Elisabeth Gruner: The Zen of Writing, Reading, and Learning

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People.
My team and I are on a mission to make you remarkable.
Helping us today is a remarkable guest. Her name is Elisabeth Gruner, and she has changed the way many people view the educational grading system.
Elisabeth teaches children's and young adult literature, Victorian literature, and creative non-fiction at the University of Richmond.
In fact, she has been teaching college English for over thirty years.
Four years ago, she stopped putting grades on her students' written work.
Let's just say that she regrets not doing this sooner.
Her personal research is focused around the relationships between children's and young adult literature and education, and how socioeconomic status affects these relationships.
Elisabeth obtained her bachelor’s degree at Brown, and her master’s and PhD in English from UCLA.
At the University of Richmond, she is a former Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, a former Director of the Academic Advising Resources Center, and she was the founding coordinator of the First Year Seminar Program.
Back in the previous century, I attended a school in Hawaii called ‘Iolani, and I had a very, very tough English teacher. His name was Harold Keables, and he pounded me into becoming a writer, although I don't think he foresaw that I would ever become a writer.
With hindsight, he was one of the best teachers I ever had, and ever since that day, I've had a huge soft spot for English teachers, hence my interest in Elisabeth Gruner.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now, here is the remarkable Elisabeth Gruner.
I want you to explain your concept that reading is a form of alchemy.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Oh, let me see. Reading is a form of alchemy, because it changes us. I really believe it transforms us. It can transport us to places that we haven't been before, it can give us experiences that we wouldn't have otherwise, and then those experiences become part of us.
So, that's transformative, and alchemy is the process of changing one thing into another.
Guy Kawasaki:
And would you say that watching video or listening to audio is not as transformative as reading? Is there something special about reading, versus other ways of receiving information?
Elisabeth Gruner:
I'm going to say that they're different. I'm not going to say that reading is necessarily better. The thing that I think is true about reading is that it does require you to invent a good deal for yourself.
So, you invent for yourself how the speakers sound, you invent for yourself how the people look. The author can give you some of that, but you can invent it for yourself.
So, for example, when J. K. Rowling said that Hermione had curly brown hair in the Harry Potter books, some black readers invented a little black girl with curly brown hair, because that was their experience that they wanted to find in that book.
And so, there's fan art and fan fiction that transforms Hermione for them, and there's actually nothing in the book to prevent them from doing that.
Now, once you put it on film and you cast Emma Watson, then you have a particular Hermione, and you have a particular experience. You can still have a very imaginative experience with a film. You can still have a very imaginative experience with audio, but it's different.
Guy Kawasaki:
Would you say writing is also alchemy?
Elisabeth Gruner:
Yes. Yes, I absolutely would.
When you write books, when you write anything, articles, poems, stories, I think most people experience this at some point, that the writing takes over, and you find yourself writing things that you either didn't know, you knew or didn't know you were going to say, and it can be sometimes a little bit terrifying, often surprising, but at its best, it's an experience of transport, it's an experience of transformation, both of the writing itself, and of the writer.
So, I've learned things while writing that I didn't know I knew.
Guy Kawasaki:
What kind of advice do you give to students about writing? Do you have a theory of, you write a little bit every day, first thing in the morning, are you a Julia Cameron fan?
Elisabeth Gruner:
I do like Julia Cameron, but I think you just write when you can write. I begin almost all my classes with a period of free writing.
I find a lot of people are a little bit afraid of writing. Somebody once told them they weren't good at it, or they read something that they thought was better than what they could do, and they got scared of it, or someone told them their grammar wasn't good, or they didn't know how to spell.
And so, a lot of people are a little bit afraid of writing, and I've found that free writing, just putting words on a page, I prefer to do it by hand, but I've found a lot of digital natives do just fine typing.
So, I don't press this, but I've found a period of free writing where you just let one word follow another is freeing and does help break down that anxiety, that fear.
