Andrew Delbanco in his excellent new book College: What It Was, Is, And Should Be offers an interesting interpretation of Moby-Dick Author Herman Melville’s line “a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
Delbanco’s Melville recognizes college as a place people went to prepare for their lives. He argues that Melville uses “college” as shorthand for all the lessons that needed to be learned and the experiences that needed to be had for a person to become an adult.
In his book, Delbanco writes that college should strive to be, “a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others.”
As the information that once was difficult to find outside of a college or university becomes increasingly available to anyone with a smartphone, the places where people can learn to take stock of their talents and sort out their lives in responsible ways will become increasingly important.
Delbanco’s idea of what a college should be is a great description of what happens at CrossFit affiliates. Eminent institutions, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, have made much of the information their professors provide available publicly and free. But I'm not so sure the newest methods for conveying information are great at also teaching people judgment.
Charlie Munger lauded the U.S. military’s practice of offering applicable, ‘real-world’ education to its soldiers preparing for war by firing live bullets over the foxholes they were training in for its vividness.
What better way, after all, to get your trainees to get down than to make it a matter of life and death.
I’m sure the practice was effective.
If only everything we needed to train for were so simple as hugging the ground.
CrossFit founder Greg Glassman is known for his emphasis on training his clients for the ‘unknown & unknowable’. He also uses methods that, while less stark than Munger’s WWII example, are vivid and totally applicable to the tasks people face. Perhaps because he's spent so much time thinking about & designing for some of the least elegant, most demanding situations the human body has been put through—soldering—he’s accustomed to preparing people for the worst kinds of unknown & unknowable.
A previous post on this blog considered CrossFit’s elegance. Pat Sherwood’s piece lauded Glassman and CrossFit because they both are remarkably good at finding the best, simplest solutions to problems. In particular, Sherwood cited CrossFit’s now (in)famous 21-15-9 rep scheme. ‘Fran'—one of the most famous CrossFit workouts—consists of 21 then 15 then 9 repetitions of a pair of exercises: ‘thrusters', front squats into a shoulder-press, and pull-ups. (Here's trainer Bob Harper taking a crack at it). One cannot begin the pull-ups until the thrusters are completed each round.
As part of the open qualifying competition for the 2013 CrossFit Games, CrossFit director of training Dave Castro offered a workout—called 13.5—that included 45 total repetitions each of those exercises (though the chest had to touch the bar on the pull-ups instead of the usual standard of chin-over-bar) partitioned into 3 sets. But he deviated from the element Sherwood cites as the hallmark of CrossFit’s elegance: the 21-15-9.
Why? With 13.5, all the reasons Sherwood cogently lists for the simplicity and benefits of the 21-15-9 are out the window. 13.5 was not elegant. To say the least. It's an ugly one. It’s also wonderful. The 15-15-15 rep scheme has the benefit of being easier to remember while fatigued, but the benefits extend beyond that.
Probably every CrossFitter who still had hopes of making it to the 2013 CrossFit Games had done Fran—with its 21-15-9 reps—before. Most had likely done it many times. But Castro didn’t just change the rep scheme—he made other changes that cashed in the elegance of Glassman’s original in order to take something that people were familiar with, something they knew how to deal with both in terms of strategy and pain-management and provided something they had no idea how to manage. By mixing the familiar with elements of the unknown, he pushed people’s limits.
That's the point of General Physical Preparedness. And General Intellectual Preparedness. Because life makes those kinds of demands on us. Jobs make those kinds of demands on us. Consider Delbanco’s assessment of what college is for. Then, ask yourself what you learn at your gym. A gym need not provide the stuff that prepares people for living, but CrossFit gyms do. I don’t even belong to a CrossFit gym, and the workouts alone prepare me in those ways (though I miss out on the magic formula for camaraderie—see video below for Glassman’s unique and colorful take on the formula!)
So, CrossFit prepares people for living. If we consider our mental preparedness, Munger’s thought does the same. Asking Delbanco’s question, “What's college for?” We see that it sometimes does a good job of preparing people for jobs, careers, and other times it fails. Sometimes it prepares people for the intellectual demands that will be placed on them by living in contemporary society and sometimes it fails.
Charlie Munger points to the single biggest problem plaguing higher education: a fatal disconnectedness. When I look at his proposals for solutions, I see Glassman looking over the fitness landscape. Fortunately, higher education is a lot better (and a lot more moral, with a much high character of the professionals involved) than the prevailing fitness model. But it’s still not perfect. And the stakes are a lot higher. Charlie Munger’s thinking goes a long way in remedying intellectual preparedness just as Glassman’s thinking (and practice!) has for the physical.
Philosopher Michael Oakeshott discusses the components of learning. Information is a necessary component of learning. And it’s pretty easy to impart. But judgment is important, too. And it’s much more difficult to impart. The greatness I recognize in CrossFit is that it offers people, even more than the camaraderie, is the physical equivalent of judgment—the ability to be prepared for novel and unexpected situations that extend beyond the movements/skills trained for. I see Munger’s latticework of ‘mental models’ as providing much the same thing for our intellectual needs.
General intellectual preparedness, in the same terms Glassman holds as the ideal for general physical preparedness, is possible. And I think it’s possible to teach and train it in much the same way.
