I have never been a good student. Through most of school, I was slightly below average—distracted, uninterested, convinced that most of what I was being taught would never matter. But I always did well in English. Not because I paid attention in English class. I did well because outside of school, I was using English constantly. I grew up playing video games: Pokémon, League of Legends, Tibia. Every quest, every piece of dialogue, every in-game instruction was in English. At first, I didn't read the dialogue. I just clicked through, trying to move forward. But eventually, the maps got big enough that I'd have no idea what to do next. I'd wander in circles, stuck, because I'd skipped the instructions. So I'd restart the game and read everything carefully this time. Not because I wanted to learn English but because I wanted to keep playing. I wasn't _learning_ English in any formal sense. I was solving problems that required English to solve. This is the gap traditional education rarely closes: the distance between learning something and needing it. ### Use creates urgency When I signed up for accounting and finance in high school, I had no background in it. But almost immediately, I could see how it applied. If I thought about my personal finances the way a business thinks about its finances, I could make better decisions. Accounting wasn't abstract. It was a tool I could use right away. I started saving before I spent, instead of spending and then saving what was left. That shift only made sense because I'd learned how businesses set financial targets. I wanted to save a specific amount, so I made that happen first. The same thing happened at Georgetown. I wanted to [[Portfolio/Building an AI Chatbot for Instant Tech Support|build an AI chatbot that could retrieve accurate answers]] without hallucinating or giving users bad information. The problem was, the Advanced Python class I needed to take required Python experience, and I had none. So I lied to the professor, enrolled in the class, and then taught myself Python in two weeks using [CS50](https://cs50.harvard.edu/python/). By the end of the semester, I had an A in the Advanced Python class. I didn't need discipline or motivation to learn Python. I needed Python to build something I cared about. The deadline was real. The application was immediate. Learning didn't feel like learning. It felt like building. ### The illusion of uselessness In school, I thought most of what I was being taught was useless. I remember learning HTML and being certain I'd never use it. Today, I use HTML almost every day—designing courses on Canvas, building this website, structuring content so it works the way I want. The problem isn't that schools teach useless things. The problem is that they teach things before students have any reason to care. You learn HTML in a vacuum, with no project that needs it, no problem it solves. So it feels useless. And by the time you actually need HTML, you've forgotten it—or worse, you've learned to believe that learning is something separate from doing. I didn't pay attention in French class. I thought I'd never need it. Today, I can't apply for jobs that require French. I can't work in France. The knowledge was there. I just didn't have a reason to care about it yet. The same thing happened with calculus. I wasn't interested, didn't engage deeply, and now my understanding of AI systems is weaker than it could be. Everything school taught me could have been useful. Could have become essential. But only if I'd at least known possible uses when I was learning it. ### The cost of separation The best way to remember what you learn is to use it. When students don't use things—or aren't told when they'll use them—they forget. Then they have to relearn later, if they ever need it at all. But the cost is deeper than forgetting. Learning itself starts to feel inconsequential. If nothing you learn ever connects to anything you do, learning becomes something you endure rather than something you pursue. Over time, people become averse to learning itself. Studies say your brain loses neuroplasticity as you age. I don't think that's because the brain physically stops changing. I think it's because people stop practicing. Children ask hundreds of questions a day. How do clouds form? Why do dogs bark? What happens if you mix all the colors together? Most of it isn't useful in any immediate sense. But children are learning constantly, and more importantly, they're _practicing_ curiosity. Adults ask almost nothing. Not because they've learned everything, but because they've spent years learning things they never used. Eventually, they stopped asking. The brain didn't lose its capacity to learn. It just stopped getting trained. ### The line that shouldn't exist Traditional education treats learning and using as separate activities. You learn first, then—maybe, eventually—you apply what you've learned. But the best learning collapses that distinction entirely. I didn't learn English and then use it. I didn't learn Python and then build something. I picked them up by using them. Every time I learn something by needing it, the next thing I learn comes faster. Not because I'm smarter, but because I've stopped separating the two. This pattern repeats everywhere. Lifting taught me discipline, which made me a better runner and learner. Chess taught me patience and pattern recognition, which made me a better coder. The difference is ownership. "You have to learn this because it will be on the test" creates one kind of relationship to knowledge. "I need to learn this so I can do what I want to do" creates another. One is external. The other is internal. And that changes everything about how you approach learning. **This is why, when I design courses, I try to collapse the distance between learning and doing.** At BCG, I [[Portfolio/One Terminal, Countless Constraints - When a $30,000 Tool Goes Unused|designed Bloomberg training]] so researchers learned by doing real work, not by sitting through demos. At Georgetown, I [[Portfolio/From Months to Weeks - Structuring Onboarding for Instructional Design Teams|built an onboarding system]] that pushed new hires into actual conversations and live projects instead of reading documentation in isolation. In both cases, learning didn't feel like learning. It felt like working. And that's the tension schools rarely resolve: they're designed to teach you things before you need them, in environments where you'll never use them, and then wonder why students don't retain anything. The line between learning and using isn't something to blur. It's something to erase.