At the beginnings of my classes, I tell students just write for three minutes, doesn't matter what you're writing about, about the thing that's keeping you from thinking about what we're supposed to be talking about, or write about what you want to say, marshal your thoughts, or make your grocery list.
It doesn't matter, but put some words down, because the more you get used to putting words down, the easier it gets to put more words down. Writing begets writing, I absolutely believe that. The less I write, the less I can write, and then the more I write, the more I can write, and I think that's true for almost anyone who writes.
So, I don't think it's magic, but I do think that it helps just to do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
By any chance, are you a fan of, If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland?
Elisabeth Gruner:
I encountered her work years ago. It's been a long time since I've looked at it, but I remember liking it very much at the time.
Guy Kawasaki:
That book changed my life, because the essence of it is overcoming doubt, whether it's external, or more likely internal doubt of your ability as a writer, and kind of the Nike saying, just do it, don't worry about what anybody says, and that book changed my life.
Elisabeth Gruner:
That's great. I think for some people, it's Julia Cameron, for some people, it's a teacher who just encourages them.
So, I'm glad you found Brenda Ueland.
Guy Kawasaki:
Thank you. I want you to also explain the impact that Literary Mama had on you.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Literary Mama came along right at the right time for me. I was raising two children, and I was finding the experience of motherhood profoundly transformative.
I had a friend who's an anthropologist who worked in Indonesia, and she told me that the people among whom she had done research actually changed their names, not when they got married, but when they had children.
And that made so much sense to me, because I thought when I got married, I joined my life to another person's, absolutely, but I didn't feel my identity transformed, but I really actually did when I brought a child into my life.
And writing for Literary Mama allowed me to express that, and to think actually critically and analytically about what those changes were, and to work actually with a group of other writers who were thinking about the same things.
It was also an amazing writing community. I've written for academic outlets, for non-academic outlets. I have rarely been as carefully edited as when I wrote for Literary Mama, because it was a writing group, as well as an online magazine, and everything anybody wrote for it in the days when I was writing for it, went through a significant revision process.
So, it was excellent training, as well as just a great community.
Guy Kawasaki:
And when you say rigorous editing, are you saying that Literary Mamas would point out the lack of a serial comma or a split infinitive, or are they at the higher level of "This whole passage is not clear"?
Elisabeth Gruner:
It was more really getting us to refine our thinking, and to focus much more carefully on, what's the central purpose of this paragraph? What is the overarching argument of this?
I wrote a lot of book reviews, so what's the real claim of this book review? Don't just meander, don't just tell me a little bit about each book, make a claim here.
And when I was writing columns about children's books, I really had to think very carefully about what single point I wanted to make. Academics get a lot of space often to sort of try a thing out and then say, "But it might be something else," and move on, and Literary Mama editors didn't have any time for that.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, as an English professor, do you believe that when you do corrections or when you do comments, do you literally point out split infinitives, passive voice, lack of serial comma, beginning a sentence with...
Not putting a comma in a conjunction between two independent clauses, or is that old school, and now it's all about expression, and you don't have to worry about Strunk and White anymore?
Elisabeth Gruner:
There's this thing called Grammarly.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Yeah.
Elisabeth Gruner:
So, you can get a lot of that kind of technical support, this sort of grammar, and punctuation, and spelling support, actually online from the device on which you're writing, and so, I have two things to say about that.
One is that you can get that support elsewhere, and so, it's not really a good use of my time or my students time for me to do a lot of that work for them. The other thing is that correctness, as we term it, does influence how one is read.
Also, a lot of it is very class-based, so that there are forms of expression that English teachers have marked as wrong for generations, that are perfectly acceptable in certain racial communities, in certain class communities, and that are transparently understood by everybody who reads them.
So, I will tell my students, your boss might not want you to write like this, your political science professor might not want you to write like this, a legal brief can't look like this, but if you're writing a short story, or a poem, or a letter to your mother, this might be perfectly acceptable.
So, you really do need to think about context, in other words, when it comes to that kind of thing.
