Category: Vertical Development

I just had an interesting conversation with Claude.ai that started by asking how to shift your mindset from blogging to taking notes using the evergreen note method. It overwhelmed me with its response but a key takeaway was to shift from a diary approach of “What I did today” to “What am I exploring”

What this made me realize was that I’m often stuck in the details of what I’m exploring so much so that I often forget what I’m exploring. This effectively feels like being stuck in a maze, going in circles, because your viewing things very close to ground rather than having a strategic birds-eye perspective of things.

Realizing what Claude.ai was talking about, I asked it if it meant that I should focus on patterns rather than talking about the details of the patterns so much and it said that’s exactly what it meant.

Why this is important is because this is something I’ve known for a while but have yet been able to construct and organize upon a website, rather than just within my mind.

Basically my internal mind approach is as follows.

See the patterns.
See the relationships between the patterns.
See the identity and big picture of the system emerging overall.

Again how to show this on a website is what I struggle with but I think an evergreen notes method of interlinking smaller, atomic notes would help achieve it. Yet I struggle with how to start this.

Anyways when I realized what it was telling me to shift my mindset, I asked it if it could be applied to shifting one’s mindset for vertical development and it said it could.

It said to focus on patterns that relate to transforming yourself and your mindset, like 1) perspective-holding capacity (i.e. open to multiple perspectives), 2) identity transition (ie letting go of expert mindset), and 3) paradox navigation (i.e. letting go of seeking closure).

This approach, focusing on patterns, creates something that one can stand upon within the detailed flow that creates the pattern itself.

In closing, Claude.ai indicated the following which really hit home in terms of how I’ve been feeling lately. Both in terms of feeling stuck but also being able to stop and sort of rise above the flow in a liminal moment, witnessing it pass me by without it overwhelming me.

Instead of seeing your “stuck-ness” as failure, you’re tracking how your capacity to hold complexity is actually developing, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

Just had an obvious realization relating to my last post about articulating your view of the world (aka worldview) by highlighting the distinction between an old belief and a new one that embodies a newer value.

In terms of sharing my worldview, as well as vertical development, here’s an obvious myth that jumped out at me that most people still believe today.

Myth: You don’t grow or evolve after reaching adulthood.

So there’s this assumption and belief that when you become an “adult,” you basically know everything that there is to know about living your life now.

This is complete utter bullshit.

Becoming an adult is just a starting point, a transition, to a larger world of understanding of what it means to be a human being.

It’s like levelling up and looking back to realize “you’ve made it.” But then, turning back around and looking forward, you realize you’ve only “made it” to a whole new game. One you have to figure out all over again.

That’s the eternal cycle of life. Levelling up and thinking you’ve made it but only to realize that there’s still a larger game to play.

This is vertical development in a nutshell.

And yes, this scares the shit out of most people because you can never know it all. Although people still try to fake it by trying to be a know-it-all.

Yesterday, while browsing through some of the posts that Tim Denning has, I realized that instead of describing what and how vertical development is, he’s actually showing vertical development in action which explains why it is important in an indirect way (i.e. removes perceived obstacles from your life).

He does this with a lot of his posts by hitting you in the face with a belief that forms the foundation of most conventional people’s mindsets and worldviews but then proceeds to upend that belief to show how false it is in our world today.

This relates to what Tiago Forte said about leveraging your constraints as opportunities. And it also relates to what Joel Arthur Barker said in his book Paradigms: The Business of Discovering the Future, whereby constraints are often paradigms that one can let go of and be turned around to create newer, more innovative paradigms.

This also touches upon something Bryan Elliott said that Seth Godin talks about in his recent book This Is Strategy. That being seeing the old patterns, so that you can step beyond them.

Understanding systems means identifying the forces that resist change and finding leverage points within those systems to introduce new ways of doing things.

As Seth points out, when launching a new product or entering a market, it’s not enough to just be different—you have to map out the patterns that have defined success and failure in that space.

