The
Learning Project by
Lincoln StollerPaul Widerman, wrestling coach, entrepreneur
Interviewed in Krumville, New York, June 12, 2005
Born: 1959 in Huntington, New York
“Learning is not something that is done to us, or that we can produce in other. An education is not something we “get”… it is something we create for ourselves, on a life-long basis. The best learning — perhaps the only real learning — is that which results from personal interest and investigation, from following our own passion.”
— Wendy Priesnitz, in Taking Risks and Breaking Rules, as appeared in the May/June 2005 issue of the magazine “Life Learning,” p.14 (www.lifelearningmagazine.com)
PW:
I would argue that to be great at anything — I don’t mean egocentrically great but, for lack of a better term, like Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss” kind of great — everything is about personal growth. At some point you’re not going to want to spend a lot of time getting good at something if you’re not passionate about it, or you don’t love it. (Joseph Campbell wrote about mythology. See Joseph Campbell Foundation: www.jcf.org — Ed.)
There are not too many Olympic champion wrestlers that hate wrestling. There might be times when they’re tired of it, or they’re sick of it, or they’ve been pushed into it for one reason or another, but you don’t reach a high level, reach mastery of any activity, if you don’t love the activity. It will weed you out.
So, to me, your whole life is about finding the things that you’re passionate about, that you love, that you’re willing to go the distance on. That’s how you get fulfillment, that’s how you grow, and that’s how people really excel, or get great at something.
I don’t think that winning’s the ultimate goal or the most important thing. So in terms of wrestling, it doesn’t really matter to me when I’m coaching somebody whether they become a state champion, or a national champion, or an Olympic champion. It’s great if that happens, that’s a wonderful thing. So, for a young athlete involved in wresting, it’s really about them being as good as they can be. That’s what the sport’s about.
Very few people that come out for it, are going to do it if they don’t like it. I encourage them: “If you’re going to be great at this sport, try to learn to love it and get passionate about it.” Then it doesn’t matter so much if you win or lose. It’s all about growth. Then you can look at your losses more objectively: “Well, why did I lose? What went wrong? What happened? Was he better? Was my technique good or bad? Was this working or not working?” There starts to be a kind of a dispassionate Zen way of looking at the activity, but also a love for the activity.
I remember this experience in college. I really did not like organic chemistry, but I was Pre-Med and had to take organic chemistry. At some point along the way I realized, “It’s not organic chemistry that’s boring, it’s how I’m thinking about it that’s boring. I’ve got to find a way to make this activity interesting enough so that I’ll go in depth into this activity.” I started to look at chemistry a whole lot differently once I shifted my consciousness. That was a real shift, and I did fairly well in organic chemistry after that.
LS:
Did you like it?
PW:
Umm… I’m not sure. I don’t think that I ever came to love organic chemistry, but when I realized that molecules were 3-dimensional, as opposed to 2-dimensional, it made it a whole lot more interesting.
That’s how I think about the notion of “follow your bliss” — I don’t like the term because it’s so clichéd — but the concept is deep. You’ve got to keep hunting around until you find what moves you.
I’ve been tremendously influenced by Harvey Fite’s “Opus 40.” (A monumental, landscape sculpture, for more see www.opus40.org — Ed.) I was so moved by what Harvey Fite did there. I’ve been to Opus 40 so many times that I came know Tad Richards, Harvey Fite’s step-son, who lives there in the house that Harvey built. Joseph Campbell and Harvey Fite were friends. Tad told me there was a calm centeredness about how Harvey built Opus 40. To me it is a great example of a man "following his bliss."
I used to run a wrestling camp and would take the kids on field trips to see Opus 40. Before bringing a group of kids there I’d get a stone out of the woods — a pretty big one, like this big — and I’d put them in a circle and have them pick up the stone and pass it around the circle. That way they’d have a feeling of what it was like to pick up one heavy stone. And then I’d tell them, “Now we’re going to go to a place where a man placed stones by hand for 38 years. We’re going to see what he did, and how he got into working with stone.”
