Hey Reader,

Welcome to the 20th edition of the 3-2-1 (check out previous issues here).

This one is about the highest bar a piece of learning can clear, and it has nothing to do with the score it gets.

Let's get into it.

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3 Things for Work (in L&D)

Learning By Teaching (Curious Lion)

• The Feynman path to mastery: you don't really understand something until you can teach it. Where "each one, teach one" started for us, four years before two reps proved it on the job.
• 🏋 Effort ≈ 4 min read

Expecting to Teach Enhances Learning and Recall (Washington University in St. Louis)

• You don't even have to teach to get the benefit. People told they would later teach the material recalled more of it, organized it better, and remembered what mattered most than people told they would be tested. The expectation alone changed how they encoded it.
• 🏋 Effort ≈ 3 min read

Big and Small Strategies to Harness the Power of Peer-to-Peer Teaching (Edutopia)

• "Each one teach one," reverse-engineered. When people know others will learn from them, they feel a responsibility to fill the gaps in their own understanding first. Written for classrooms, but every play ports straight to a team.
• 🏋 Effort ≈ 7 min read

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2 Things for Life

Was Houdini's Magic Actually Real? (History Channel)

• My son got curious about Harry Houdini, so we watched this together. Six minutes later my mind was more blown than his. Was the man actually supernatural? I still can't decide.
• 🏋 ~6 min watch

Sebastian Mallaby on the Race to Superintelligence (The Tim Ferriss Show, #870)

• Finished this yesterday. The takeaway that stuck: prepare your mind. Invest in your own thinking and your own writing to work out your own ideas, and don't outsource your conclusions to AI. The bull and bear cases on AI doom versus optimism were also interesting, including a genuinely plausible path to the US and China cooperating on AI safety.
• 🏋 Long-form listen

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1 Idea from Me

Each One Teach One

"When one teaches, two learn" - often attributed to Robert Heinlein

We often measure learning with instruments like smile sheets and satisfaction scores. "Would you recommend this to a colleague?" There are many problems with this, but one is that these instruments stop at the individual when the program ends. They don't tell you whether the capability survived contact with real work, or whether it just left the building inside one person's head.

A far better instrument might look like a three-rung ladder:

• Level 1: they liked it and gave it good scores.
• Level 2: they liked it enough to tell other people to sign up.
• Level 3: it mattered enough that they teach it themselves, unprompted, because they don't want anyone to miss it.

(h/t to Brianna on my team for this analogy)

The first two are opinions. The third is behavior, and behavior that costs the person something. You can give five stars in ten seconds. You can't fake hours of teaching. When a busy person spends their scarce time teaching others, that is one of the strongest signals of value there is. Time is a finite resource. Nobody burns it re-explaining something mediocre.

I watched Level 3 happen twice this spring, both at Faire, both out of the same program.

A Faire account exec started running weekly practice sessions for the junior reps on the team beside his, drilling them on the moves he had just learned. When I asked him about his experience in the program, he said: "The mindset shift of being able to explain the concepts to other people on my team is more valuable and useful to me in practice than being able to use [the move] myself. It's becoming something that I can teach, and that feels more like mindset than a skill."

The second was an IC at Faire whose manager asked her to build the program's takeaways for the whole sales team. She didn't relay our material. She rewrote it in her own words and gave a core technique we teach her own name, so it would land with her people.

This behavior is not part of the program, but both turned something they learned into something their team now uses.

When you invest in leadership development, and someone teaches what they learned forward, what you bought stops being a skill in one head, and becomes a shared language the team owns. A language is portable. It shows up in teams that were never in the room, outlives the tool you trained on, and survives the next reorg. It spreads without a mandate, and without dragging every last person through the program. The direct return is visible in the people who went through it. The indirect return, your framework showing up three desks over in a team that never enrolled, is the compounding you never have to put on a spreadsheet.

So if you want to know whether a learning investment is working, stop asking whether people liked it. Stop asking, even, whether they learned it. Ask the one question that cannot be gamed: is anyone teaching it to people who were never in the room?

Each one teach one is not a motto for the wall. It is the test. The one I'd want every program judged by, ours included.

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That's it for this week - enjoy your Sunday!

I'll be back in two weeks ✌️

Andrew

P.S. 👉 Run a program of any kind, for a team, a class, a cohort? Reply and tell me the last time someone taught your material forward without being asked. I collect stories like these.