How to be a creative thinker | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh

People used to go to school to learn how to do the homework and do the exams. Today, everyone needs to learn how to grade the homework. This is the huge difference because someday if you want to do anything in the world, the first thing you will do is you will ask ChatGPT.

The role of a person in the world is going to be to solve problems. So that's why what the world needs now is a large scale way for everyone to learn how to come up with their own way of thinking, not just how to do the problems. Hi, I'm Po-shen Loh.

I'm a mathematician. I'm a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm a social entrepreneur, and I'm also the national coach of the US International Math Olympiad team.

If you have six match sticks, how can you put them so that they make four triangles? Four triangles where the side of the triangle is the same length as the matchstick. So if you have six of them, you might start putting three of them like this okay.

But then you only have three more. Now what? Okay.

It turns out that the answer is that you take the three matchsticks like this, and then you use one more up here, and you put it down like a pyramid. That's thinking outside the box. If you if you can call it that.

Because this is not just on a piece of paper anymore, it's still six matchsticks or six toothpicks, but it's not what you were thinking of. I've done lots of different kinds of teaching. I teach people all the way from the International Math Olympiad team.

I will also go to schools and teach sixth grade in schools, where unfortunately, there might not even be any math teacher for the whole seventh grade. So I go and cover the entire range of education. I find this to be very interesting because that helps me to learn what the challenges are.

The whole point of a school math test is to see whether or not you listened and you practiced. In fact, all the math competition problems in the US and also in many parts of the world are of this type. Which is why today, the way that I approach education and training is to try to help as many people as possible learn how to do those questions, which they won't have seen before.

But I want to emphasize the reason I've been doing a lot of work on this nowadays is because when I was doing math competitions in the 1980s, the way you got good at it was by thinking every problem which was new was a chance to practice mental flexibility. Today, unfortunately, there's a huge industry around test preparation and cramming where people try to help students get high scores on these strange math questions by showing you all of the strange math questions that you might possibly see. And that involves studying for many, many, many, many hours, so that the hope of the parents is that when the students see the test questions, they are never surprised that they have done everything many, many, many times.

By the way, as you may know, this causes students to have to go to school and after school and so many others. It's actually very bad for the student, but even worse, it takes away the student's chance to invent. Money doesn't buy you happiness, but money is important for impact and influence.

So in fact, it's very important that the things that we build are capable of generating enough money to create the impact. This just happens to be what drives me. Ten years ago, I had this crazy idea that maybe if we made a website that would collect people's ways of explaining math and science topics, then maybe people would explain the math and science topics and it would be free, and everyone would be able to learn math and science.

And I remember thinking, oh, that can't be very hard. We'll be done with that in a few months. I'm glad I thought that because I'm still working.

So I had this whole thing called XP. We were making a website with free explanations, but that didn't actually have a business model of its own. It wasn't generating money, so I had to find some way to support all of that.

In 2019 and April, we started creating our own version of that in the United States of America, where we took charge of filming me teaching, and then we had a product which consisted of me teaching math that people could watch recordings of, and they would pay for it. And this, this made some amount of money. But then this one, we still found there were pain points.

And finally, about two years ago, I realized, you know what? What people really want is to have a live human experience with somebody else who is an expert. The only problem is that's quite rare and hard to find.

And there's also another challenge, which is that ideally that person you're talking to is friendly. If the person knows a lot but is not friendly, that's actually not useful either, right? This is the hardest thing to deliver in education because it's the least scalable.

Of course, in entrepreneurship world we always think about scalability. And yes, you can find one brilliant coach who teaches ten students or maybe even 20, or maybe even even 100. That's a small scale compared to the size of the world.

And then that's when I suddenly realized I can make a giant win, win win situation. So the main thing that I do now is an ecosystem. It's actually an ecosystem that I invented, which unites many different types of people to all contribute in ways where everyone is winning.

One pain point, which was for the people learning math. Then the second pain point was from the people who are very, very strong at math already, from which building the EC would be even better. Although I do want to emphasize this is helping them finish up to become extraordinary.

And the thing that made me realize the key that made me realize I could put everything together, was an experience that I had about five, six years ago, which is that I also took improvizational comedy classes myself, improvizational comedy classes, our acting classes. And I was doing that because I was trying to learn how to communicate better, to get more people interested in math. But I realized that even a math nerd like me can take those classes and then become able to talk to a few more people.

So then I realized, let me add that. And then I walked over to our drama department, and I found out that actually, there are lots of people who have extraordinary drama skills who are actually, indeed very interested in paid part time jobs to help to coach the high school students. So that's the third pain point.

The third pain point is there are people who absolutely love what they're they're passionate about what they're doing in the acting and drama world. But there's a practical need, which is, well, how to find a stable, part time job, flexible hours that they can use to support their passions so suddenly win, win, win. We have all three lined up.

And that's why this thing scales. Actually, the everyone winning is very important because I work with high school students. And so in our in our company, any time anyone wants to ask high school students to do anything, my answer to my employees is always that thing you want to ask that high schooler to do.

Can we explain to their parent why? For a very busy high school student, that thing is the best thing they can do with their time. If I cannot explain that, they're not doing it.

So this is the discipline that we run it to. This is this is how strongly we make it a win win situation. We will never have a high school student doing something unless I could explain myself to their parent.

We suggested for your daughter to do this because it's really good for her to do this. The thing is, beforehand it was hard to imagine there would be a way to do that until the answer became oh yeah, because while doing this, they will get to learn from a Broadway or Hollywood quality actor or actress that's going to help them become extraordinarily successful now. But you see, this took eight years to come up with, two more years to scale.

