Beyond the tutorial ...

I’ve been working alongside someone these past few months who is truly brilliant. This individual is the kind of person you learn from in thousands of tiny moments. Just by working beside them, you become a better version of you.

Their knowledge on the fundamentals of their work is so strong and their contributions to our projects are outsized. But what surprises me the most by working close to them - who taught them? How do they know all these things? How did they become this way?

While useful, tutorials get you in first gear for any particular skill. But any experienced worker knows that professional work has a lot more depth and complexity than what you see in a tutorial. In fact, a true beginner struggles when they leave the charted path of a tutorial even a little bit. By the way, if your work looks like something out of a tutorial, real professionals can sense it right away and it’s not a good look.

At the same time, intermediate tutorials do exist, professional certifications, or your job may transform you from a promising beginner to a professional level worker, but the actual resources to make someone beyond intermediate to great are still few and far between.

Everyone you work with can do the thing you’re all hired to do, but at the same time, we are all complete beginners and don’t know the first thing about the thing we all thought we knew how to do. But there is a select few who do. It seems worthwhile of a pursuit to understand these types of people and how we can make more of us as proficient as them.

While language models can guide you through every step the way, they still do not organize your learning journey in a structured, cohesive way towards a very high level of elite performance. At the same time, they don’t really teach craft the way a great mentor does. Many skills related to the craft are not commonly known, or may have been singularly discovered, and if you’re lucky, they may be passed down to you from a mentor in passing. A real mentor has strong preferences and influences they have accumulated and internalized over the years too, so maybe, any kind of universal curriculum may not be possible. The problem is that the gap between beginner and elite level master is still so great, with very few definitive resources that actually get you there.

Perhaps the real resource is in the journey itself, or that the real expertise would be too big of a resource to truly capture in a book or video tutorial form. Perhaps, the wisdom cannot be distilled, since many times, some rules apply; while others do not and it takes a true master to recognize when. Maybe experimentation is the key and the wisdom of a craft can only be discovered that way. Maybe “shipping real product” into a real customer market is the only way to learn these hard lessons and see what works.

But also, perhaps, it’s just not worth it to make such a learning resource. Most people lose interest in any topic past a certain point or they become impatient and ready to depart their course half way through to go on to their own journey. Or, maybe, we all just don’t have the time …

But this still seems like an exciting opportunity where AI could potentially be helpful. Could we develop language model agents that chart a user’s journey, and over time, make them great in a personalized and impactful way? It’s one thing to have a language model help you cheat on a quiz, but is the role of a master craftsperson mentor something an AI language model could also help us fulfill? What could it mean for everyone’s journey and self actualization?

I tend to believe everyone is destined to make something great. The challenging is less about mentoring people and making them great, but rather, mentoring people and providing them with the skills and knowledge of craft to surface the individual greatness that is already within them.