Bryan Elliott
Behind the Brand: ‘This Is Strategy’ by Seth Godin

Even what Robert Fritz highlighted in his book The Path of Least Resistance relates to this. That being having a clear vision of the future you want to create isn’t enough. You also have to be able to see reality clearly in the present as well. In other words, the two of these are required to build a bridge to what you want to create, thus creating the creation tension to impel you forward.

This is what Tim Denning is doing. He’s showing the present reality Unfiltered (which is the name of his publication).

He does this by articulating our society’s present reality clearly and unfiltered, show what one present societal belief is and how it is often a myth and wrong. He then proceeds to show another vision of the future with a different belief, one that often embodies values the empower the person, rather than disempower them, like the old beliefs were doing.

I find this all fascinating because it got me asking the question, “How would I articulate my own worldview right now?” And the even greater question is, “How the hell does one go about articulating their encompassing worldview in the first place?”

It seems like a daunting task. But again, it seems like the touch points for it are where one’s old beliefs are replaced by newer beliefs and values, ones that radically transform the perspective of the person as a whole.

In the beginner stages of life – that most adults never progress out of – we’re taught to be narrow-minded in our thinking. As you progress to higher states of consciousness the world starts to look different.

As you start to transcend into higher states of consciousness – that’s not taught in school, jobs, or university – the world looks different. You see humans as one. You begin to notice we’re part of a much bigger universe.

This sudden transformation leads you to chase a higher purpose in life. That purpose helps you operate daily in never-ending flow states.

As you start to do this, the law of attraction kicks in, and you suddenly meet higher-quality humans who give you better answers and solve some of your hardest problems with ease.

So…

Choosing a niche is the most narrow-minded, useless, stupid way to look at our complex world.

Until you go beyond the surface you’ll never experience the depth that comes with being nicheless, where the world feels abundant and overflowing with money & opportunities.

You’re here because you resonate with the ideas I share. You’re interested in my view of the world (even if you don’t agree with every part). You’re here to think differently.

Tim Denning
If You Want to Be a Millionaire, You Need to Be Nicheless

The ancient Greeks knew writers entered a real, imaginal realm when they wrote and that they encountered the mythic there. They knew there was something more than the merely human involved. Writers, artists of all kinds, enter a particular kind of dreaming state as they create and something from out there, from some other place, comes into and through them. Writers inhabit an older world, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that their dreaming is a bridge between two worlds, or perhaps even that their dreaming allows them access to an ancient, imaginal realm filled with myth and that their writing is an account of what they find there—perhaps it is all three. Writers begin in this normal everyday world in which we live when we think we are awake, and they move, as a way of life, into another, one that is, as Homer intimately understood, filled with powers all of us have been told no longer exist.

Stephen Harrod Buhner
Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life

It’s a never-ending journey.

I keep saying this repeatedly but it’s not getting into my head.

I keeping thinking, “Oh, I’ll just have this one major realization and I’ll be over this transition and then I’ll have figured everything out.”

Nope!

There is no end. This isn’t a transition like before. It is a continual process.

It is a continuum.

The sooner I can embrace this instead of denying it, the sooner I’ll be able to relax and go with the flow of it.

I’ve still got a lot of work to do.

If you’re wondering why in my previous posts I decided to describe why vertical development is important and why vertical development training should be accessible to everyone first, before describing what vertical development is, hopefully the reason for this is obvious. Often times, the whyof something is more important and compelling than the what of it is.

Like if I tell you what vertical development is first, you’ll be like, “Ok, that’s interesting but why would this matter to me?” Therefore, I spun things around and explained why vertical development was important (hopefully in an emotional way that connected with you) and why the training of it should be accessible to everyone.

The other primary reason for doing this is that it’s really hard to explain whatvertical development is in a way that will connect with you, unless I can bridgesome emotional experience within your life that relates to it and helps you to understand what it means to you personally. This more than anything is what I struggled with when I first started learning about vertical development. That being understanding the meaning of it.

