Learn with Avthar #1 with The Wise Uncle of Botswana - Ramarea Tumisang on his journey to 2 degrees from Stanford University, Strategies for Success and Remembering who believes in you

I'm excited to launch my new podcast that helps you become a learning machine. It's called 'Learn with Avthar'.

Awareness of your strengths helps you maximize your impact. Here’s how to find your strengths, using the frameworks of reflection and finding your Reflected Best Self, with step-by-step guides and resources to get started

Traditionally, most career advice has centered around building an impressive resume. Most job hunters spend most of their time on resume reviews and practice interviews. However, in the internet era, a resume is way overrated. The resume is dead. And content killed it.

You should decide for yourself what you should work on, based on following your own curiosity and interest. Do the hard work of experimenting, exploring and thinking for yourself. Don’t outsource your thinking.

I’ve found that a critical component to living a happy and successful life is developing an internal scorecard: where you decide what’s important to you and you evaluate your life and performance according to that criteria. If you do not define success for yourself, you will get sucked into chasing what society deems as valuable. And what’s worse than playing a game with a prize you don’t want to win?

How do top performers become the best in the world? This is the question which Josh’s life and work will help you answer. I’ve written this post in order to collect all the bits and pieces of Josh’s wisdom and put them in one place for you to explore and digest. If you’re interested in learning, creativity, competition or becoming world class in your discipline, then you’d be wise to study Josh’s life and lessons carefully.

If I had to teach only one thing to every student, athlete, artist or aspiring top performer in the world this would be it. If you want to succeed at school and in life, you need to have a growth mindset -- the belief that your potential is not fixed and that with hard work, smart training and perseverance, you can get better at everything.

In this essay I want to explore two questions. First, “How do we find the best teachers for us?” Second, “What makes a good teacher?” I’ll do this by examining what I call “The Five Pillars of Great Teaching”.

Imagine a maths teacher who was bad at maths or a swimming teacher who was bad at swimming? Their students are gonna have a bad time! Great teachers must be proficient in the things that they teach. You can’t teach something if you yourself don’t understand it.

Skin in the Game is important because it shows that a teacher has tested their expert knowledge in an environment where there is accountability and consequences for being wrong. It helps us be wary of teachers that teach about things that they’ve never actually done.

Beginner’s Empathy is the skill of being an expert in a topic while still remembering what it’s like to be a beginner. Such teachers remember what it’s like to not know things. They’ve deconstructed why they excel and are able to explain it to others in a relatable way.

Great teachers embrace the truth that there are many paths to greatness. They don't mold students into their own image or try to create an army of robots that speak, act and sound the same. The best teachers help their students not only achieve success in a domain, but help them express themselves in the artform. They help students find their own way.

Great teachers are focused on long term outcomes for the students. Teachers who are long term focused empower students to teach themselves, eventually rendering the teacher unnecessary.

We should strive to find teachers that fulfill all five pillars of great teaching. From examining the Five Pillars of Great Teaching above, I hope you have ideas of teachers or coaches from your own life who embodied (or didn’t embody) each particular pillar. To further assist you to vet potential teachers in each of the Five Pillars of Great Teaching, here’s a non-exhaustive list of questions and methods.

In this essay I want to explore two questions. First, “How do we find the best teachers for us?” Second, “What makes a good teacher?” I’ll do this by examining what I call “The Five Pillars of Great Teaching”.

What the heck is a developer advocate? I’ve never heard of that before, what do you do? I wrote this post to answer those questions, share how I became a developer advocate and offer advice to those considering becoming one. I also wrote this post for my family in South Africa, who keep asking me how to explain what exactly I’m doing in ‘America’ to my relatives back home. Here you go, Ma!