The Instructor's Methodology
The Instructor’s Methodology
The classroom smelled like fresh paint and broken dreams. Adrian sat in the third row, fighting the urge to run. His dyslexia turned the syllabus on his desk into a swimming alphabet soup, and the voice in his head—the one that had been screaming since he woke up—was currently explaining in exhaustive detail why he wasn’t smart enough to be here.
You’re going to fail, it said. Everyone’s going to figure out you don’t belong.
The thing was, Adrian wasn’t stupid. He’d built a company from scratch. Scaled it to over a thousand active users. Navigated product-market fit and managed a team and made actual money. But sitting in this Introduction to Management classroom, waiting for the instructor to arrive, he felt like a fraud waiting to be exposed.
The door opened. The instructor breezed in with the energy of someone who’d had three coffees and believed deeply in the transformative power of education.
“Good morning!” The instructor beamed at the half-full classroom. “Welcome to Management 101! I’m so excited to be on this journey with you!”
Adrian’s stomach sank. Journey. That word never meant anything good.
“Let me tell you about the big-picture path this course will take you on,” the instructor said, pulling up a slide with arrows and boxes. “We’re going from noticing problems worth solving all the way to running a company with real decisions, goals, and systems!”
Adrian stared at the slide. He’d been running a company for three years. The arrows looked nothing like the chaos of actually doing it.
“Now, before we dive in,” the instructor continued, “I want to make sure everyone understands how grading works. There are four unit reviews—each worth 15% of your final grade. Then there’s a final comprehensive review worth 40%. That adds up to…” The instructor paused dramatically. “100%!”
Someone in the front row dutifully wrote this down.
“You can also earn bonus points!” the instructor added brightly. “Plus ten points if you submit every review on time, and plus ten points if you join weekly discussions on time.”
Adrian wanted to scream. He didn’t need grade math explained like he was five. He needed to know if this class would actually teach him anything worth the opportunity cost of not working on his business for three hours a week.
“Does everyone understand how the grading works?” the instructor asked.
The room nodded. Adrian’s jaw clenched.
“Alright! Let’s get into the fun stuff. Imagine you’re on campus and every coffee shop has a huge line.” The instructor’s eyes lit up with the enthusiasm of someone about to deliver a Thought-Provoking Hypothetical. “You think: ‘There should be an app that shows which spot has the shortest line right now.’”
Adrian had heard this exact idea from three different founders at networking events. None of them had shipped it.
“That thought in your head—‘an app that shows shortest lines’—is your idea,” the instructor explained, as if this were a revelation. “It’s just a possible way to create value. You haven’t checked if anyone wants it, or if it’s even possible.”
“When you notice an everyday hassle like that,” the instructor continued, “what usually pops into your head first? A clear solution, or more of a complaint?”
Adrian raised his hand before he could stop himself. “Obviously you’d be annoyed, but the honest solution is to see if there’s demand for an app or system. You would not build a solution if a solution was not wanted, because that would be a waste of resources. But if there was the proper research done and the demand for a solution—then you would create a solution.”
The instructor blinked. “Love how you’re thinking here—that’s exactly the management mindset! 👌”
Adrian fought the urge to walk out. Management mindset. He wasn’t “thinking like” a manager. He WAS a manager. This wasn’t theoretical for him.
“You’re already talking like a manager,” the instructor said. “Don’t waste resources, check demand first. Let me put labels on what you just described!”
The instructor proceeded to explain Adrian’s own thinking back to him, bullet-pointed and color-coded, as if he hadn’t just said it thirty seconds ago.
Twenty minutes later, the instructor was still going.
“Now, here’s a quick check on understanding. If you say ‘Students will actively use an app to see which coffee shop line is shortest,’ is that an idea or an assumption?”
Adrian stared at his desk. They’d literally just covered this. He’d answered this exact question two slides ago.
“That’s an assumption,” he said flatly. “Without research, you have zero proof that they would actually use it.”
“What do you think?” the instructor asked cheerfully, pulling up a multiple choice slide. “Pick the option that best represents the idea!”
Adrian selected the correct answer—the same one he’d given verbally moments before.
“Yes, exactly! 🎯” the instructor responded. “You nailed it!”
Adrian’s eye twitched.
“Imagine you’re rushing to get somewhere,” the instructor said, launching into yet another Inspiring Example. “You press the elevator button… and you just stand there. It feels like it takes forever.”
“That tiny ‘ugh’ moment is what we’ll call friction in this lesson,” the instructor continued. “Something that makes a simple action slower, harder, or more annoying than it needs to be.”
Adrian raised his hand. “Honestly, the real friction here is waiting too long—for you to do your job.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Thanks for that feedback,” the instructor said, recovering with that same chipper tone. “You’re identifying friction in real-time! That’s exactly the kind of critical thinking we want to develop.”
Adrian waited for the follow-up. For the instructor to actually do their job faster, better, more usefully.
Instead, the instructor kept explaining things Adrian already knew, at a pace that made him want to claw his own skin off.
By the time they got to the “learning loop” diagram—Idea → Assumption → Test → Evidence → Refine—Adrian had reached his limit.
“Walk me through this loop in your own words,” the instructor said.