A lot of students will use Grammarly, spell check, all of those tools to be as correct or acceptable as possible in an academic context, but what I comment on is, are they expressing their ideas in such a way that they're getting across to a reader? Are they saying something that's interesting, that's new, that engages with the topic of the course, that sort of moves the conversation forward in a way that's interesting, and that expresses them in a way that they want to express themselves?
So, that's what I try to help them with.
Guy Kawasaki:
I had the opposite experience. I went to a school in Hawaii that had just a phenomenal English teacher, and as I look back on my life, he's one of the biggest influences, and he was one of the toughest teachers I've ever had.
This is before word processing, so he would circle an error as simple as not having a comma and a conjunction between two independent clauses. He would circle that.
You would have to write that sentence incorrectly as you did, you'd have to cite the rule that you broke, and then rewrite it. And so, I quickly learned grammar and punctuation.
Now, do you mind if I drop the F bomb in this episode? I don't want to offend you.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to tell you a great story that I think you'll appreciate. I interviewed Margaret Atwood for this podcast and I asked her, "So Margaret, how do you do your editing? Do you seek outside eyes on it, and all that?"
She goes, "Guy, let me tell you a story. So, I wrote this book about a Millennial, and in the book, I had him say something like, 'What in fuck?' And then I let somebody young read it, and he told me, 'Margaret, it's not 'What in fuck?' it's 'What the fuck?'"
And so, I got Margaret Atwood to say "fuck" on my podcast.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Context is everything.
Guy Kawasaki:
Context is everything. Context is everything.
So, now, you have been a college professor for thirty years, I think, something like that?
Elisabeth Gruner:
Almost. Yep.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, and I would like to ask you, this may seem like an airy-fairy question, but I'm very curious these days, particularly because being Asian American, I wouldn't say my parents were tiger parents, but definitely, we toed the line.
So, what do you believe is the fundamental purpose of a college education?
Elisabeth Gruner:
I'm an English professor, so I believe the fundamental purpose of a college education is to change lives, and it is to prepare young people for citizenship, for lives of purpose, for lives of value.
I teach in a liberal arts college, and the liberal arts were originally conceived as education that was fitting for a free person.
The education that could, in fact, make you free, could make you a good citizen, could make you a contributing member of society, and I really believe that we can still do that.
Now, I also teach in an institution that has a business school, so we have accounting majors, we have marketing majors, we have students who are taking a course of study that's going to prepare them to apply to medical school, to apply to law school.
So, I'm aware that we are also preparing students to enter the professions and to enter their chosen careers, but the English majors specifically, and the humanities, generally don't have an obvious career path. What they do is create critical thinkers, careful readers and writers, people who are, I really believe ready to contribute to society in a variety of ways.
And we offer a general education for all the students who were in those pre-professional majors as well, that requires them to take humanities courses, that requires them to take fine arts courses, that requires them to take science courses, so that they're also well-rounded and able to be contributing members of society, no matter what profession they choose.
So, that's idealistic, perhaps. I think college had that effect on me. It really opened my eyes, it gave me the opportunity to experiment, to take risks in a sort of risk-free environment, if that makes sense.
That is, I could take intellectual risks, and experiment, and grow in a very safe and wonderful environment with people who challenged me and gave me things to chew on that I keep coming back to.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. Just for the record, I consider teaching God's work, and one of the things that I just have a very great difficulty wrapping my mind around is the lack of, at a very basic level, why we pay teachers so little, and why we pay investment bankers so much, is just counterintuitive to me completely.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I'm with you, and not only that, but I honestly think if we really valued children, we'd be paying preschool and kindergarten teachers at least what I make to teach college, if not more.