It Goes Beyond Skills & Knowledge

So what is vertical development then? To explain this, let’s first describe what it is not. In fact, let’s just step back and describe what most people think the word “development” often conventionally means to them.

Usually most people think of the word “development” as meaning the acquiring of skills and knowledge. It is but specifically with regards to what’s known as horizontal development.

An easy way to visualize this is thinking of information going “in” to you, like you’re a cup that you’re filling up. This is the conventional way people see learning. You read or are taught something, you acquire it, and you can use it again later.

Another way of thinking about this is thinking of this type of knowledge gained as explicit knowledge. It can be easily transferred by word of mouth, usually from an expert on the subject.

It Transforms Your Perception & Identity

Now vertical development is radically different than horizontal development. It’s about growing the capacity and awareness of your mind, so that you can understand the complexity of life in a much deeper way than what you might have believed or interpreted it to be before.

An easy way to visualize this is to imagine you being able to increase the size of your cup through the transformation of it. So while horizontal development is informational learning that adds to “what we know”, vertical development is transformational learning that changes “how we know”.

Another way of thinking about this transformational learning that occurs within vertical development is realizing it is more about tacit knowledge. What this means is that it is knowledge that can’t be easily transferred via word of mouth but it actually has to be experienced to be fully understood, usually with the assistance of a mentor who has already experienced it themselves.

If it’s still not evident about the difference between horizontal and vertical development, let me try to narrow this down and clarify it even further. Vertical development relates to your perception of yourself, your identity, and the world around you, encompassing your assumptions and beliefs, as well as your needs and values. It therefore encompasses what you believe is possibleand impossible.

It Upgrades Your GPS for Navigating Life

Now let me give you some more comprehensive ways to visualize vertical development, with the first way being visualizing it as way to upgrade your GPS for navigating life.

Basically think of your perception of yourself, your identity, and the world around you, which encompasses your assumption, beliefs, and values, as being your existing worldview. Think of it like a mental map within your mind. But again, as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory,” even though we might think and believe it is.

So when we undergo vertical development, we are able to expand our worldview and mental map of the world (represented by us as a cup), understanding it in a broader and deeper way. Why this is essential is because without doing this, we may face challenges within our life that are beyond our comprehension of what’s possible and thus may think they are impossible.

But they’re not impossible. We just need to upgrade our internal map so that we can see a way to bridge these challenges and drive across them into a whole new world of possibilities that previously we thought were impossible.

At the same time though, if we don’t upgrade our mental map via vertical development, the opposite can occur as well. In effect, the world will change around us and it will be operating in a different way, yet we are still utilizing our old map which no longer works. Thus we can take a turn and suddenly we’ve driven into a lake of trouble without being aware of it because we just implicitly trusted the way things previously worked, even though they’re not working that way anymore.

It Upgrades Your Operating System & Interface

Another way to visualize vertical development is to visual it as way to upgrade the operating system and interface of your mind.

For example, back when we just had MS DOS, the operating system was quite basic, yet still functional, primarily just using a keyboard for input. Yet if you wanted to do any sort of drawing or artwork, your capabilities and options were extremely limited.

Today with operating systems like Windows and Mac, which give us a mouse as a powerful input and an upgraded graphical “windowed” interface, our creative capacities are dramatically increased.

The same applies to seeing vertical development in this same way. By upgrading your mind via vertical development, you gain more experiential inputs to understanding life and in turn gain greater creative capacities for it. Most important of all though, your interface for interacting with life is dramatically improved, allowing you to perceive things that others might lack the awareness of.

It Feels Like Freedom in a Whole New Way

Now to close off and wrap this all up, I’d like to describe to you a way of visualizing vertical development that has been around for ages.

The Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic describes The Allegory of the Cave to help us understand “the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature.” He does this by getting us to imagine people who for their entire lives have been chained by their necks to a lower inner wall within a cave and can only see the outer wall of the cave in front of them.

Unbeknownst to these prisoners, behind the lower inner wall that they are chained to are people who walk along it with a large fire behind them which causes their shadows to be cast on the outer cave wall that the prisoners can see. Only the shadows and sounds that these people make form the effective reality that these prisoners experience, so they believe it to be the “truth” and their world.

