This post is part 3/7 of a series on How to Pick Good Teachers to Accelerate your Learning.

Pillar 2: Skin in the Game

Skin in the Game acts as a balance against teachers being too theoretical, academic, or otherwise out of touch with reality, thus making the knowledge they impact less practically useful to their students. We can separate who to learn from and who to avoid based on whether they’ve successfully applied their Expert Knowledge in the real world.

Skin in the Game is important because it shows that a teacher has tested their expert knowledge in an environment where there is accountability and consequences for being wrong. It helps us be wary of teachers that teach about things that they’ve never actually done. Unfortunately, we see these types of teachers all the time in the modern world  -- people teaching courses about business who’ve never run a successful business and people who’ve never worked as software engineers teaching people how to code in coding bootcamps.

Teachers with Skin in the Game have developed richer understanding and more complex mental models from their time as a practitioner. This helps us ensure that teachers we follow pass the Chauffeur Test, to see whether their knowledge is true or is just memorized with no underlying understanding.

During my high school days at UWC Costa Rica, I was fortunate to have an IB Physics teacher who was previously a biomedical engineer. She had Skin in the Game from her actually being a practicing engineer. This enabled her to relate to physics in a way different from someone who was just a career physics teacher -  she would weave in anecdotes from her time doing car crash safety testing while we were studying motion and momentum and give us examples from her career about the application of physics in medical devices. Similarly, I was fortunate to have an IB Economics teacher who worked in finance as a banker for 10+ years, as she also brought much real world context to the subject.

Skin in the Game teaches students that it’s better to be a person in the arena, not an armchair professor, and that it’s better to learn from people in the arena. What does it mean to be in the arena? Theodore Roseveldt, defined the man in the arena in his iconic speech, Citizenship in Republic:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roseveldt, Citizenship in Republic

Tim Ferriss and Josh Waitzkin call this the difference between a “philosopher” - the person doing philosophy (or some other discipline) and the “philosopholigist” - the person that studies other philosophers, rather than doing it (or some other discipline) themselves. You want to learn from philosophers, not philosopholigists. That means learning writing from a prolific writer, rather than a person who studies writing theory. I learned this first hand while co-founding and operating a startup fresh out of college. I found that my team and I received consistently more useful and actionable feedback from investors and advisors who were practitioners - people who had either run a company before or worked at the sort of company we were aiming to build -  than we did from those with ‘business’ expertise but who lacked the context of operating the type of business we were building.

Next, read about the third Pillar of Great Teaching, Beginner’s Empathy.

Which part of the article did you find most interesting? Let me know on Twitter (@avthars) or email me (avthar at avthar dot com) if you’d like to discuss it!