And then you go there and you see what he did. And it completely changes your conception of moving stone, and art, and that kind of thing. So to me, that’s kind of what life’s about: trying to find things that you like to do enough so that they move you on that level.
The curriculum of my wrestling camp was quite different. I used to get bored at wrestling camps I went to. I liked wrestling but I hated the downtime between the sessions because all you did was sit around and talk about wrestling. I got bored, I didn’t really like to talk about wrestling that much, I liked to do other things.
In my camp we went on field trips that inspired; the whole idea was to inspire the kids. First we’d go to Opus 40, and then we’d go right from Opus 40 to the Tibetan Monastery. It was very interesting to see how kids reacted to the Tibetan Monastery on the top of the mountain. Then, later in the week, I took them to Nancy Copley’s house. She’s an architect who’s been building her own house for 25 years or so. Nancy is an amazing person…a mentor for me and another following their bliss. And then we went in to Pompey’s Cave.
Do you know about Pompey’s Cave? It’s a cave that was made by a river. However, the underground river is below a dried out river above it. So, you walk upstream of the dry riverbed, then go down a ladder about 12' underground. Then you can go up or downstream following the underground river. It is quite an intense experience. Pompey was a run-away slave girl who was brought up from the South. The legend is that the local farmers hid Pompey in the cave for three days with her infant. Bounty hunters searched for all over the area, couldn't find her and moved on. It became Pompey's cave, a place of fear and total blackness, but also of shelter and courage where you come up against your own mind and thoughts.
The cave is scary. After climbing down the ladder you find yourself in the river, and you’re knee to waist high in water, and it’s completely pitch black. In some places you have to crawl on your hands and knees, and in some places it’s quite vast and cavernous. So it’s a dramatic thing to do with a bunch of kids. After Pompey’s cave we would finish with a hike in the mountains.
We’d do all of this in between doing yoga, Smartbells®, and wrestling. The curriculum ended up being so powerful, in the way that it flowed over the course of the week, that I wanted my whole life to feel like that week. It really moved the kids.
LS:
What inspired you to do that? Was there something that you could
identify that was important or life changing?
PW:
My relationship to my high school wrestling coach was quite intense. He was a tremendous mentor.
From a very young age I liked to do a lot of things. I liked to be free. I didn’t like to be put in a box, and I didn’t like labels. And I liked to go really deeply into things. I liked mind-body, physical things — just naturally liked to move, liked to be in my body — so I thought I wanted to be a gymnast, but there was no gymnastics in our town’s athletic program.
Our high school wrestling coach, Lou Giani, was so good, and so renowned that there were people who moved to the town to be in his tutelage. One man moved his whole family so that his kids could be coached by Lou.
I got interested in wrestling because I thought I would like it. And the first year actually I hated it! I went out with a team and I got so pounded that I quit in seventh grade! (laughs) All the tough kids in town went out for wrestling, and I was tough, but I wasn’t as tough as them.
The next year this man moved to town who had two sons, and he needed workout partners for his own kids. So he recruited me to be the workout partner for one of his sons. We used to go up to the high school in the summer, where they were practicing wrestling, and I would hang around and learn the moves from this other guy, who was under the tutelage of Lou Giani.
That got me in the fold of seeing how he was training people over years. I started to see the discipline with which he approached his craft, and how he really developed people over a long period of time. I sort of fell into the fold, kind of accidentally.
He was really able to teach people the art and science of approaching something in order to be great at it. He was an Olympian himself, so he knew the different ways to find mastery in yourself.
I’ve seen many people in other disciplines, like dancers have an understanding of what he was doing, and also martial artists. The person I’ll bring up very peripherally, because I know you’re interested in astronomy and physics, is Neil Tyson. Do you know Neil?
LS:
Yes, I went to school with him.
PW:
You went to school with Neil? So did I! Where did you go to school with Neil?
LS:
Graduate school, in Texas.