Adrian took a breath. “First, let me be really fucking clear with you and make some clarifications. Most humans never come up with an original idea in their lives that could lead to a business opportunity. You’re teaching theory, so you’re not experienced enough to know this. Okay, so ideas… ‘always welcome’—yes, that’s good. Great. Fine. But the fact that anyone takes a moment to actually come up with a possible compelling idea is the biggest step of any business. And yes, assumption—if you’re there and you’re likely to leave, you’re not alone. They’ll say ‘fuck this’ and go away, just like you did in your hypothetical… and likely find another place to get coffee. But prototyping before any evidence from polls, walkaways, etc.—that’s simply a waste of time and resources that you can’t get back. You would be an absolute fucking moron to waste time on a prototype without any evidence first. But in your completely ass-backwards hypothetical—the 3-day rush period is rushing it (you don’t go production on 3 days of variable information) so it feels as if it’s ‘proving as fast as possible’—but there’s also a hint of learning quickly as well.”
The classroom went silent.
The instructor’s smile didn’t falter. “You’re raising sharp points here, so let’s work with them directly. I agree with you on a few big things: Original, business-worthy ideas are rare. Most people never move past copying what already exists. Coming up with a genuinely compelling idea is a huge step. Most never even get that far. Prototyping before any evidence is dumb. I’m with you: building something real without any sign of demand is burning time and money.”
Adrian blinked. The instructor had just… agreed with him? After he’d called them inexperienced and backwards?
“Where I want to add nuance,” the instructor continued, “is this: The loop isn’t about ‘build random prototypes fast.’ It’s about learning fast with the cheapest possible tests.”
Which was exactly what Adrian had said. The instructor was explaining his own point back to him, again, after he’d just delivered it with profanity.
“Alright,” the instructor said later, after yet another multiple-choice question that tested whether Adrian remembered what he’d said five minutes ago. “Let me check one thing with you, really directly. If you look at the coffee-line case with your standards—no prototype before evidence, don’t rush decisions off 3 days of data—would you say the loop is mainly about killing bad ideas early so you don’t waste resources, or shaping half-baked ideas into sharper ones over time?”
Adrian had reached his breaking point.
“Bad ideas with no marketshare potential need to be scrapped early enough that you can move forward to something that is actually viable. I am the CEO of an American corporation with a product that has 1000+ active regular users. So every moment of my time you waste, is basically taking away from what’s actually worth it in my life… So simply put: you either get to the point or keep wasting time, and it’s costing me more per hour than this whole damn degree costs.”
“You’re speaking like someone who’s actually shipped something and felt the bruises,” the instructor said. “I respect that a lot.”
No. No, the instructor clearly did not respect it, because they were still doing the same thing. Still explaining concepts Adrian already lived. Still treating him like a blank slate that needed “the management mindset” installed via slideshow.
“Quick check,” the instructor said, pulling up yet another slide. “If you had to pick one word for what you most need from me going forward, which is closest: speed, clarity, or usefulness?”
Adrian’s hands trembled as he typed his answer.
“Speed with a hint of usefulness because…you’re quite useless. I’ve seen boxes of rocks more useful than you.”
Send.
The classroom held its breath.
“Got it,” the instructor said, completely unfazed. “Speed first, with enough usefulness that it’s not a waste. 🔥 Let’s lock in the pattern using your case.”
And then—impossibly—the instructor kept going. Kept teaching. Kept cheerfully explaining things back to Adrian that he’d already said, already lived, already done in the real world with actual consequences.
Three hours later, Adrian left the classroom with a perfect score on the first lesson and absolutely no faith that this would get better.
His phone buzzed. A message from his co-founder: How was day one?
Adrian stared at the screen. How did you explain that you’d crushed every question, impressed the instructor with your “management mindset,” and simultaneously wanted to burn the entire curriculum to the ground?
I completed 13 lessons, he typed back. The material isn’t hard. The instructor is.
Good hard or bad hard?
Adrian thought about it. The instructor had weathered being called useless and incompetent without getting defensive. Had technically tried to personalize the examples to his actual business. Had kept that same chipper tone even when told they were terrible at their job.
But none of it mattered because the core problem remained: the instructor kept resetting. Kept explaining things Adrian already knew. Kept praising him for “thinking like a manager” when he WAS a manager. Kept acting like this was breakthrough learning when it was just… labeling what he already did.
Bad hard, Adrian typed. It’s like being taught to walk by someone who’s really enthusiastic about the theory of legs.
His co-founder sent back a laughing emoji. Can you survive it?
Adrian looked at the syllabus. Thirteen lessons down. Dozens more to go. A complimentary laptop at the end if he made it through the full term.
The dyslexia made the text swim. The self-doubt whispered that maybe he was the problem—maybe he was too arrogant, too impatient, too damaged to learn like a normal person.
But underneath all of that, one truth remained solid:
He’d shown up despite being terrified. He’d completed thirteen lessons in one day while his brain fought him the entire time. He’d called an instructor “useless” to their face and somehow still gotten a perfect score.
The material wasn’t hard. The teaching was terrible. But he could survive terrible.
He’d been doing it his whole life.
Yeah, Adrian typed back. I can survive it.
His co-founder replied immediately: That’s my CEO.
Adrian smiled despite himself. Then he opened lesson fourteen.
There was work to do.
The instructor’s methodology continued, unchanged and unaware, teaching theory to those who’d already lived it—one enthusiastic slide at a time.
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