Austin Scholar #24: The Science Of Compression (And How It Can Help Your Kid Go Viral)
While I'm At Oxford...
Hey, y'all!
Like any teen, I've always been fascinated by TikTok. My cultural references are steeped in it, and I'm fascinated by what makes someone go viral.
It wasn't until I started working for David Perell that I realized there's a science to what goes viral.
Your kid can go viral for all the right reasons. There are just two skills they need to learn.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: What I’ve learned from my summer internship with David Perell
The science of compression (and how it can help your kid go viral)
Scholar’s Sources: My favorite examples of compression
I'm currently at Oxford in the second week of my creative writing course. I wrote and scheduled these newsletters ahead of time so I'd have plenty of time to focus on my creative writing. I can't wait to tell you all about my course when I get back!
Austin’s Anecdote: What I’ve Learned From My Summer Internship With David Perell
As many of you know, I've been doing a summer internship with Write of Passage, which is an online writing course for adults created by David Perell. My best friend and I are doing this internship together, and our main focus has been to transform the existing Write of Passage curriculum and "teenager-ify" it into a new Write of Passage high school program.
Now, my best friend (let’s call her P) and I took Write of Passage last October (Cohort 7!!) and we basically thought that the course was The Greatest Thing In Existence.
After every live session, my poor parents had to listen to me rant about how amazing the breakout rooms were or how life-changing the concept we learned that day was.
So, obviously, when P and I were asked (by David Perell himself?!) to work on the curriculum for a high school course, we jumped at the chance.
Anyway, in our excitement of learning we were going to be working at Write of Passage, P and I sort of forgot that we were actually going to have to make stuff for high schoolers that is as good as the OG Write of Passage course. On top of that, we were going to have to come up with a few amazing examples that would make the content interesting for high schoolers instead of adults.
And, we couldn’t forget that we were getting paid actual dollars, so not only did we have to worry about creating something to impress someone we admired, but it had to be extra perfect because we were getting paid. (This was both of our first jobs – in case you couldn’t tell.)
P and I started at the beginning of June, and the first few weeks were so incredibly stressful because we wanted the curriculum to be really good – good enough to prove that hiring us wasn’t a mistake. And, we also tried to add as many obnoxiously teenager-y references as possible so that it was clear that P and I provided unique value to the team.
Lots of pressure.
P and I were up past midnight every night writing live session plans and making templates and learning how to use Notion and Keynote (I’m basically an expert at this point) trying to make sure that everything we did was perfect.
But of course, at that first feedback Zoom, it turned out that everything we did wasn’t perfect. There was still room for improvement.
And while it was painful at first, taking the feedback helped change my mindset from “this needs to be absolutely perfect” to “how can I make this better?” – and that shift has resulted in some work that I’m pretty proud of.
While those stupid, horrible slide decks never seem to be just right, I can say that where they are now is so much better than where they started.
Yay, growth!
One of the topics that we’ve been making curriculum about has really stuck with me (probably because of how many hours I’ve spent revising exercises and live sessions on it :/ ) is compression.
Lately, I’ve been seeing it everywhere: in tweets and advertisements and YouTube videos, so I just had to write something about it.
The Science Of Compression (And How It Can Help Your Kid Go Viral)
Okay, so: compression. What is it? And why should you care?
If you Google it, the definition is “the action of being compressed,” which isn’t all that helpful.
In my mind, there are two pieces to compression:
Summarizing larger pieces of existing content or ideas
Expressing your own thoughts in a shorter, punchier way
Learning both of these concepts is key in helping your teen (and you!) understand complex topics (World History textbooks anyone? Long news articles?) while also increasing clarity while speaking and writing.
Part One: Summarizing to Compress
This is the piece of compression that, for me, is most easily recognizable.
Let’s be real here: we all know that your kid has, at some point, used SparkNotes instead of doing the assigned reading. And even if you have the perfect dream child who always does their homework perfectly, Shakespeare’s hard to understand. So they’ve probably used SparkNotes to make sure that they’ve interpreted the themes and scenes correctly.
SparkNotes is literally a textbook example of how useful compression is (pun intended).
The larger piece of content (the book) is summarized by highlighting the key ideas, themes, and actions (SparkNotes).
Okay, this might seem like a simple example of compression, but this concept can be applied to literally everything, and that’s what makes it so useful.
The internet already has infinite information in the form of articles, studies, documentaries, papers, blogs, and anything else you can think of. The problem is: no one knows how to compress it.
Those crazy smart people who are getting their PhDs in computer science or biochemistry probably know a lot of really important, cool things. Unfortunately, all of those important, cool things are usually written in long academic papers that no one wants to read.
If, instead, these important, cool things were summarized and posted on Twitter, a lot more people would benefit from them.
There’s so much important knowledge on the internet that no one knows about, simply because no one wants to spend all of that time sifting through it.
“But what can a mere teenager do about this,” you might ask?