PW:
Small world. So you’re a friend of Neil! (laughs) A friend of Neil’s is a friend of mine! (laughs)
LS:
You were an undergraduate with him?
PW:
Neil was at Harvard, he was a Junior when I was a Freshman. He was on the wrestling team. And I’ll say this — you can put it on tape — that I was a far better wrestler than Neil was. He was a far better physicist than I’ll ever be!
We sort of kind of “glommed” on to each other. He was watching me as a young, blue-chip wrestler — you know Harvard really didn’t have any elite wrestlers on the team. It was tricky because I was a light-weight, and I was really too small to be an elite college wrestler. But I could have been on any of the top wrestling teams in the country, but I wanted to go to Harvard.
What happened was, when I was looking at college in high school, I went up there with a friend who was obsessed with going to Harvard, and I was trying to figure out where I wanted to go. One of his mentors said, “Oh, you really should go to Harvard.” So we went up there to explore it together.
I remember going into the Freshman Union, the dining room for Freshman, and I just loved the atmosphere. There were students from all over the world — all races, it was very international — just a real mix of people who were good at different things from academics, to cello, to wrestling. It was such an interesting environment. -. As soon as I entered that room full of 1,500 so varied and talented… I was, like, “This is where I want to go to college.”
I met Neil on the wrestling team and he tutored me in physics a few times. I will never forget the tidbits of wisdom that he passed on as a Senior to a Sophomore in college. I remember them to this day.
At that time he was not doing as well in math as the department wanted. I think they wanted him to drop the major and move on to something else. I think he was getting B-‘s instead of B+’s or something. And what he told me was that for him to get the grades they want, given the way they were teaching the courses, he would have to regurgitate the material by memorizing the formulas. And that wasn’t how he wanted to learn math or science.
He felt he had something creative to contribute, in a real way, and he needed to learn it at a pace where he would own the material, as opposed to regurgitating the material. He was willing to take the heat in order to go at his own pace. He had real confidence once he learned the material, once he knew it, he owned it. And to creatively manipulate the material he needed to learn it his own way, so he was content to get whatever grades they gave him. I really admired his relationship to science. He inspired me to really learn things at my own pace, my own way.
I’ll never be the scientist he is. I think some of us have a natural proclivity for certain things, and he’s an innate, true-blue scientist. Well, I’m that way in my body. I have something genetic in my body, a mind-body relationship, that I know about. It’s just something that … it’s just one of my gifts.
Neil and I connected over something artistically; we both have a sense of art, a passion for intuitive knowledge and art. We found this meeting-ground in athletics. At the time he was interested in dance, and there weren’t too many other wrestlers interested in dance. We both had this interest in movement for movement’s sake.
At this point in my life I’m really looking at wrestling as a movement art, one of many movement art forms. To me it’s one of the most interesting. One that I love the most but I don’t look at it as the only one, or the best one. I’m not nearly as interested in the competitive aspect of wrestling as I am in the art of it. It’s not so important whether you win or lose, but how you pursue this art form called “wrestling.”
In the summers, in high school with Lou Giani, we did wrestling for fun, and we did the art of wrestling. We went to practice, worked out as hard as we wanted. It didn’t matter whether you won or lost, you were creative. Then from November to March the idea was to be as good as you could be, and to win as much as you could win. So the year was sort of cyclical: you got to be an artist part of the time, and be competitive part of the time.
Wresting is interesting that way. It gives you this chance to be competitive, and humans seem to like that, focusing on being the champion, or being the best. And then at other times you get to be creative, which humans also like. Wrestling gives you the opportunity to do both things.
For me, at this point in my life, I feel like I see the bigger picture, and I’m not as interested in the winning per se. If that were my passion I’d be a college wrestling coach trying to produce Olympic champions.
I was on the path to be the head wrestling coach at Harvard, but I chose not to take that path. I was the assistant there for 5 years with Jim Peckham, one of the greatest wrestling coaches in the country. When he got ready to retire, he called me to say, “Hey, I’m leaving. Do you want to take the job?” I didn’t go back to take the job, I wanted to stay here, in Accord, in the mountains. I wanted to stay on a creative wavelength that felt more important to me.
