Coen Conner

Student at Alpha School

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

Today was a big one — I took my first-ever practice SAT. Walking in with a mix of nerves and adrenaline, but pushed through the whole thing from start to finish. Right after, I kept the momentum going with a solid hour of extra academics, no break, just staying locked in.

Now winding down the day the way I like to — more of The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh. It's a great reminder that the fundamentals and daily discipline matter more than chasing results. Score takes care of itself when the process is right.

One rep at a time.

#SAT @Alphaschool @Big_EG7 @StoneCandenu9a @Alpha_carzs @RemyHazen

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@TipsyPianoBar All of those religions believe in some type of heaven. Muslims believe in Jannah, which means garden or Paradise.

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

I closed today's session at @AlphaSchool back inside Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself, and one line has stayed with me:

"Success doesn't care which road you take to get to its doorstep."

At first glance, this reads like a platitude. But Walsh, a coach whose philosophy prized process over outcome, was making a sharper claim: success is indifferent to narrative. It doesn't reward elegance of method or punish an inefficient route — it responds only to whether the requisite work was actually done.

That cuts against how we're conditioned to think about achievement. We're drawn to clean origin stories — the prodigy, the overnight success — because they're legible, easy to reverse-engineer into a formula. But the real path is almost always non-linear: detours, false starts, quiet repetition. None of that irregularity disqualifies the result. The destination doesn't interrogate the route.

There's something freeing in that. No "correct" path to fail at — just the discipline of continuing to walk one. Today, that meant two hours and a few more pages. The road doesn't need to be straight. It only needs to be walked

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

RT @StoneCandenu9a: Today was a very productive day.

I started a new book called Grit by Angela Duckworth, and it is great.

The great thi…

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@Seeqent @RebornKobe If you watched the whole series, then you would've seen that the Spurs players were trying to injure him the whole time, with Carter Bryant diving at his knees.

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

Sequence for the day: two hours of focused, mastery-based learning at @AlphaSchool first — no distractions, no filler, just deep work. Reading comes after, as a deliberate second phase rather than a competing priority.

Today's text is Bill Walsh's The Score Takes Care of Itself"— pen in hand, ready to annotate rather than passively read. The early pages already make clear that this isn't really a football book. It's a leadership treatise, and Walsh's central argument is that obsessive commitment to a Standard of Performance — not the scoreboard, not results themselves — is what produces sustained excellence over time.

The parallel to the morning's work is hard to miss. Mastery-based learning operates on the same logic: get the process and the standards right, hold rigor as non-negotiable, and the outcomes take care of themselves. Score takes care of itself. So, it turns out, does learning — once the bar is set high enough and the discipline is real.

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@jerrrynunez @NBA2K @shaiglalex @okcthunder He doesn't even foul bait the most because if you look at the stats, it's Luka.

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

Today was my first day without regular tests, and it felt completely different!

Instead of studying just to get a grade, I finished my personality tests, learned more about my strengths and how I think, and started creating my first real goals.

I’m excited to use what I learned about myself, take action, and see how much progress I can make this year.

This is only the beginning!

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@JKash000 @RealTheoWold @greg_price11 He seems to be pretty smart if he's a governor and you're not

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

Spent the day building my own version of ChatGPT from the ground up.

Not because the world needs another chatbot — but because I wanted to understand what's actually happening under the hood instead of treating it as a black box. Tokenization, context windows, the way a model "decides" what token comes next. It's less magic and more work than people assume, and that demystification alone was worth the day.

But here's the unexpected part: building a tool meant to help people think clearly forced me to confront how unclear my own thinking was. I had the how down. I didn't have the why.

So I've pivoted to something less technical and arguably harder: goal setting. Not vision-board goal setting — the kind where you interrogate whether a goal is actually yours, or just inherited from ambient pressure. Where "specific and measurable" matters less than "specific and true."

Turns out the best systems — whether it's a language model or a life — need the same thing: a clear objective function. You can optimize beautifully and still end up nowhere useful if you never define what "useful" means.

Building the tool was the easy part. Deciding what to point it at is the real work.

[Stone Candelaria @StoneCandenu9a]

Another amazing day at @Alphaschool

We went on a fun scavenger hunt across OKC, and once we got back we did some critical feedback work.

Can't wait for tomorrow!
#AlphaSchool #OKC #ScavengerHunt @AlphaSchool @CoenConnerAHS @RemyHazen

[Eli Green @Big_EG7]

Day 3 at alpha okc went great

we ran the everest simulation today. it's a harvard business sim where your team is climbing mount everest and every person gets a different role with different info and different goals. so you can't just do your own thing, you have to actually talk to each other every round or the team stalls out. way harder than it sounds.

we didn't do the best on it, but it was a valuable teambuilding exercise and a good workshop overall.

if you don't know what alpha is: it's a school where academics are about 2 hours a day on an app, and the rest of the day goes to life skills and real projects. no lectures, no sitting in class all day.

i'm posting this whole journey here, so follow along.

https://t.co/AqX3qJIfw6 @Alphaschool @CoenConnerAHS @RemyHazen @Alpha_carzs @StoneCandenu9a

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

My Alpha School classmates and I recently ran Harvard Business School's "Everest Simulation" — a masterclass in the limits of individual communication.

The setup: five team members, each holding a different slice of critical information, no shared visibility, one shared goal — reach the summit before conditions turn. Success is mathematically impossible for any one person alone. Teams that assumed shared understanding or let the roles dictate whose voice mattered most made costly errors. Teams that built in redundant checks and treated every role as essential performed far better.

The bigger lesson: organizational failure is rarely a knowledge problem — it's a coordination problem. The data usually exists somewhere in the system; the real risk is whether it reaches the right people in time.
@Alphaschool @Big_EG7 @StoneCandenu9a @RemyHazen

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@ZakkenKloot A grown man cares about consoles in 2026. PS5s are the better console right now anyway

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@ShayTweetedThat Rams Mickey Mouse in 2022 and if Bengals had an offensive line they whoop y'all

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@Meechie_67 @FirstTake @danorlovsky7 Dak not even top 15 with his playoff performance

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@theArchivePicks @TheHoopCentral AR must have sold one of your parlays lol he better than bam

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@R3AVES @lockedupjb His MVP weighs more than Matt Stafford

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@jonmachota Bro is running out there to throw 10 picks to Caleb Downs.

[Coen Conner @CoenConnerAHS]

@LordSpitta @TheWestbrookEra 2017 MVP and WNBA in the same sentence is crazy