But imagine if one of these prisoners is released and was able to look around, seeing the fire and people behind them, and then, even more so, was forced upwards out of the cave and into the sunlight. Wouldn’t that whole experience feel not overwhelmingly threatening and disorienting, as their existing reality up until that time was just the shadows. Yet the fire and sunlight are unknown things to them, since they had no previous experience and thus comprehension of them.

But let’s say the escaped prisoner finally begins to reason and understand what’s going on and realize that there is a much larger world out there than they had initially believed. Might they not want to go back to the cave and help the other prisoners there escape from their predicament as well? But when the escapee does so, explaining the larger world that awaits them, most of the prisoners might think them crazy (and perhaps might even try to kill the escapee) because the prisoners cannot comprehend and believe the larger reality that the escapee has perceived, seen, and understood because it seems impossible for them to do so without experiencing it for themselves firsthand.

It Feels Scary, Exhilarating, & Adventurous

What I’ve just described is a way to understand what vertical development feels like. Initially it can feel like a very threatening experience because you’re coming up against things that you’ve never experienced before and thus you won’t be able to comprehend them at first. And thus as usual, we often fear what we don’t know.

But over time, if one becomes curious to the experience, one may begin to question their existing assumptions and beliefs about their previous perceivedsense of reality and in turn openly embrace a quest for a much larger one.

Today our world feels like it’s rapidly changing at a pace that many feel like they can hardly keep up with. Yet within many of our educational institutions, a lot of what’s being taught is pretty much the same as in the past, albeit with some minor upgrades for the times.

If we want people to be able to not just cope and survive within this newer world that is emerging but actually thrive within it, we need a newer, deeper way of learning, one that helps people to understand the changes that are occurring and how to transform and adapt to them.

It’s Because Leadership Development Training Isn’t Enough

Right now, the main way to get this deeper type of education is through leadership development courses which can cost thousands of dollars. These courses, along with teaching vertical development, help leaders within organizations to understand what this new VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world feels like and how to work within it.

Yet here’s the thing. The first article I saw about vertical development was one on Harvard Business Review back in 2005 entitled Seven Transformations of Leadership. Since that time, while I’ve seen a variety of people talking about vertical development, such as Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, as well as major initiative by change agents to transform organizations, there have been little to no significant changes in the way mainstream business operates today.

For example, I even remember when I was on Google+ back in the mid 2010s, I saw a lot of change agents worldwide raving about the potential and possibility of transforming organizations but few rarely made an impact on them because most organizations seemed to be looking for a quick weekend upgrade rather than putting in the years of arduous hard work to make the transformation possible for the organization, let alone themselves.

It’s Because Transforming Yourself as a Leader Is a Lifelong Journey, Not a Weekend Retreat

That’s the key thing to understand here. For an organizational transformation to occur, it’s got to start at the top, with the leadership team going through the transformation process themselves first. Yet it seems like a lot of them don’t fully understand the scope of what this actually entails and how epically challenging it is to be.

Levelling up your level of consciousness means completely transforming the way you see your self and the world around you, including your employees. This means letting go of beliefs and assumptions that form the very bedrock of your identity. Again, this is not a weekend retreat. This is the start of a lifelong journey.

It’s Because Most of the People Ready to Transform May Not Actually Be “Leaders”

What’s surprising though is that the very people who may be ready for this journey are the employees within the organization rather than the leadership itself. This is similar to my own case. When I saw the fallout from the dot-com bomb back in 2001 and saw how people were disposed of so carelessly, I began questioning my assumptions and beliefs around the concept of work and felt there had to be a better way.

Today, other people are experiencing these same feelings. Many may have started working with organizations during the pandemic with the promise that remote work was going to be a foundation for the company going forward but then suddenly organizations are demanding that people return to the office.