But now, in coaching high school kids, I try to give them the opportunity to experience both things. To be both as good as they can be, to be competitive — because they like that — but also to look at this as a chance to be creative, and work at it like a mind-body, artistic endeavor. I’m going to digress even a little bit more, because these are topics that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.
I was interested in being a dancer, but I became frustrated pretty quickly, and let me tell you why. Dance is interesting in terms of the skill of moving to music, and the discipline of how dance works, but to become a dancer in a company you really become the artistic tool, or medium, of the choreographer.
If you’ve been a wrestler for your whole life, for 20 years, you’re the painter. You get to go out there and decide what’s going on on the canvas. You’re not used to having somebody tell you what shape to put your body in. And if you get really good at wrestling, then you hold on to that pretty tightly. So I became more and more disillusioned with dance. I realized pretty quickly that intellectually I was finding wrestling way more interesting than dance.
Since that time people in the dance world have really broken
out, and I follow them because I think they’re doing amazing work, like Michael
Moschen (Contact juggler, dancer, and performance artist, see www.michaelmoschen.com — Ed.).
Have you heard of Michael Moschen? If you ever get the chance, get a hold of
his video “In Motion with Michael Moschen.” You know he got a McArthur Award
for juggling? He does things with balls, and movement, and pattern making, and
physics that are just over the top. Seeing his PBS special really influenced me
a lot.
You know I’m into this Smartbells stuff, and Michael Moschen’s work was one of things that influenced me regarding the interaction of shape and energies. There’s a certain wavelength that Michael is on that really resonated for me, and that I couldn’t find in wrestling; couldn’t find in dance. Michael made up his own path and explored it both artistically, through movement and dance, and through science.
SmartBells are way more utilitarian than what Michael is doing, but I’m taking this utilitarian object and doing things on a similar wavelength, pattern-wise. There are other people that are out there on that wavelength — not as much with objects I think — like there’s the Momix Dance Company, and the Pilobolous Dance Company, and Sarah East Johnson. (Three avant guard dance companies. For more information see www.mosespendleton.com, www.pilobolus.com, and www.lavalove.org — Ed.).
I keep an eye out for people in those worlds; I keep a pulse on what they’re doing. At this point wrestling is way too small a box — I couldn’t fit in the wrestling box —so I’ve invented my own box. That’s why I have a company, it’s called THINKFIT, and it gives me a box that I feel comfortable in. In all ways, with movement, , creatively, artistically, business-wise… I can move in all of these ways.
To me wrestling is a way — I love wrestling — to transfer knowledge: to teach people things that are not really about wrestling. Wrestling just gives them a way to learn those things.
LS:
How much of what you do is focused on teaching, and the rewards of teaching?
PW:
You mean from coaching wrestling? I have kind of divided it at this point. Teaching wrestling is almost all about the reward of teaching the kids. It’s certainly not for the money, thought that helps, living out here in the woods.
LS:
What’s the other part?
PW:
I’ve never wanted to be a teacher in the school system. I really don’t have an interest in being there from 7 to 3 every day. That takes up too much time. Wrestling ends up taking up too much time also, but I feel it’s a worthy use of my time because I feel like you can’t really match… For me…
You know, the level of this conversation changes completely knowing that you’re friends with Neil. That allows me to go to places… You know, I really don’t know you, Lincoln! (laughs)… But if you’re doing physics with Neil, then there’s a certain level of trust — let’s say “simpatico” — about what this is really about.
Like if you’re an academic, then you’re dealing with the tension between pursuing your gift, and passing the energy on to other people: to help open them up to energies in themselves. Some people are different. Some people have no interest in passing on their teaching, they’re content to be academics, to study, or be artists, or just abuse their graduate students! (laughs) They have no interest in teaching their graduate students. You know what I’m saying?
