Research and science are often boxed in as esoteric pursuits, inaccessible to most and carried out by a select few. It is the same perspective that leads people today to fear an AI monopoly over discovery. Our lived experience as a community has been quite different.
We are born curious and unafraid of the challenges before us, yet conditioned over time into learned helplessness. Everything begins with something as clichéd as asking questions, which is ironically the very thing most often forgotten. This is conditioning we have had to overcome ourselves, and one we continually help young minds grow resilient against.
Our learning methodology rests on well-established findings about how minds do their best work, from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow to Cal Newport's writing on deep work and Steven Pinker's accounts of how the mind makes sense of the world. It draws just as deeply on the lives of the masters themselves, on Richard Feynman's playful and irreverent curiosity, on Roger Penrose's willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads, and on the many such journeys gathered in Robert Greene's Mastery.
The method itself amounts to a few simple steps. Students learn, or often relearn, to ask questions, and then to stick with those questions long enough for new ones to take their place. The cycle repeats as they discover the answers for themselves, until the questions born of what is personally unknown converge with what is unknown to all. It is at this point that the wider world begins to call the process research. And it is by this deceptively simple process that our students have gone on to exhibit "genius" and, more importantly, to find personal fulfilment.