Man teaching pointing to a projector screen.
by Nathan Coumbe

Talking yourself into learning

I’ve been reviewing some coding skills in my spare time to improve the content and coursework I create for my day job.

As part of my practice, I’ve been talking to myself.

Here’s one example:

“I need to turn this text into a link, so [as I’m typing out the code] I need to wrap this header element in an anchor tag and add the hypertext reference attribute to it and set it equal to the hyperlink I need to direct my audience to. Oh, don’t forget to add the target attribute and set it equal to blank so it’ll open in a new tab.”1

It’s more tedious and time-consuming than simply typing out the code. But the point is to understand the concepts behind what I’m doing, not just to write functional code as quickly as possible. (If I wanted to do that, I’d just have Claude do it for me…)

Teaching someone else—even if you’re teaching yourself by talking out loud—is one of the best ways to prove you know something. When you force yourself to explain something out loud, you learn where the gaps in your knowledge are, which then signals what you need to review. Then, when you come to the same scenario again, you can see if you’ve acquired the necessary ability to explain your former knowledge gap.2

This is active recall: talking or writing out something you’ve learned in your own words, and it’s how I’ve been approaching certain aspects of training at work. Rather than having everyone watch videos or read through course SCORM files, we’re testing employees’ abilities to talk through features.

It starts with review, of course—you still need content they can reference at the beginning of the learning process. But that’s where L&D often falls short. We equate content delivery with learning. And, obviously, that’s not true.3

But the proof of learning comes when they’re forced to talk it out and get graded on their delivery.

There’s no punishment for getting things wrong. But we know for certain where the gaps in understanding are, what needs review and further study. Or we learn that we, the L&D practitioners, missed something in the initial teaching and have to fill it in.

Talk out what you’re learning. If you can explain it to someone else (or yourself)—out loud—there’s a good chance you’ve grasped the concept.

  1. I’m aware that this is extraordinarily basic HTML code for all you web developers out there. But the point is the practice of talking it out, not how advanced the code is. ↩︎
  2. My favorite book on this topic was actually written to help college students improve test scores. Check out Cal Newport’s How to Become a Straight-A Student. It’s not just for undergrads. ↩︎
  3. Again, I have to point out that this is why most online learning (e.g., MasterClass, Udemy, and most corporate training) doesn’t work. Consuming information isn’t learning. It’s part of it, sure, but only the retention and understanding of that information actually matter. And the only truly effective way to test this is through active recall, which is exactly what I’m doing when I talk out my code. And it’s what we’re doing when we have people talk through our product. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

It’s one of my favorite lines from Jurassic Park, and it applies in just about every situation imaginable.

via GIPHY

In my case, it’s on my mind daily as I watch the L&D industry, of which I’m a part, rapidly adopt AI for anything and everything that it possibly can.

The biggest victim of this is video creation. There are now approximately 7 trillion companies that all offer some form of talking-head, AI-avatar video-generating software that’s supposed to make video creation fast, simple, and easy for practitioners.

The problem is, most of it is awful. At least, if you care about your craft and the quality of your output.

The videos are generic. They don’t actually “TEACH” you anything. They simply come across as informational videos, which ironically is what people constantly complain about in corporate training. “It’s too boring. Not actionable. Just random information that I don’t know what to do with.”

So it’s great if you want to do more of the same stuff that doesn’t work, but you want to do it quickly, cheaply, and efficiently.

However, if you ACTUALLY want to create learning that matters, you might be better served doing it without AI. Or at least learn best practices for making learning stick or making it applicable, then work that into your AI-generated videos.

As always, it comes down to design thinking: Who’s it for and what’s it for?

If you know the answer to those questions, you can make quality content. Maybe with AI, or maybe not.

Just because you can do it with AI doesn’t mean you should.

by Nathan Coumbe

What skill have you developed in the last five years?

For most of us, I’d bet it’s something like this:

“In the last five years, I’ve gotten really good at reading and sending emails and instant messages. But also, I’m really good at going to meetings.”

Not exactly skills you can sell when you’re looking for your next gig, are they?