To me, that’s not what it’s about. I see the effect that I have on some of the kids, and the effect my teachers have had on me. To me the wrestling season is about the kids, it’s not about me. As Coach Giani said to us many times, “I've got all my gold medals at home, boys. I don’t need any more. This is your thing. This is not for me, this is for you, and your relationship to yourself.”
The year before I moved here to the mountains I was seeing a therapist in Cambridge, trying to figure out what the hell I was doing in my life. When I told him that I wanted to move to the Catskills, I said, “Jeff, I can’t really tell you completely. All I can say is that it has to do with modern Japanese architecture.” I’m really interested in architecture, passionately interested in architecture, architecture that has the spirit and depth of a Japanese Zen temple, but modern. The first year that I moved here I spent the whole winter putting this tiny little addition onto our house. That was sort of a way of expressing this.
I was afraid to use an electric saw, a circular saw, so I cut every piece of wood by hand, in the winter, in the snow. It was all hammers and nails, because I was afraid to use the tools. Now I’m up to using chain saws and circular saws. You know, living out here you change, but it took years.
That was the first year — I must have been 35 — that I didn’t spend every day in the winter going to a wrestling room. I realized that I had spent more years in wrestling rooms than the age of the kids on the local team. They were 17, and I’d spent 20 years in a wrestling room! (laughs). So that year I was passionate, I’m like, “I’m not going to the wrestling room!”
The next year Alphonse, the Rondout Valley High School head coach, came up to me and said, “Will you help me coach the high school team up here?” I was like, “Well, OK.” So I go to practice and he introduces me to the kids on the team and he goes, “This is Paul. He’s an Olympic alternate, and he was the coach at Harvard, and he knows way more wrestling than me, so I’m just going to turn the coaching over to him.” And I go, like, “What!” — in my mind, you know, I didn’t say, “what” — I said, “That wasn’t what I signed up for, Alphonse!”
And then I started to think about it and, you know, I realized that I really didn’t get to coach the way I wanted to at Harvard because Jim Peckham was there. So this was an opportunity to use the kids as my laboratory, and to teach wrestling the way I wanted to teach it. So I’m trying out all this stuff that I believe. This is my new laboratory!
We lost our first match, and then we won the next seven, and then we went undefeated for 5 straight years. No, we weren’t undefeated, we were 50 and 3 after 5 years. We had three undefeated seasons and we had a couple of guys place in The States (New York State Championships). I was teaching them yoga, and every day we had music on: they were wrestling to music, and they were learning yoga.
Then I invented SmartBells. I had been doing movement with barbell plates, and I had all the boys on the team doing the routines with barbell plates. They really liked it, and they were making progress. They started to teach it to other kids in the school, and the girl’s field hockey team started doing it, and they were, like, “Wow, these routines were great, but we hate the barbell plates. You need to invent some different weights.”
At first I would just say, “Oh, boys, don’t complain. Just do it.” And then I was teaching a yoga class and I had everyone doing the routine with their shoe, and that’s when I realized, “Oh, I really should invent something to do this with.”
My brother was a puppeteer and he had all this plasticine clay in his puppet studio in New York City. At the time I was going down to work with him, so I brought home about 5 pounds of clay. I got it into my mind that I was going to invent a weight that was so aesthetic that people would just want to pick it up and work out.
Since my father had been an airplane designer I knew all about “form follows function,” and he would always tell us that if something was beautiful, then it would usually work better in terms of design. So when you design something you always look for beauty as well as function.
I sculpted the object in clay and tried to make it as sexy as I could with lots of nice curves. Then, I started to do the movements with the clay. I used plasticine, which doesn’t harden and allowed the movements to change the shape. It changed into this shape that worked, and was unusual. Upside down, it’s saddle shaped. Eventually, a math professor at Stanford pointed out that was one of the three shapes of the universe predicted by the theory of relatively. So, to bring this full circle, so to speak, eventually, years later, I brought it to Neil.