The speed at which we grow is purely just based on how long it takes for people who have middle school children to realize that, oh, there are these classes here where the class looks as good as a Twitch gaming stream, and it's taught by math geniuses who are smiling. You know, these are things that people could not imagine that you would put all together at the same time. And as people discover this, they actually switch over.

They start joining our classes. Then we can bring more high school students. And the scaling power this can go to is we.

I estimate that this easily could grow to 100,000 high school students in the US. That's 1% of the US high school students teaching about a million middle school students. If you look at our live program, it looks a little strange because you'll see that the only subjects that we teach is a pretty small number algebra, geometry, combinatorics, number theory.

Why do we cover these? We cover these because these are a curriculum that teaches you how to think the. Only way to do that is by giving them questions that they have never seen in school before.

So I need to find a source of problems that you will not see in school. Actually, that turns out to be the middle school math competition curriculum, because the people making those problems were trying to make problems that you don't see in school. But the difference between the way we do it and the way that lots of the training centers do it, is that we are trying to use those as opportunities to make you able to practice the thinking, instead of just showing you doing the question that way enough times.

So the answer is the topics that we cover specifically chosen, because that will be enough to teach a student how to generate their own idea. Our philosophy is if you finish all of that, you will discover that you can learn anything. Our goal is not to make it so that we have classes for you for every year of your life.

Our goal is to make it so that as fast as possible, you don't need any classes from anyone ever again. Today. Everyone needs to learn how to grade the homework.

This is the huge difference because someday if you want to do anything in the world, the first thing you will do is you will ask ChatGPT. Let me make this analogy stronger. If we look at any good software engineer, most good software engineers, if they're given a task that they have never done before, the first thing they do is to think about some similar problems and search on StackOverflow to see examples they don't expect that will give them the whole code they need to write, but they use this to research what kinds of technologies might be useful.

But as ChatGPT suggests, the solutions they need to be quick thinkers and analytical thinkers to understand whether or not what ChatGPT said is correct. So that's why what the world needs now is a large scale way for everyone to learn how to grade homework, for everyone to learn how to come up with their own way of thinking, not just how to do the problems. My general philosophy is when you are learning, you should keep challenging and you should not be repeating.

In the real world, when you're doing a task. If it's repetitive, you should get ChatGPT to do it, or a calculator to do it, or a computer to do it. But in order to know how to control those well in the real world, you need to learn how to think.

And that's the purpose of the learning process. What I do for fun is I like to meet and try to understand people whose backgrounds I don't fully understand yet. This is actually what I do for fun.

This is also why we're talking right now. I happen to be talking to you in New York City. The way I got here overnight is I took the bus, the overnight bus.

You know, some people don't take the overnight bus because who knows who you're taking the bus with. But for me, I'm actually not scared by that. That's just called real world.

You can't understand the real world unless you actually start going into various parts of the real world. I think my message of how to create value is you cannot create value if you don't interact with people. You cannot just theoretically think about the value.

And the more people, the more you can understand. People of different backgrounds understand means, have some idea of how they tick, what are their needs, what are the limiting factors? What do they want to do?

The better you are at modeling this, the more effective you will be at coming up with a solution. I started going to city after city after city giving math talks in public parks. I actually set a schedule.

I put a schedule on my website, and I said, I'm going to go to all these cities, and people could just sign up to show up for the talks. And at the beginning, people were wondering, Will anyone show up? But actually there would be like 50 to 100 people showing up at these talks in parks.

And by the way, that was a fun journey because in order to do that, I was traveling around from park to park with all the AV equipment, speakers and everything to be able to have a stage in park shelters all around the US. But while doing that in a inadvertently, that was customer discovery because I was able to suddenly interact with and talk to thousands of parents and students, which started to make me realize what kind of challenges people had. And that's why just a probably about 1 to 2 months after that, the big idea came the big idea of, oh, we can actually have all these middle school students who I've met.

They can all learn how to think all at the same time. While these people who are brilliant become extremely polished so that someday later in their careers they can be really successful. So that was that was the idea.

It was like, somehow you cannot really find pain points if you're not seeing people. That's also why with a lot of the work that I do, I will go into schools, right? I love to work on education, and I do it in a way where even just last night, I was writing to somebody who is involved with a large network of schools and their schools, I believe, serve students who are also disadvantaged.

Now, instead of just putting money or putting resources from my side, what I said is I'm very interested. Can we arrange for me to go into some of your schools and teach sixth grade? What I'm explaining is that the way I do anything, if I want to work in a sector, I go and myself step in and start doing the work and see what happens.

And this is actually how I came up with all these ideas, because actually the ideas that I'm doing are all things I've personally experienced myself. I've experienced being a math person, taking acting classes. I've experienced being a person, learning how to think, taught by somebody who knows a lot of things and also smiles.

So all the different parts gave me these ideas. Now I can understand why you identify you as a social entrepreneur. Yeah.

We're not doing a very good job of maximizing lifetime customer value. If our goal is to solve the customer's problem as fast as possible. But this is what we want to do, right?

This is the social entrepreneurship. This is also why, if you ask me, what is my definition of success? My definition of success is not just that we make a ton of money.

My definition of success is if we manage to convince a huge number of people on this earth to enjoy being thoughtful, then I want. I love the fact that entrepreneurship is about creating new things. So the message that I've been sending in my entire tour is that this new world of AI is going to be a Wild West.

There will be lots and lots of new opportunities. The people who will be the most successful are the ones who are very good at creating value. Actually, in my public talks I tell everyone.

Everyone should be a bit of an entrepreneur. They can be an entrepreneur, or they can even be an entrepreneur, which is a word in English that we sometimes use to describe making new things within an organization. But the whole concept of creating value is actually going to be central in helping the society survive and everyone flourish as we go forward into this age of AI, into this new world.