All Good: Positive, Negative or Divided

Your weekly newsletter from the mind of Miles Lasater

Happy Saturday! Here is your weekly dose of the world of Miles, learning, techno-optimism, business thoughts, and ways to be a better human. 

1. Positive Sum Education. We spend too much time in the education system on sorting students, focusing on inputs and moving people through a fixed-time system to the next topic. There is an alternative. I’m a fan of competency-based education. At one of my startups, OneUni, we based our programs on the approach. Plus we had mentorship for persistence, better division of labor among curriculum creation, teaching and grading, and other features. If you’re looking for an introduction to these concepts, I recommend this article on creating a positive sum education system. How can we move more in this direction?

2. Negative Carbon Products. I’m told that negative carbon concrete is now cheaper than the traditional version. By negative carbon concrete, I mean concrete that has CO2 mineralized inside of it. And by “cheaper” I mean it in the conventional sense of the sticker price to the customer. Wow. If that is true, it is thrilling. What are other negative carbon products that are cheaper than the traditional or fossil-fuel-based alternative?

3. Division of Labor at Home. One of the ways I judge a book is by how many new-to-me ideas it includes. On that metric, How to Keep House While Drowning comes out looking great. It contains good reminders that we should examine our beliefs about chores and cleanliness. Make sure you still believe the messages you received growing up. The book also offers tips on defining chores to serve you and how to better fit them into your life. Another interesting part is about dividing up work at home. The book proposes you focus on creating roughly equal amounts of rest for each person rather than focus as the amount of work. (Another take on the division of labor at home worth considering is The 80 / 80 Marriage.)

Until next week,

Miles