I hadn’t seen Neil for 15 years — last time I saw him was at the National Wrestling Championships in Maryland, and he was in grad school — so I punched his name into Google and I couldn’t believe his résumé. I was, like, “Oh my God! Look what Neil has been doing!” (laughs)
I went down to the Hayden Planetarium and laid all this stuff that I was thinking on him. I said, “Look Neil, I really don’t want to be out here like a quack, making all this stuff up, but look at all of these things. I’m starting to connect some dots. What do you think about this?”
If he had said, “Shelf it,” then I would have shelved it, but he was very encouraging about me pushing all these ideas and told me to write a book about it. That has kept me going on ideas like electromagnetic fields, and auras, and quantum mechanics, and SmartBells, and those sorts of things. So Neil came up in my life again, 15 years later, giving a nod on this project.
I see him about twice a year. The last two times I brought Nancy and he brought his wife, and we went to a wrestling match. I swear, Neil can get more excited about wrestling than physics, and I can get more excited about physics than wrestling. You know what I mean, at this point?
LS:
I don’t have any overt enthusiasm about physics. I rarely talk about it. It rarely figures in anything that I do with people. But it’s what I want to do.
PW:
So are you a practicing physicist in some way now?
LS:
No, there’s nothing in the professional world of physics that attracts me. I consider the professional world antithetical to doing physics in any deep way.
PW:
Seems true of a lot of activities, doesn’t it? I think architecture is a perfect example.
LS:
I know architecture really well. My father was “The Great Architectural Photographer.” I spent a lot of time going on trips with him when I was between the ages of 12 and 14. I used to be his assistant. If you now go to the post office you’ll see modern architecture stamps that they released just a few weeks ago. Most of them are taken from his photos.
PW:
Was there someone in particular that he liked to photograph?
LS:
He worked for Frank Lloyd Wright when he was young; he was the only person that Wright would have photograph his buildings. That was before my time.
PW:
Is your Dad still alive?
LS:
No, he died last year.
PW:
I’m sorry to hear that. Did you have a good relationship with him?
LS:
No, no one really did. He was a very driven person, and he basically wanted the world to stop at the peak of his career. So he decided that he was just going to pretend that it was still 1963 for the rest of his life, and treat everybody like that. That’s not a way you relate to people. You can’t freeze time for everyone else.
PW:
It’s interesting because having been a Harvard undergrad, living around 1,500 driven people — no, more than that because that’s just one class — maybe 15,000 driven people, counting the grad students, undergrads, and the professors. It didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t interested in that mentality.
I was pretty accomplished when I was young. I graduated first in my high school class. I was two-time State Champion. I was on this fast track that I thought was to fuck’in nowhere. You know?
LS:
When did you decide that?
PW:
By the time I was a sophomore.
I took time off after sophomore year. I almost dropped out halfway through. And then I felt, like, “I don’t want to waste all my parents’ money.” It’s very socially acceptable to take time off from Harvard, so I thought, “OK, I’ll get through the sophomore year, and then I’m out of here.”
After that, I spent 2 months living with a wrestling team in Japan. I worked at the Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas. I lived on my own, and traveled, and did things. By the end of the year I felt like I was ready to go back to college; that I wanted to go back. But I felt like, man, they’re producing people who end up successful and unhappy.
LS:
What did you do with your remaining time there? Did you change direction?
PW:
I took every elective in visual studies. I was a biology major and didn't like it. But, I didn’t drop the biology major because switching majors at that point would have been too hard. I only needed two more courses to finish the major. So I finished that out and took every elective in Visual and Environmental Studies; it’s kind of like the pre-architecture program.
They have a thing called 99-R, which is where you find a mentor and make up your own curriculum. You choose the books that you want to read, study with a mentor, and write two papers: a mid-term and a final. It becomes a course.
Harvard’s amazing if you have the gumption to make it what you want to make it. I did three 99-R’s, making up my own courses. I studied wrestling and I did sculpture. Man, I loved that. I was in heaven. It was my last year. Then I took my Bio class pass-fail. Almost failed it! (laughs a lot). It was Biochem 10B, and I as like, “Shit, if I fail this I’m not graduating!”