For those of us who don’t make or sell tangible products for a living, skills are all we have to trade for money. But the nature of knowledge work means more of us are developing fewer skills the longer we’re in our careers.

We’re spending more and more of our time talking about work rather than doing work. We’re building fewer things and completing fewer projects.

AI is only exacerbating the problem, as we outsource more of our making and thinking to AI chatbots (and getting worse outcomes as a result).

Without projects that we do ourselves—without making things that challenge us to learn—we’re deskilling ourselves. And as a result, we’re making ourselves less marketable in the workforce.

The best time to develop a new skill was five years ago. The next best time is today.

by Nathan Coumbe

I’m signing up for cold calls

Every week, I sign up for several webinars or other educational opportunities. And every time I do so, they ask for my phone number (always required, never optional).

Several years ago, I noticed that I was getting dozens of unsolicited phone calls each week from people and companies I’d never heard of.

I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that most of these people worked for companies that sponsored (overtly and sometimes covertly) the events I attended.

It’s obvious now that the events weren’t just for me: they were pipeline-building opportunities for organizations to grow their businesses.

If this sounds annoying, it is. But I’ve come to terms with it.

I realized that, unlike telemarketers interrupting me at dinner, I was getting calls from professionals who were just trying to make a living at the same time they were offering me something that by my own admission—I signed up for their webinar, right?—might benefit me.

Most of these calls go nowhere because they’re for businesses or services I either can’t afford, don’t need, or don’t have the authority to decide on for my job.

But the person on the other end of the phone is a professional. She’s doing her job, and I will respect that by treating her with decency rather than contempt.

Because I might be that person on the other end of the line someday. Whether it’s making contacts for a new job, selling a service I created, or raising funds for a cause I care about, I might be that person making calls.

And I hope the person on the other end sees it as a generous act on my part, not a self-serving one that benefits only me.

So my mantra, when I’m typing my information into a sign-up form, is, “I’m signing up for cold calls.”

by Nathan Coumbe

Now on Substack!

As part of my growing POSSE strategy (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere), I’ve decided to feature some of my longer pieces—and some original long-form articles—on Substack.

We’ll see how well this works out; AI is currently making a mockery of what was once a great platform.

If you’re interested, I published my three-part series on hiring, degree requirements, and salary as a single, long-form article on the site.

Check it out!

And as always, thank you for reading.

—Nathan

by Nathan Coumbe

How to get a job in cybersecurity

I went to pick up a friend for lunch a while back, and while I was waiting, I struck up a conversation with one of his coworkers. The young man asked me about my job, and when I told him I worked for a cybersecurity company, he got excited!

“That’s what I’m studying in school,” he said. “Would you mind telling me how you broke into the cyber job market? It would really help me out.”

Here’s what I told him, tongue-in-cheek the entire time:

Step 1: Decide you want to be a physical therapist and spend the first couple of years of college studying biology, human anatomy, chemistry, and exercise science while working in the university’s gym.

Step 2: Realize how much you hate chemistry and biology, then switch your major to jazz studies because you’ve been a musician all your life and want to make a go of it as a drummer.

Step 3: Spend the next 3 years questioning every decision you ever made about becoming a musician and changing your major between history and music every semester until your wife-to-be says, “Why don’t you just double major?!”

Step 4: Graduate with a double major in history and music, then take a job working as an ophthalmic technician for two eye doctors because it’s the first job someone offered you that didn’t pay minimum wage.

Step 5: Become a banker after your wife graduates college because you have to move, and your boss’s daughter just happens to be hiring, and you’ve got a recommendation.

Step 6: Demote yourself to teller (seriously, I willingly took a demotion) because you hate putting people in debt and cold-calling people over dinner to sell them credit cards.

Step 7: Get recruited by Apple on the recommendation of a friend, and learn how awesome you are at teaching. Then spend the next two and a half years honing that craft.

Step 8: Go to work for a child support agency to develop your writing and marketing skills… Because yeah, that tracks.

Step 9: Watch the world go to hell during a global pandemic, lose your job, flounder in unemployment for 8 months, and nearly die from COVID at 30 years old.

