the too-long-didn't-read version. So I took this pretty much to heart with my education, with TL;DF, which was, "College was too long, so I didn't finish." So I took the first 3 years of Columbia, pretty much did everything, you know, that I wanted to as a political science major, and realized that there wasn't much else there for me. So I took a shortcut and dropped out. Now, when I told my parents I was dropping out, they didn't think it was too great. They thought that that would be me, that I would be, you know, cooking fries at McDonald's. Unfortunately, you know, that's not the case, because not everyone that drops out of college ends up doing that, and I guess I'm proof positive. But when I did drop out of college, I didn't want to stop learning, so I didn't want to stop absorbing information in a bunch of different fields. But what I was faced with was the fact that most resources that are out there for people aren't necessarily for people that are learning after college, because learning is concentrated on people that are learning during college and within college. So what I sort of discovered is that reading and doing is better learning than necessarily just— or than just reading. So when you're in college, you read a bunch of books, and it's all theoretical, and it's not necessarily practical. Whereas when you're in the real world, you have the opportunity to combine a lot of stuff that you're reading with actual activity that you can end up doing. So the question is, how can publishers, entrepreneurs, and everyone else support this notion of learning by doing, and cementing what you're learning in books with real-world experience? I think it's a difficult question that the industry's faced for a while. So what most people have done in the past is condense media and change different forms of publishing into different media. So instead of presenting something in a book, you'll present it in a video. And you end up with people like this, who are looking at the same content, that they've read in a book, but they're watching it on television, and they're not learning anything different. So what we need to do is change people from passive learning, like the panda, to active learning, where, you know, they're really taking a part in their learning experience, and, you know, whether they're in college or not, they're actually doing the things that they're reading about, which is sort of what the publishing industry is starting to see more when you embrace online technologies. So most people think that when you're on the internet, you know, everything is a time sink. So you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you're doing things that aren't necessarily value to what you could be learning. But that's not necessarily the truth. You know, the internet can be a time sink for some people, but all the buzzwords that we're used to seeing actually can play a role in the education of people. And we're seeing finally that bunches— that a bunch of different people are starting to understand how to create education for everyone else using technologies that are out there, that are in popular services like Facebook and Twitter. So we have stuff like the iPad that's really democratizing the way people are learning different materials by giving them an opportunity to to dive deeper into what they're learning, to explore different concepts instead of just reading things, and in some cases, you know, to virtually dissect a flower or something like that, uh, to better understand certain concepts. And, uh, the project I'm working on is something called Codecademy that teaches people how to, uh, learn code by actually doing it. So I think this is sort of greater— indicative of a greater trend where people are really interested in actually doing things instead of reading about them. So if you combine the two, read a book, uh, and also add practical experience, It's a more interesting way to learn than the traditional method in college. So when someone drops out of college, like me, you know, I've done a lot of reading to— on how to manage the company that I'm building, and what always ends up happening is I read something, and it's never really useful until I have a way to experience it, and a way to actually go through with what I'm learning. So I think the publishing industry sort of needs to find a way to bring together experience and books to create a new, more cohesive learning experience that people can understand and actually internalize, as opposed to, you know, just thinking that learning is cemented when you're in college. So I think what most people see is that people drop out of college and they stop learning, that college is sort of the end of the road, whether you're graduating, dropping out, or whatever it is. But the truth is that people should always continue learning, and there should be ways for industry to support stuff like that. So I like to think of it as people can drop out of college, but they should never drop out of education. So thanks.
