Cal Newport

It's going to be hard to do.

Like your hardest course you took in college, you're doing it now as like a middle-aged man because you want to make sure you keep pushing your mind, not because the skill you're learning is instrumental, but because the learning itself is going to get your mind sharp.

I think we're going to see this process-focused marketing as opposed to skill-focused marketing for courses in the near future, all a cognitive fitness play.

Finally, I want to elaborate an idea that was mentioned in that article that we opened this episode with.

I do think cognitive endurance testing is going to be something that actually we do more often.

It's going to be numbers we know, and it's going to be numbers that we are going to use, which will completely change our conception of cognitive fitness, how to quantify it, and its value.

There'll be some sort of standardized test that gives you a number that I think might play a role in hiring people.

I mean, why wouldn't it?

If you're in a non-trivial knowledge work job, what is your capability of sustaining focus on a hard task and actually making progress through complexity?

Can you resist distraction and actually use your brain to add value to information?

This might be like a primary ability we're looking for if I'm hiring in one of these jobs, right?

And that we might like give you a test right there and see what your score is.

This might also become not something we use to gatekeep, but also a measure that we aim to improve.

I could imagine, and I think I would approve of this,

a world in which we're thinking about schooling instead of our standardized testing notions all being content-based.

We want to make sure that our students know all of these things from some sort of list that experts produced is like, this is the knowledge you need to know.

You need to know about Andrew Jackson's presidency, but not Calvin Coolidge's presidency.

You need to know about...

euclidean you know geometry but you don't need to know about uh calculus on the trigonomic functions right we have these like big lists that we're just like these are what you have to know and not and let's test everyone and see where they are in knowledge imagine instead schools are saying we want to see kids improving in cognitive endurance that's just as important why they're here can you deploy your brain with intention

you're cognitively fit then no matter what you go off to do you are going to have a more success professionally you're going to thrive more personally and we want to train your ability to focus and use your brain and we're going to test your cognitive endurance and different people be at different places but we won't see yours go up improvement in cognitive fitness is maybe going to be the number one sign that a particular educational institution is actually delivering on its promise i think we're going to see that and it will completely reorient the way we think about things