Step 10: Find a way to combine your teaching and marketing skills by becoming a content developer for an online business education company

Step 11: Get laid off from that company for no reason at all, only to have a conversation with a former coworker from said company who gets you an interview with your future boss at the cybersecurity company.

There you have it: in just 11 easy steps, you, too, can get a great job in cybersecurity!

He got the joke, and he knew I was trying to be helpful even though I really had no idea how it happened.

But I ended my advice with an offer: if he wanted a job at my company, or any other company where I knew someone, I would give him a recommendation and make an introduction.

Because that’s how I got every single job I’ve ever had. I knew someone (or someone knew me and my work); that led to a conversation where we genuinely connected. That connection often led to a job offer.

I’ve (most likely) applied to more than 1,000 jobs since I started working at age 16. And the only way I ever got an interview was because someone treated me like a human being, had a conversation with me, and made a connection I needed to get my foot in the door.

Speaking of helping other people get their foot in the door, two of the best people I’ve ever worked with (Joe Charman and Rebeca Leininger) are looking for their next roles.

If you need hardworking, technically savvy, AI-fluent, customer-focused, cybersecurity and threat intelligence experts, you’d be extraordinarily LUCKY to have them on your team.

Reach out and connect with them on LinkedIn.

by Nathan Coumbe

We’re disconnected from work because work is disconnected from life

One reason I think so many of us are feeling disconnected from work is that work itself is disconnected from our lives.

For most of human history, work was literally and directly tied to living our lives. We hunted and gathered to feed ourselves, our families, and our tribes.

After the Agricultural Revolution, we worked the fields and raised animals to directly support how we lived. At the same time, the idea of markets developed, and we began selling the surplus and byproducts of our work. But the selling itself was still directly tied to the work we’d done previously.

Then the Industrial Revolution hit, and humans went to work in factories. And for the first time in our history, our work was separate in every way from our lives.

We left our farms and our cottage industries (aptly named). We stood at assembly lines for 10 or 12 hours a day, away from our “tribe,” moving or assembling widgets that had nothing to do with our day-to-day.1 We didn’t make the parts, build the factory, or come up with the ideas for what we were making.

But it was also physically separate from the rest of our lives. No longer did we work fields on or near our homes or in little shops in the town square.

Instead, we commuted away from home to work in an alien environment in the most anti-human way possible, literally putting our lives on hold for our shift. And the only things we had to show for it were little bits of paper or metal at the end of the week.

And once the Information Age hit, the disconnect became absolute. Now, most of us are completely disconnected from production altogether. We often don’t “make” things anymore. We administer, we meet, we talk about work through digital (no longer tangible) communication methods. And occasionally, we do something like sort of feels like actual work.

Few of us are close enough to the end product of what’s made, sold, and consumed to actually feel what it is we’re doing.

And now we have generative AI, and we’re steadily offloading what’s left of our work to a little homunculus that does everything for us.

So where does this leave us?

We’re heading toward another revolution, but I think it’s different from what all the AI pundits predict.

I think this disconnect is going to become so severe that we’ll push back and seek to return to the roots of human production.

More of us will step out on our own, or join together in small groups to make things that matter for people who care.

I think this AI revolution will end up becoming a revolution of meaning.

  1. Sure, Ford made sure that every American eventually had an automobile of their own. But it’s highly unlikely that you would have made the very same car that you, yourself, were driving. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

Remember: there are humans involved

There’s one train of thought in discussions about AI that aggravates me the most.

The conversation inevitably, yet casually, turns to when it will be time to eliminate job roles and pass the work off to AI.

I hear it all the time, and there are several problems with it. The least of which is the belief that an AI agent, in the current state of the field, can actually replace a human expert in a field or subject simply because it’s fast and efficient at doing similar work.1

It can’t, at least not yet. And when it’s used as such, the results are often banal (AI slop is aptly named).2

But the issue with these conversations that bothers me the most is the nonchalance with which these comments are made.

We’re talking about people here. Human beings with hopes, dreams, and worlds as rich as those having the conversations. People with families, children, parents, and friends who rely on them.

And we reduce them to job roles?

