The Dyslexic AI Newsletter by LM Lab AI

Reading Time: 7 minutes | Listening Time: 9 minute

Last edition I laid out the continual learning loop. Learn, apply, discover, unlearn, relearn, adapt, repeat.

I said unlearn was the hard one and moved on fast.

I want to go back to it, because I’ve been living inside that step for about thirty years and only recently got a word for it.

I have never been the kind of person who likes doing the same thing over and over.

Once I learn how to do something, I’m already looking for the next step in the process.

This was true long before I was an entrepreneur. When I worked for other people, I could only stay in a job as long as there was something left in it to learn. Once I’d taken as much as I could get, I started looking. The next position up. The next process. The next thing I didn’t know yet. The next job.

For a long time I read that as a defect. Restless. Can’t sit still. Doesn’t commit.

That’s what it looks like from the outside, and honestly that’s what it felt like from the inside too.

But that was never restlessness. That was the loop running without a name on it.

We bought a kids’ gym. It was already a business, already running, and we spent years improving it.

I learned that business completely. Which led to coaching other owners on running children's activity centers.

Same shape as every job I’d had. Get in, learn everything available, build it into something better, and then the part that always comes next.

I didn’t have language for it then. I would have told you I was chasing opportunity. What I was actually doing was refusing to spend twenty years applying knowledge I’d already finished acquiring.

Then came Dyslexic AI.

I built it as my hero’s journey. This was going to be the one. The thing I could do for the rest of my life, that used everything I am, that mattered.

And I still believe in the work. That hasn’t changed.

But here’s what nobody warns you about. The work taught me to question my own assumptions so well that it eventually turned around and questioned itself.

Three years of building tools, running experiments, writing an edition of this thing almost every day. Coaching and consulting alongside it, which I genuinely love, because helping another business think through their own version of this is a kind of learning in itself.

And somewhere in there I stopped being able to see myself doing any single thing for the rest of my life. Including this one.

That is not a crisis of faith in the project. It’s the opposite. It’s the project working exactly as designed and then applying itself to its own creator.

I turn 50 in January.

I have friends and acquaintances who are closer to retirement than to their next career move. Who are counting down instead of counting up. And I am sitting here seeing more opportunity in front of me than at any point in my life, with almost no ability to point at one and say that’s the one I’m doing until the end.

I’m not going to dress that up. It’s unsettling. There’s a version of this where I’d feel much better having picked something.

It’s also the most alive I’ve felt about work in years. I am learning more right now than I did at 25, at 35, at 45. An old dog can absolutely learn new tricks. What nobody mentions is that the tricks keep replacing each other.

Here’s the part I want you to take away.

Unlearning a fact is easy. Somebody shows you better evidence and you update.

Unlearning a story about yourself is not easy at all. Because you didn’t just learn it. You built things on top of it.

“I’m a job hopper.” “I don’t finish things.” “I’m not a details person.” “I’m not smart in school ways.”

Those aren’t facts. They’re conclusions somebody drew about you, usually early, usually from a very small sample, and you’ve been carrying them as load-bearing walls ever since.

The unlearn step in the loop isn’t mostly about information. It’s about identity.

And that’s why nobody schedules it. You can’t put “reconsider who I am” on a Tuesday.

If you’re dyslexic, you know exactly where I’m going with this.

We get our story assigned young. Usually around eight or nine. Usually from someone measuring one narrow channel and calling it intelligence. And then we carry it for decades, quietly running our whole lives off a conclusion drawn by an adult who had a class of thirty and eleven minutes.

Here’s the strange gift in it. Because the standard procedure never worked for us, we had to keep rebuilding our approach from scratch. Over and over. Every time the method failed, we swapped it.

We were doing forced unlearning reps before we could drive.

That was survival at the time. In a world that changes this fast, it’s the actual skill. Most people have to build the unlearn muscle from zero at 40. Some of us have been in the gym since third grade.

Pick the one you've never checked.

Find a belief about yourself that you learned before you turned 20, and audit it like you'd audit a business assumption.

Not what you do. Who you are. "I'm bad at X." "I'm not the kind of person who Y." "I always Z."

Ask where it came from. Ask who said it. Ask what evidence they actually had, and how old you were, and whether you have ever once retested it as an adult.

Most of us have never audited a single one. We've just been paying interest on them.

"There's a belief I've carried about myself since I was young: [state it in one sentence]. I think I picked it up around [age or situation]. Walk me through it like an auditor. Ask me what actual evidence it was based on at the time. Ask me for evidence from the last five years that contradicts it. Then tell me honestly whether this is still true, whether it was ever true, or whether it's a conclusion someone else drew that I've been enforcing on myself. Don't be gentle about it."

Then run it a second time on a belief about your work. Same process. It holds up or it doesn't.

Matt "Coach" Ivey

Founder, LM Lab AI | Creator, The Dyslexic AI Newsletter

Dictated, not typed. Obviously.

Studying and homework are cooked