If you’re someone who has gotten used to this way of life, as it has given you more control over your life and a better relationship with your family, you may be questioning your assumptions and beliefs about working with these organizations, as well as the conventional concept of work, all over again as well.

It’s Because Many People, Outcast From the Old World of Work, Are Looking for a New One 

Even those people who may be working within offices in the tech industry are even having a difficult time in other ways. While the tech industry once used to be a bastion for a great paying, reliable career. No longer does it seem the case. Many layoffs have occurred and finding work elsewhere has become more difficult than it has been in a long while.

All said and done, the point that I’m trying to make here is that the very people who are primed and ready for transformational learning are often the very people who are already questioning their assumptions and beliefs about their lives, especially as it relates to the concept of work.

These people are often like refugees who have been cast out from their old world and are adrift on a sea of uncertainty, trying to find their way to a new world of work. Their questioning of their existing assumptions and beliefs has already started them on a quest for seeking something new. Yet the main issue is that they’re really not sure how to get there and how to gain the new mindset that allows them to step into and work within this new world.

It’s Because Most Organizations Often Stand in the Way of Their Own People’s Development

It’s funny. I remember reading a paper by Alfonso Montuori on creativity a while back where he indicated that creativity was simply getting out of the way of yourself. This I believe is the same issue that organizations are having today. Most leaders, as the minds of the organizational body, are effectively standing in the way of the organization itself and their employees which comprise the body of it.

There’s another quote, this time by Richard Barrett, which also relates. He indicated that you don’t transform organizations, you transform people. Yet to transform people, the organization has to get out of their way to give their people the time and space to actually do so.

In fact, if you understand creativity at a deeper level, this really touches upon the paradox that relates to it. That being, often at times we’re already being creative but not really aware of it. Within organizations, the same thing is occurring. People are often taking informal leadership positions amongst themselves to work around the formal “leadership” of the company to actually get things done.

So a lot of the times, leadership really is about learning to let go of trying to control people first and foremost but also at the same time, giving people the support they need, as well as the emotional confidence and inspiration to help them become the leaders they often already are but don’t fully realize yet.

It’s Because We Need Newer Organizational Institutions for These Newer Times

This is why for the longest time, I’ve felt like my place hasn’t been within conventional organizations trying to transform them from within the inside but instead more about being on the outside, helping to bring outcasts from the old world of work to a sort of sanctuary online and help them realize that there is a new world of work just waiting over the horizon of their minds, if they have the courage to venture towards it.

This to me seems to be what’s missing from our world right now. And William Bridges spoke about it way back in the 90s within his book JobShift. He indicated how we will need new organizational institutions that are effectively a hybrid of previous organizations from the past. So they will not only help people gain the newer mindset and skills necessary to step into this new world of work but they will also provide the emotional support and inspiration that they need to get there.

In effect, the very things that they should be getting from conventional organizations today but aren’t because the leaders within these organizations are often more focused on maintaining their control, due to their older mindsets, rather than willing to let go of it.

Strangely enough, William Bridges likened these newer organizational institutions to medieval guilds of the past and I agree that it’s a perfect comparison. The key thing to realize here though is that what we are creatively crafting within these guilds is our very sense of selves, yet at a much deeper level than we are now. One that is also much broader, so as to contain the larger, newer life awaiting for us within this newer world.

It’s Because the New World of Work is Already Here But Most People Just Aren’t Aware of It

This is why I believe vertical development needs to be accessible to everyone tody, no matter where and who they are. Within an organization or not. As a leader or not.

It’s because I believe that there already is a whole world of people out there already questing and seeking a newer world of work, yet they’re just not aware of the possibilities of it, nor see how its already emerging, because most organizations themselves aren’t aware of it.

In other words, what’s out of sight is out of mind. And in the same vein, what’s out of your mindset is out of your sight, since you’ll lack the awareness to perceive and see it.

So if most conventional organizations are standing in the way of most people’s growth and development, we need newer ways of learning vertical development, both outside the realm of these organizations and outside the normal realm of most leadership development programs.