How did you end up out here? You were in Austin at University of Texas?
LS:
The University of Texas was kind of a funny mistake. I went there because it was a place I hadn’t been yet, but that’s like joining the army because you’ve never been to Iraq, you know? There are various ways to see Texas, and going to the University of Texas Department of Physics is not the best way. It was a war zone.
PW:
Is it a good physics department? Is it a renowned department?
LS:
Yeah, it’s renowned. It’s very competitive, and also very profit driven, there’s a lot of money flowing in certain veins. A lot of people coming in to follow it: academic money, industry money. Powerful people associated with that, political people. I got a very good education, but I don’t give anyone any credit but myself.
Remember that book “All Quiet on the Western Front,” by Erich Remarque. It was World War I and the main character got a great education about life from the hell of living in the trenches. But I don’t think he’d give Germany credit for his education!
I basically did three different dissertations at Texas. Getting failed on each one after I half finished them, until I finally got through on the third time. I learned everything there was to learn there for me: I did dissertations in every topic that was of interest to me, and I learned all the dimensions of the profession, most of which they would prefer a student never see: the personalities of these people, and the professional consequences of going into the field.
It convinced me that there was nothing there for me, except the topic. The subject is inherent in the field itself, but it wasn’t really in evidence in anyone’s work. It’s like art: you have the choice of being an artist, or being a commercial artist. I choose to be an artist in science, but not a commercial artist.
I cannot see any way to make a living in physics without fatally compromising the art. Not only is what I want to do unmarketable, but it’s inherent that the project will fail. The real project of science is to investigate the unknown, not to discover the key to the universe, because there isn’t any. All you do is investigate; all you do is ask more questions. If you ever answer a question in science, you’ve failed, because you’ve deceived yourself into thinking that there is one. There are always more questions underneath the answers.
The things I want to work on don’t have solutions. People aren’t interested in them. No one’s buying them, but I don’t care. I just want to work on these problems for the beauty of running them through my hands, so to speak. I find it beautiful to better understand my relationship to the world.
What about you? What brought you to this area?
PW:
I came here from Cambridge and since concluded that men move for one of two reasons, it is either because of love or for money. And there’s no money here! (laughs) So I moved here for love. I moved here to be with Nancy. And then I got roped in to coaching wrestling again, or danced into coaching wrestling
What got you interested to write this book?
LS:
Basically, I’ve been a student my whole
life. At some point, not long ago, I was taking flight training and I got so
angry at this flight instructor, who was putting me in a situation where I was
guaranteed never to improve. I felt, “I’m too old to accept this kind of
situation.”
I recognized that an important element in learning is the decision about what you want to learn, and how you want to learn, and whom you want to learn from. It’s crucial that you exercise judgment as a learner.
A lot of people get to a certain point and just teach themselves, they don’t rely on teachers anymore. They become experts in their field. But I’ve always wanted to approach new problems, new fields, so I often find myself in the presence of teachers, at least in certifying situations where I have to meet some standard, as I was doing in flight training. So I thought, “Here’s an opportunity to review the skills I’ve learned about learning, and how they can apply to other people.”
I first wrote a book in which I complained about all the bad teachers I’ve had. I decided I could improve on that by focusing on people who are actually learning things. I could do less moralizing and sermonizing by letting people reveal their own experiences. That would also present a broader view than what I could present by myself, and it would be more powerful too: when people speak with passion they speak better than I can write. At my best I’m still not a good writer. I can edit, that’s what I can do.
PW:
So the other book was written once?
LS:
Yeah. The other book was psychological background for me, sort of like tilling the soil to get the stones out. Once that was out of the way I felt I could put down something transcendent. I don’t want to present another in the endless series of books about education. I see no point in it.
I think learning is about growth — personal transformation — and it really is your own. There can be education, and people whom you call teachers and mentors, but it’s really you realizing that there’s a territory in yourself that needs to be born. All the rest is just vehicle.