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| Andrew Delbanco--America’s Best Social Critic |
Delbanco’s Melville recognizes college as a place people went to prepare for their lives. He argues that Melville uses “college” as shorthand for all the lessons that needed to be learned and the experiences that needed to be had for a person to become an adult.
In his book, Delbanco writes that college should strive to be, “a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others.”
College and University Presidents address the question, 'What is College for?' in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece. And Scott Carlson asks whether ROI is the right measurement for what a college degree offers.
As the information that once was difficult to find outside of a college or university becomes increasingly available to anyone with a smartphone, the places where people can learn to take stock of their talents and sort out their lives in responsible ways will become increasingly important.
Delbanco’s idea of what a college should be is a great description of what happens at CrossFit affiliates. Eminent institutions, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, have made much of the information their professors provide available publicly and free. But I'm not so sure the newest methods for conveying information are great at also teaching people judgment.
Firing Live Bullets over foxholes.
Charlie Munger lauded the U.S. military’s practice of offering applicable, ‘real-world’ education to its soldiers preparing for war by firing live bullets over the foxholes they were training in for its vividness.
What better way, after all, to get your trainees to get down than to make it a matter of life and death.
I’m sure the practice was effective.
If only everything we needed to train for were so simple as hugging the ground.
CrossFit founder Greg Glassman is known for his emphasis on training his clients for the ‘unknown & unknowable’. He also uses methods that, while less stark than Munger’s WWII example, are vivid and totally applicable to the tasks people face. Perhaps because he's spent so much time thinking about & designing for some of the least elegant, most demanding situations the human body has been put through—soldering—he’s accustomed to preparing people for the worst kinds of unknown & unknowable.
A previous post on this blog considered CrossFit’s elegance. Pat Sherwood’s piece lauded Glassman and CrossFit because they both are remarkably good at finding the best, simplest solutions to problems. In particular, Sherwood cited CrossFit’s now (in)famous 21-15-9 rep scheme. ‘Fran'—one of the most famous CrossFit workouts—consists of 21 then 15 then 9 repetitions of a pair of exercises: ‘thrusters', front squats into a shoulder-press, and pull-ups. (Here's trainer Bob Harper taking a crack at it). One cannot begin the pull-ups until the thrusters are completed each round.
As part of the open qualifying competition for the 2013 CrossFit Games, CrossFit director of training Dave Castro offered a workout—called 13.5—that included 45 total repetitions each of those exercises (though the chest had to touch the bar on the pull-ups instead of the usual standard of chin-over-bar) partitioned into 3 sets. But he deviated from the element Sherwood cites as the hallmark of CrossFit’s elegance: the 21-15-9.
Why? With 13.5, all the reasons Sherwood cogently lists for the simplicity and benefits of the 21-15-9 are out the window. 13.5 was not elegant. To say the least. It's an ugly one. It’s also wonderful. The 15-15-15 rep scheme has the benefit of being easier to remember while fatigued, but the benefits extend beyond that.
Probably every CrossFitter who still had hopes of making it to the 2013 CrossFit Games had done Fran—with its 21-15-9 reps—before. Most had likely done it many times. But Castro didn’t just change the rep scheme—he made other changes that cashed in the elegance of Glassman’s original in order to take something that people were familiar with, something they knew how to deal with both in terms of strategy and pain-management and provided something they had no idea how to manage. By mixing the familiar with elements of the unknown, he pushed people’s limits.
That's the point of General Physical Preparedness. And General Intellectual Preparedness. Because life makes those kinds of demands on us. Jobs make those kinds of demands on us. Consider Delbanco’s assessment of what college is for. Then, ask yourself what you learn at your gym. A gym need not provide the stuff that prepares people for living, but CrossFit gyms do. I don’t even belong to a CrossFit gym, and the workouts alone prepare me in those ways (though I miss out on the magic formula for camaraderie—see video below for Glassman’s unique and colorful take on the formula!)
So, CrossFit prepares people for living. If we consider our mental preparedness, Munger’s thought does the same. Asking Delbanco’s question, “What's college for?” We see that it sometimes does a good job of preparing people for jobs, careers, and other times it fails. Sometimes it prepares people for the intellectual demands that will be placed on them by living in contemporary society and sometimes it fails.
Charlie Munger points to the single biggest problem plaguing higher education: a fatal disconnectedness. When I look at his proposals for solutions, I see Glassman looking over the fitness landscape. Fortunately, higher education is a lot better (and a lot more moral, with a much high character of the professionals involved) than the prevailing fitness model. But it’s still not perfect. And the stakes are a lot higher. Charlie Munger’s thinking goes a long way in remedying intellectual preparedness just as Glassman’s thinking (and practice!) has for the physical.
Philosopher Michael Oakeshott discusses the components of learning. Information is a necessary component of learning. And it’s pretty easy to impart. But judgment is important, too. And it’s much more difficult to impart. The greatness I recognize in CrossFit is that it offers people, even more than the camaraderie, is the physical equivalent of judgment—the ability to be prepared for novel and unexpected situations that extend beyond the movements/skills trained for. I see Munger’s latticework of ‘mental models’ as providing much the same thing for our intellectual needs.
General intellectual preparedness, in the same terms Glassman holds as the ideal for general physical preparedness, is possible. And I think it’s possible to teach and train it in much the same way.
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