Ayk

- Stealing your audience’s attention
- Translating your ideas into visual metaphors
🤝 DM me for collaborations

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

You are spending hundreds of hours writing, but your audience is scrolling right past your best ideas.

I help creators bridge the gap.

By turning your concepts into highly recognizable visuals, we build a mental shortcut that forces people to stop, process, and remember.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

The Church Business vs. The Banking Business:

Music executive Jimmy Iovine used this metaphor to highlight their contrasting approaches to the music industry. Iovine viewed himself as being in the "banking business" (focusing on the bottom line and commercial success), while he told Rubin that he was in the "church business" because his work is driven entirely by passion, devotion, and belief in the art
@FoundersPodcast
@RickRubin

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with @RickRubin

0:00 Less Is More But Harder
2:00 Def Jam From The Dorm Room
4:00 Capturing Club Energy On Record
6:00 Going Deep On Influences
12:30 Why Reduced By Rick Rubin
14:00 Beatles Structure Meets Rap
16:00 The Ruthless Edit
19:30 Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist
22:00 Lazy Workaholic
25:30 Protecting The Moment Of Magic
29:00 Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster
32:30 Professional Listener
44:00 Fishing And Showing Up
47:00 Johnny Cash And Constraints
55:30 Church Business vs. Banking Business
58:50 Run On Intuition Alone
1:01:00 Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process
1:04:30 In Service Of The Artist
1:09:00 Work As Diary Entries
1:13:30 Four Ways Success Destroys You
1:16:00 How To Sustain Success
1:21:00 The House On The Mountain

Includes paid partnerships.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

“The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again”

Labels act as filters that prevent us from seeing the world as it truly is, blocking our ability to explore the depth of the things around us.
- Article by @drgurner

[Dr. Julie Gurner @drgurner]

https://t.co/WgJcvFSU3z

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

Providing a private tutor to every child is an impossible limitation of human labor.

Math Academy is trying to solve Bloom’s 2-sigma problem by using an automated learning platform to overcome the bottleneck of human teaching labor, making elite, individualized talent development accessible to everyone.

@justinskycak breaks this dynamic down in "The Math Academy Way." Its a massive, 500-page framework detailing exactly how to leverage cognitive science to build math mastery at high speed.

Visualizing the whole thing would take me forever, but I will definitely dive deeper into more of these ideas with future designs.

[Yiran - edu/acc @yiran__c]

A beautiful knowledge graph drew me to edTech in the first place, but the learning science behind it was the most interesting part about building in the education space.

The benefit goes beyond building a better learning app, it helps me reflect on how I learn at work and in life.

For those who are curious about what goes into this mastery-based learning engine, Check out @justinskycak 's the Math Academy Way.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

AI is a disastrous shortcut for the novice, but a remarkably powerful tool for expert learning.

@C_Hendrick about the danger of letting AI do the thinking for students, contrasted with how Alpha School successfully harness AI to engineer the exact right amount of desirable difficulty.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

Establishing your credibility through free educational content makes your eventual sales pitch significantly more effective.

[Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee]

https://t.co/1VZyBCTclf

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

"The morning block at Alpha is short by design.
The point of compressing the academic core into a couple of hours of intense, guided, machine-monitored work is not to maximise time on screen but to minimise it, to buy back the rest of the day (6 hours) for other stuff that they would never get to do otherwise.

The paradox I saw there was that technology enabled more human interaction, not less."

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

AI is a disastrous shortcut for the novice, but a remarkably powerful tool for expert learning.

@C_Hendrick about the danger of letting AI do the thinking for students, contrasted with how Alpha School successfully harness AI to engineer the exact right amount of desirable difficulty.

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

Chatbots, novices, the automation of learning and the case for Alpha School

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

Instead of guiding a student's effort, an AI chatbot simply drops a finished, fluent answer directly into place. By handing the novice a completed product, it acts as a free pass to bypass the thinking process altogether.
The student may get the correct answer, but because they skipped the necessary cognitive labor of connecting the information themselves, they learn absolutely nothing.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

To successfully navigate an unpredictable future, the best strategy is to arrange your life so that you continuously maintain multiple choices and backup skills.
Host: @arjunkhemani
Guest: David D. Friedman

[Arjun Khemani @arjunkhemani]

My conversation with David D. Friedman, anarcho-capitalist, author of The Machinery of Freedom, Future Imperfect, and several other books.

