Being a Student and Assuming the Role

Before my good friend Dr. Romanov teaches, he always makes a request of the room. “Today, you assume the role of student,” he’ll say. “And, I’ll be the teacher.”

As someone who has been in both roles, I love this sentiment. I mostly love it because I’m often in rooms where teachers are technically in the role of student, but since this point is rarely made explicit, teachers poorly embody a full student mentality. 

Learning takes humility. 

Forget what you’re learning, but if you’re reading this sentence, I encourage you to humble yourself enough to sit in the role of student more in 2024 than you did in 2023. Recently, Andrew Huberman had this to say about school, “I think learning how to sit down in a chair and force yourself to learn and then compete with others in terms of how well you learn that information, I think is a great way to evaluate oneself early in life.”

Try it.