We need something that is accessible to everyone for their own personaldevelopment. And it needs to be seen as a lifelong journey of playing, learning, and working with our very sense of selves, integrated together as a whole new way of living life.

I’ve been researching vertical development for over a decade now. And as I begin to understand it at a deeper and deeper level, I realize how so much of it underpins life as a whole. So much so now, that I pretty much see how it relates to everything, especially issues arising within our world today.

The girl on the news who said she was doing everything society said she should do but nothing seemed to be working for her. More than anything, she felt like she was drowning and could barely get ahead.

The guy who committed suicide after he lost his job that he had most of his life.

The other guy who lost his lifelong job as well and ended up killing some of the people within the company in retaliation.

Leaders in companies who believe they’re the epitome of success, yet they’re often completely detached from the needs and values of their employees and customers.

Politicians who often say they will solve all of the problems their opponents created, yet they often end up creating more problems than solving them themselves when they get elected.

Citizens who feel like politicians and governments aren’t helping to solve the serious problems in their lives. Yet most of these wicked problems in the world today are systemic, societal issues that no single politician or political party can possibly solve on their own because these problems are so huge and complex in nature that they require a collective societal effort not seen since the previous world wars.

It Teaches Us About Our Perceptions & Beliefs

Most of these issues arise because of the way we perceive ourselves, our identity, and the world around us. They arise because we believe something and we make that belief into a reality, even though it may not actually be.

What vertical development helps a person to understand is that what they perceive and believe to be true, may not actually be true, primarily because we’re not seeing reality directly, so much as we’re seeing an internal GPS-like map of it that we believe to be true. And as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory.”

So when you lose your job and you feel like your life is literally over. It isn’t. It feels that way obviously, with a painful intensity that you can barely contain. But it’s not real in the sense that you’re not literally dying, even though it feels like you really are. This more than anything is what vertical development can help you to understand.

It helps you to realize that when you’re challenged by life on a monumental scale and your way of navigating the world no longer seems to be working for you, your life isn’t ending so much as it is creatively beginning in a whole new way. But in a way you just can’t fully understand and make sense of yet, until you take that first step of the journey into the unknown and begin mapping it out yourself.

It Teaches Us That Change Is Constant & Complex

For a lot of people, this is something that they aren’t going to be able to comprehend. For example, most people might say, “Life never seemed this complex before, why now?”

That’s because our world is constantly changing, yet many of us often aren’t aware of it in our busy daily lives, so we don’t really realize it. Instead we often look at the world today and think the world always worked this way. But it didn’t.

Everything that’s a part of your everyday life was conceived of as an idea by someone and made into a reality. The institutions that form the foundations of our society once didn’t exist but were created. Even the concept of a “job” is a fairly new invention for humanity.

It Teaches Us How Every Generation Has Their Own Challenges That We Later Glorify

People from history realize this because they themselves went through monumental times of change that we today often can’t fully comprehend, even though we often glorify those times. For example, World War I and World War II brought massive changes to the world and society, with women taking a huge step forward in terms of their rights because they were needed so much by society on the homefront, while men were fighting away on the war fronts.

Today, massive changes are rippling across our world and the pandemic was a perfect example of this. Most companies never considered allowing employees to work from home before, as they believed it would be an impossibility. But as the reality of the situation unfolded, it made it a necessity for it to be a possibility, regardless of how painful the process seemed for some, if not all of us.

Again this is what people who glorify the past often forget. They often wish they could have been alive during those times and been a part of those changes and gallant social efforts to overcome them. Well they can’t. But they can be part of the changes today, helping to gallantly overcome them. They just need to realize though that these challenges, as well as the methods to overcome them, will often be dramatically and painfully different than those of the past.

So think about that for a second. The very thing you may be pushing against today, because you believe it’s an impossibility due to your beliefs, may actually be the very thing that future generations may look back on and glorify as a possibility that was created to overcome the challenges of the times. “Women working in men’s jobs? Outrageous!”