I’m no Luddite. I know that technology changes the world of work. The steam shovel got rid of ditch diggers, and email eliminated the secretary pool.

AI will eventually have a major impact on the job market: it will change which jobs are available and, for those that remain, what they look like.

But in the meantime, let’s remember that we’re talking about people. And our decisions need to be made with empathy and understanding for the impacts they’ll have on them.

  1. If you actually think that AI is replacing human beings, you need to check out the addendum at the bottom of Cal Newport’s latest blog post. ↩︎
  2. I assert that companies that make these decisions to eliminate jobs and outsource everything will thoroughly regret them in the next few years when the limits of these tools are exposed, and we enter the “trough of disillusionment.”

    The Gartner Hype Cycle is proven and applies to these AI companies as much as they have to every other culture-changing technology we’ve experienced.

    After the hype dies down, most things will go back to normal, except that people will use AI for things that it’s actually good at. ↩︎
By Jeremykemp at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10547051
by Nathan Coumbe

Why I still write a blog in the age of AI

Blogs are dead. They were at peak relevance about 15 years ago.

Then, algorithmically-driven social media platforms ruined them by providing perfectly curated, mind-numbing entertainment any time you need it.

Now we’re living through another significant moment for tech innovation and the internet.

When AI can write everything for us, why bother writing in a medium that hasn’t been relevant in more than a decade?

Because I refuse to offload my thinking to artificial intelligence.

I use AI every day to help me with work, complete minor tasks, and even sharpen my thinking. But I will not let it think for me.

So I write this blog. It’s not because I have a huge audience. There are only about 300 subscribers, and of those, only a third of you read it regularly.

So it’s definitely not because I’m reaching millions of people or making my living writing here. It’s because I need to do it for my own mental acuity.

It helps me crystallize ideas, expose gaps in my knowledge and logic. It makes me assert, which means I have to consider counterarguments and be okay with potentially being wrong.

So I continue to write. According to my WordPress dashboard, this is my 500th published blog post. That feels like a pretty significant milestone.

And if you’re reading this—thank you. From the bottom of my heart, I am truly grateful.

by Nathan Coumbe

The em dash exists for a reason

And I’ll be damned if I stop using them now. I’ve been using em dashes since I started writing—because they work.

They do things that other parenthetical devices like commas or parentheses don’t do.

They add force to your arguments. They separate potentially unrelated but still relevant or useful thoughts—have you ever noticed this?—from the point you’re making.

And for those of you who say that there’s no way to recreate them on a computer keyboard…

Shift + Option + – (for Mac users) gives you —.

Here are 11 of them: — — — — — — — — — — —

Also, there are two other types of dashes.

– (press only the dash key) is a hyphen most often used to separate compound words.

– (made by pressing Option + – on a Mac) is called an en dash and can be used to separate things like dates (April 20–23).1

And then you have the glorious em dash.

Why do they show up so often in AI writing? It’s simple: most of the best writers in history made (and still make) liberal use of it—because it works! And because AI has imbibed all the writing ever written, it also uses it quite often.

Does AI use them too much? Absolutely.

Does that mean we should stop using them? Absolutely not.

So what’s the solution? You get really damn good at writing.

Develop a style of your own, a voice, a way of writing that sounds like you—and only you. So when people read your writing, they know that you did it, not an AI.

And you’ll be able to use fifty em dashes in a single piece if you wanted to, and no one would care because they would know, simply because of your personal style, that you were generous enough to take time out of your day to share something worth reading.

If you write well—and like yourself—you’ll be fine.

(Ann Handley actually beat me to this a long while back. But I was so incensed by no less than 7 posts about this yesterday that I had to say something.)

  1. Unfortunately, there is a feature in WordPress’s code that prevents the three different dashes from rendering properly. I didn’t realize this until after I publish. So if you’re reading this on my site instead of in email, you won’t be able to see the difference between them.

    You can test this for yourself: pull up a blank document somewhere on your computer and try all three keystroke combinations.

    Also, this is a great reason to subscribe to my email newsletter, so you’ll see it rendered the way it’s supposed to. ↩︎