The most valuable things I have learned over the last seven years never came from a lecture.
I often joke that I have spoken at more colleges than I have actually attended. It is true. I have spent surprisingly little time sitting in classrooms, usually showing up only for examinations. But this is not a story about skipping college. It is a story about where my real education happened.
The most valuable things I have learned came from sending an email I was scared to send, launching something before it was ready, talking to customers, pitching investors, hiring the wrong people, walking away from businesses, watching ideas fail, and trying again. None of those experiences were part of a syllabus, yet they have taught me far more about building than any textbook ever could.
Information versus judgment
One realization keeps coming back to me. College is very good at transferring information. It is much less effective at helping people develop judgment, and I think judgment is the thing builders need most. Judgment is not knowing the right answer. It is making a decision without knowing the answer, living with the consequences, and becoming slightly better because of it. You cannot download that from a lecture. You have to earn it.
What is interesting is that information has quietly stopped being the bottleneck. Almost everything I have ever taught myself started with YouTube: SEO, WordPress, Google AdSense, sales, marketing, AI. The internet has become the greatest classroom humanity has ever built. If someone genuinely wants information, it is available within seconds. So if information is becoming abundant, what becomes valuable? I think it is environment.
What environment actually means
When I started QuestSchool, I assumed curriculum would be the hardest part. It was not. Designing workshops was relatively easy. Building an environment where people actually stretched themselves was much harder, an environment where students felt enough responsibility to take ownership, but enough psychological safety to fail without shutting down. That balance turned out to matter far more than any slide deck. The curriculum was not creating transformation. The environment was.
Since then I have noticed the same pattern everywhere. People rarely rise to the level of the content they are consuming. They rise to the level of the environment they are part of. Put ambitious people in a room together, give them a difficult problem, a short deadline, real accountability, something meaningful at stake, and suddenly they learn faster than they thought they could. Not because someone explained it better. Because reality became their teacher.
Why this matters for the future of education
This is why I do not think the future of education is primarily about better content. There has never been more content. The future belongs to whoever can design better environments, places where people do not just learn ideas, they practice judgment, build, fail, reflect, and improve, again and again.
None of this means college is useless. Far from it. College gives people structure, friendships, and exposure to ideas they will carry for years. But I think we have confused education with information. They are not the same thing. Information can be delivered. Education has to be experienced.
That has become the question I am most interested in spending my twenties exploring. What would undergraduate education look like if it were designed around building instead of memorizing? I do not have the complete answer yet. I have been wrong before, and I will probably be wrong again. But I think it is a question worth dedicating years to, because if we can build environments where ambitious young people learn by doing, not just by listening, we will not just produce better students. We will produce better builders.