It Teaches Us That Change & Growth Are Often Painful But Meaningful Experiences

This is something that most people have a hard time understanding about challenges. When we are dealing with them, we often perceive them as negative and threatening to our way of life. Yet after facing them and overcoming them, our lives can often be dramatically and meaningfullychanged for the better.

So yes, getting laid off at work can be a traumatic experience. But it can open our eyes to newer possibilities that previously we may have thought were impossible before within our safe, stable lives. This is more commonly known as post-traumatic growth.

The key thing to realize here is that life isn’t throwing challenges at you to make your life a miserable hell (even though it may seem that way at the time.) Life is presenting challenges as lessons to you to help you grow. And as always, growth is often a painful process. But with that growth comes a greater understanding of ourselves, the world around us, and what it means to be a human being in a much deeper and broader way. Something that hopefully brings us closer together collectively, rather than pushes us farther apart.

Be open to possibilities from the most unexpected places.

So often what we perceive as the problem in our lives is not actually the problem.

The problem instead is often our perception of the problem.

Once we let go of this perception that our problem is the problem, an inadvertent solution often arises that solves our problem indirectly and almost effortlessly.

(Afterwards one might even laugh hilariously at how blind they were to something so obvious to them now.)

The Metacognition Revolution – Sponsor Content – Google

AI is Playing a Central Role in Reshaping How We Learn

www.theatlantic.com

This is it!

This is what I gave space for “something to emerge” over my last handful of posts and something did actually emerge. My mind is blown away by this synchronicity.

This article effectively explains what I’ve been intuitively doing for the last year or so, ever since Inflection’s Pi was released in May 2023, but I just couldn’t articulate why it felt so deeply important to me. At best, I described it as a process whereby the AI is helping you to “adventure within yourself” which in turn helps you with your growth and development. (Actually I may have even saved a conversation with Pi that does explain the why behind this all but I never shared it because I was too afraid to do so at the time.)

The following quote perfectly explains what I’m going through right now. Not “moments of confusion” as the article indicates but rather long bouts of confusion, followed by momentary bursts of insight. This is exactly how I feel doing my work right now and why it feels like I’m doing something wrong and or unnatural. But it’s not unnatural, even though it feels like it is, but rather a normal part of the process.

Imagine, for a moment, an assignment where the “deliverable” isn’t a polished essay, but a student’s entire revision history, including AI tutor interactions. This record would provide a window into their process of discovery and iteration, revealing the messy, non-linear reality of learning. It’s an approach that aligns with what we know about how learning actually happens—not in smooth, predictable increments, but in fits and starts, with moments of confusion followed by bursts of insight. This personalized approach to learning is one of AI’s most promising features.

“It’s about developing the ability to learn how to learn, which is arguably the most crucial skill in our rapidly changing world.”

Ben Kornell

This focus on metacognition has helped many educators illuminate gaps in understanding that might otherwise go unnoticed. … By highlighting these gaps, AI prompts students to reflect on their own understanding in new ways. They’re not just identifying what they don’t know, but understanding why they don’t know it and how they might go about learning it.

The above quote effectively embodies vertical development. When you face a life challenge that you can’t resolve with your current worldview, you are effectively facing cognitive dissonance on a macro, life scale. Thus it creates a massive “gap” in your life that can’t be resolved with what you currently “know” in terms of your knowledge. And instead it can only be understood and learnt by stepping into the unknown of it and actually experiencing it to make sense and meaning of it.

This shift allows us to focus less on memorization of facts and more on building skills and metacognitive abilities. The question isn’t just ‘What do you know?’ but ‘How do you think about what you know?’

Shantanu Sinha

The promise of AI in education isn’t about replacing human thought, but about enhancing it. It’s about creating tools that allow us to see our own minds more clearly, to understand our own learning processes more deeply. In the end, this AI-driven focus on metacognition may be preparing students not just for the jobs of the future, but for the lifelong journey of learning itself. By teaching students not just what to think, but how to think about their thinking, we may be unlocking the true potential of education in the AI age.

Vertical development is a lifelong journey which over time unlocks your true potential.