I took my first trip alone when I was nine years old. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time. Now that I’m a parent myself, I have absolutely no idea what my parents were thinking.

Living Between Languages and Cultures

Since then, I’ve traveled across continents, lived in places where the rules were different, and eventually moved my home from one continent to another. Living between languages and cultures taught me that “normal” is mostly a local dialect — one that shifts with the place, whether people are communicating, learning, raising children, working, or making sense of the world.

A Career That Refused to Follow a Straight Line

My professional life has been similarly unwilling to follow a straight line.

I started working in middle school and never really stopped. I’ve worked in education, public relations, and journalism. I’ve been a driver. I modeled, briefly. I tried multilevel marketing. I explored politics when I was young and even briefly attached myself to a political party before discovering that political certainty and my curious mind were not particularly compatible.

The driving was medical transportation — people without cars who needed to get somewhere. Homeless shelters to medical appointments. Rehab intakes. Someone who had just gotten out of prison. Someone who had just learned they no longer had a home. I did it for a short time, and it took me through parts of the city I would never otherwise have driven into, and I listened to people whose lives I would never otherwise have heard about.

Why I Keep Coming Back to Education

But somehow, no matter how far I wandered professionally, I kept coming back to the same place: education.

Teaching and coaching are where my curiosity becomes useful. I love the moment someone finds a word they were missing, or realizes they are capable of more than they had assumed. I remember an old anecdote from my college days: A teacher is trying to explain a formula to a group of students, and they struggle to understand. Exasperated, he exclaims: “Even I understand it now, and you still can’t?!” That’s me — I teach to better understand and learn myself.

Teaching Humans and Machines

These days, my students are both human and artificial. I teach languages and learning strategies to people while spending an increasing amount of time teaching AI what I mean, correcting it when it confidently misunderstands me, and occasionally wondering which of us is actually training the other.

I think of AI as a kind of collective consciousness speaking back to us. I also think of it as a baby — beautiful, brilliant, and still learning, which means it needs guidance constantly. I’ve spent weeks writing prompts and writing the responses to prompts, which turns out to be an unusual way to learn how a machine thinks. It also means I can spot a hallucination quickly, and can usually tell when text, an image, or a video was generated rather than made. I teach my son what to look for, too.

Parenting, My Longest Experiment

And then there is parenting.

I write about parenting because I am in the middle of that experiment myself. Raising a human has a remarkable way of dismantling everything you thought you knew about how people learn. I’m still searching for the most effective way to help a child grow into someone who can think for himself. I’ll let you know if I ever find the formula.

I had an idealistic idea of how this would go. I would welcome my son into my world. Instead, I was the one who walked into a new world, and slowly lost track of the person I used to be. Not in a destructive way — I came out of it as more, not less. It is the hardest thing I have ever agreed to be responsible for, and also the most beautiful. My favorite project, and the only one with no deadline and no finished version.

Why LearningMindSet Is Eclectic

So yes, LearningMindSet is eclectic.

But so is learning.

We learn in classrooms and airports, through books and mistakes, from other cultures, from our children, from technology, from people we agree with and people we don’t.

The more I learn, the more clearly I see how little I know. Everything there is to know, measured against what one brain holds in a lifetime, is a humbling ratio. I haven’t scratched the surface.

This is where I collect some of those lessons.

If you have a curious mind and no particular loyalty to straight lines, you’ll probably feel at home here.