 Let's imagine a particular type of young person living in the 1800s. Having not so many distractions at hand and no passion for drinking. Now what would she or he do? Probably reading or studying or say documenting the insects in the local district where say nature set the rules. And that person is exploring and documenting the rules which will probably set the pillars for future scientific discoveries and exploits such as the progress of medicine. And what is the person having the same level of peculiar weird hobby doing now? That person probably spends hundreds of hours obsessing over breaking the speedrunning record on Super Mario. Hacking and exploiting the game in such a way becomes a technical challenge, a sort of a puzzle a young person can solve. The same level of passion and obsession is there as well. That person is exploring the digital world in such a way that's comparable with the 1800s guy's obsession for bugs. And probably a regular person from that particular point in time would see the guy documenting the bugs as a weirdo. Now every field needs folk on the spectrum. People who are capable of thinking from first principles, able and willing of dismembering and studying the unstudied. And human history has provided us with a list of things we never thought possible. And progress often happens through the push of these oftentimes disagreeable, loner, individual, mutant geniuses. Individuals that have managed to find a way to hack nature. And I view hacking as a concept that's not only about computers. Hacking is a sport against someone who's in a position of authority. Either human, a machine and ultimately nature itself. And you are most likely able to order food through an app right now simply because one of these individuals was too lazy to go out for groceries so they hacked the social defaults and found a way to make the food come to them. And hacking represents the best and the worst in humanity. It's about artistic and also scientific curiosity. It's about pushing the boundaries of human progress and stress testing those boundaries so that you can ultimately do the impossible. Alright, so based on this framework I thought about throwing the way we live our lives right now into two separate buckets. In the first bucket we have what you can do according to how the general population thinks is possible. And in the second bucket we have what is actually possible but hasn't been tried yet. And circling back at the story I was talking about at the beginning, the story about you know the person documenting the insects in the local district, I sort of want to ask myself a series of questions. And the first question is what is that type of person doing now? People with this type of obsession who are exploring the unexplored. How do they fit into society? And again a simple example I oftentimes give is in regards to video games. And one can swiftly go on Twitch and see the number of people playing various kinds of games. And what I found cool is trying to analyze the minds of people involved in the speedrunning communities. And speedrunning is a popular form of entertainment in the gaming community where players try to break records by finishing games in as little time as possible, often using glitches in the games code and advanced techniques to skip ahead. And these people are almost obsessed with exploiting a game in such a way that will allow them to open an entire web of possibilities and complete the game faster. But see here you're not only hacking the game, you're also hacking the frameworks on which the developers built the actual game. Frameworks which ultimately came out of disposable sets of human minds. You can also find these people in obscure communities around the web. Researchers who are debunking mainstream concepts and books. People wanting to add clarity to our societal defaults through hard work, research and data. Now the next question I want to ask myself is why don't we try hacking something that most people in society as a whole think is impossible. And there's one key reason why people are not indie writers, YouTubers, underground musicians and programmers. And that is because people mistake the work that's necessary to become really good at that specific craft versus the work required to get started. Do you want to be a YouTuber? Take your phone out and start recording your first video. Want to learn how to play music? Make something useful out of your free YouTube account or SoundCloud account and start hosting your music there. Want to start a blog or a newsletter? I have created a video where I do this in two minutes. And I believe that sometimes people do not realize that googling is a skill one can improve. Pulling together different strings of information, word variations and pieces of code is something that they don't teach you in school. You generally have to do this all by yourself and this probably starts somewhere in middle school. Essentially the first time you realize the power of Wikipedia, copy and paste, but are too young to understand why you should remove the links. And the questions I often ask myself do not require a specific response. But what I'm trying to find a sketch and answer for right now is why and what you can do to develop a hacker mindset. And speed is an important component in this day of age. One's ability to think quickly, react quickly and be agile can set him apart from the crowd. Precision is important as well, but one can develop precision by throwing lots and lots of things against the wall and checking what sticks. You'll get precision through repetition. There's also context and random events that can influence one's evolution like that. There's rarely a streamlined recipe, but I found that the importance of developing a mindset where you are always thinking if there's a better way to do anything is a decent tool you can have in your arsenal. You're trying to break the defaults of that particular craft you're trying to learn or absorb, you're thinking from first principles, and you can end up in a better position. You code quicker, you shoot, you write, you hit more walls, you debug, you type, you fix, and you ship quicker. You think ahead, you are getting through the cycles faster and generating more feedback loops from which you can find lessons and experiences a lot quicker. It is about finding shortcuts, but also about fast exploiting what you think might be a shortcut but can end up not being one. So start testing things out. Put your imperfect thoughts and projects out there. Share your work, work with your garage door up, and allow people to see inside. Try out both thinking from first principles and also building on the shoulders of giants. And you sometimes realize that the rules people believe about the world are not accurate and common misconceptions are passed on from generation to generation. And I believe that one crucial part of the future of education is about speed learning, how to use the internet to extract, connect, and build on bits of information coming from extremely large data sets. Sort of learning how to pull out trustworthy resources and knowledge, repositories so that you can end up creating and connecting the dots faster than everyone else. It is about selecting and filtering your interests, keeping what is useful and removing what is not. We should be building and evolving by staying on each other's shoulders. And an individual who will be able to navigate through these intricate webs will be the valedictorian of the future.