Timestamps:
0:00 – The economics of longevity
8:05 – Epigenetic reprogramming
12:37 – Overpopulation and the “ultimate resource”
16:33 – Fluid vs. crystallized intelligence, aging and political power
20:46 – Cryonics
24:35 – AI, open source, and the surveillance state
28:29 – Zcash, privacy, and cryptocurrency
41:12 – Taxes, government, and money supply
50:27 – A poem about tyranny and benevolence
56:42 – Education and its resistance to change
1:05:42 – Argentina, Milei, and planning for an uncertain future

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

AI tutoring systems eliminate the inefficiencies of the standard school day, allowing children to learn far more academic material in a fraction of the time.

@TKPPodcast
Host: @shaneparrish
Guest: @jliemandt

[Shane Parrish @shaneparrish]

My conversation with @jliemandt on why the future of education is better than you think.

0:00 The current education system
7:01 What makes Alpha School different
11:01 What are the results
23:20 Current classroom struggles
26:40 What does mastery mean?
35:37 Changing the education system
39:19 Teaching through AI
44:27 How do you solve motivation?
57:01 What makes a good teacher?
1:01:04 Coaching
1:05:17 What life skills matter?
1:08:18 Doing hard things
1:13:25 AI Monitoring
1:21:08 Effort vs. IQ
1:24:40 What happens after Alpha School?
1:38:21 The Genius of Jack Welch
1:45:49 Trilogy IPO: the choice to not go public
1:51:40 Physical vs. virtual learning
2:03:18 Does Paying Kids To Learn work?
2:11:01 What Is Success For You?

(Includes paid partnerships)

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

The greatest financial advantage of youth is simply having the time to outlive your mistakes.

@myfirstmilpod
Host: @thesamparr
Guest: @lloydblankfein

[Sam Parr @thesamparr]

full ep: https://t.co/mAuEUPDczp

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

Establishing your credibility through free educational content makes your eventual sales pitch significantly more effective.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

@garyvee talks about the shift to "interest media", where platforms distribute content based purely on relevance and why you must provide free value upfront before ever asking for a sale.
- Two visuals to keep in mind:

[Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee]

https://t.co/1VZyBCTclf

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

We no longer live in a "social media" world where content is only served to your followers; platforms serve content based entirely on interests

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

Great writing comes from deliberately observing and collecting small, everyday details over time until you have enough material to structure and draft a complete story.

[David Perell @david_perell]

Anne Lamott is the queen of writing teachers. Ask 100 writers for their favorite book about the craft, and her book, Bird by Bird, will top the list.

Everybody who's tried to make a work of art knows how loud the inner critic can be. When struggle comes, most people try harder. But Anne says: "The point is not to try harder; it's to resist life less."

Improving as a writer is about becoming more aware and paying closer attention to what's already around you, and this conversation is about how to do that.

It centers around her famous writing advice: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Timestamps:

0:39 Bird by Bird
2:17 Why writer's block isn't real
3:36 The problem with trying harder
9:06 Every book has three drafts
14:24 Learning to observe the world
15:58 Facing your inner critic
27:59 "Help, thanks, wow"
31:16 You get three pages
35:51 Revenge = fuel
38:26 Anne's #1 writing prompt
48:53 Finding writing ideas
54:57 Writing lessons from movies
1:02:08 The ABDCE storytelling formula
1:05:37 What makes for a good ending?
1:10:57 Dealing with criticism
1:16:28 Writing to be fully alive

I've shared the full conversation with Anne Lamott below. If you'd prefer to watch it, I've published it on YouTube, and you also can listen to it on Apple / Spotify. I've shared those links in the reply tweets.

This is one of those bucket list interviews I've wanted to do ever since I started How I Write, and I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

True progress demands independent thinking that rarely fits safely into the accepted norms of conventional wisdom.

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

The individuals who actually move the world forward are usually the ones society initially dismisses as crazy.

David D. Friedman talks about navigating an unknowable future and why true progress rarely comes from accepting conventional wisdom.

To keep these concepts in mind, here are two visual I built.
Host: @arjunkhemani

[Arjun Khemani @arjunkhemani]

My conversation with David D. Friedman, anarcho-capitalist, author of The Machinery of Freedom, Future Imperfect, and several other books.

Timestamps:
0:00 – The economics of longevity
8:05 – Epigenetic reprogramming
12:37 – Overpopulation and the “ultimate resource”
16:33 – Fluid vs. crystallized intelligence, aging and political power
20:46 – Cryonics
24:35 – AI, open source, and the surveillance state
28:29 – Zcash, privacy, and cryptocurrency
41:12 – Taxes, government, and money supply
50:27 – A poem about tyranny and benevolence
56:42 – Education and its resistance to change
1:05:42 – Argentina, Milei, and planning for an uncertain future

[Ayk @RobinHookVisual]

To successfully navigate an unpredictable future, the best strategy is to arrange your life so that you continuously maintain multiple choices and backup skills.