By the time they get to me, I can absolutely help. I think I do a good job, and I think you can still make a difference with eighteen to twenty-two year olds, with college students, but teaching children, teaching young children is so important, and that we don't value that more highly is one of the great tragedies of American society.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. I just had someone named Dana Suskind on my show.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I listened to that episode.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
And so, her thing is you're out of the womb, it's time to start your education. That was really-
Elisabeth Gruner:
This is why I study children's literature, because these books form us in ways that we're not even paying attention to at the time.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now that we're half an hour in, you're probably wondering, "Guy, what the hell? I didn't expect these kind of questions," but-
Elisabeth Gruner:
You read my stuff. I'm impressed.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now, what brought me to you and how I found you was an article that you wrote for The Conversation, and I just loved it, obviously, that's why I invited you.
And so, would you explain your method of grading?
Elisabeth Gruner:
I don't grade in a traditional fashion. So, it's a method that some people call ungrading. I'm not completely comfortable with that, because I do put grades on my students' work at the end of the semester.
But what ungrading is in a nutshell, is a system wherein students do their work throughout the semester, and the work is designed to demonstrate their learning.
So, they write papers, they produce maybe PowerPoints, or presentations, or whatever it is to demonstrate their learning, and they turn those in, and I comment on them.
I give them feedback, and with that feedback, they may, if they choose, revise their work throughout the semester, and at the end of the semester, they turn in a portfolio of their revised work, along with a statement that they created at the beginning of the semester of their goals for the course.
So, they revisit that, they submit it again in the portfolio, and that goal statement, they don't just make it up out of whole cloth. There's a syllabus for the course, and we talk about what the learning outcomes for the course are supposed to be, and then what they're particularly interested in, given the sort of broad outcomes.
So, at the end of the semester, they revisit those goals, and they look over the work that they've produced over the semester, and then I ask them to write a reflective essay in which they assess the work that they've done, and they say, "I think I achieved these goals.
Maybe I did better on this one than that one. I think I did a really good job with my research paper. I learned a lot writing it. I missed a blog post. I meant to do three, but I only got two done. Time got away from me," or whatever it is.
They write this essay, and then they assign themselves a grade for their work over the course of the semester.
I tell them at the beginning that I will take that very seriously, that I might not give them the same grade that they've given themselves, but that most often, I do, actually. They usually know how they've done over the course of the semester.
And so, at the end of the semester, that's what I do. I read the portfolios, I read the goal statement, I read the reflective essay, and then I submit a final grade. So, that's a description of ungrading.
Guy Kawasaki:
This sounds like it's more work for the teacher, not less.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I wouldn't say it's less. It's not less. I have not found it to be more work. It could be. If everybody revised everything over and over again, it would be.
I'll tell you, Guy, most people don't. They're taking four other classes, they're busy, they've got extracurriculars, they've got sports, they've got clubs, they've got a lot to do. My class isn't always the most important thing they're doing. Sometimes it is, and if it is, then they're going to revise their work.
If it's not, they might say, "You know what? That was good enough." Sometimes they revise it just at the end of the semester, and so, I don't actually see the revisions until I see the portfolio. It depends.
What I will say is that I hate grading a lot less. If you ask any teacher, they mostly don't like grading. They really don't, and what has changed for me with ungrading is that I don't have to spend any time during the semester worrying about, is this an A- or a B+? Is this better than their last thing, or are they getting worse?
I don't have to worry about any of that. I don't waste any time thinking about if I do give them a B+, are they going to come to my office and complain? What kind of comment do I have to write to justify this grade? I don't have to do any of that.
All I have to do is write comments that respond authentically to the work that they did, suggest what might improve it, note what they did well, and go on from there.
And the other thing is they actually read those comments, and I'm not the only person who will say this, study after study shows that if you put grades and comments on the same paper, students mostly just look at the grade.
They don't look at the comments, because if it says A, what do they need the comments for? And honestly, though, if it's a lower grade, they don't either, because it's either reinforcing something they already thought about themselves and they're just going, "Yeah, here it is again," or it makes them mad, or sad, or anxious, or angry, but it has an emotional quality to it that makes it really hard to take on the commentary.
And I said before that I had great editing from Literary Mama. I didn't get any grades with that. What I got was feedback from people who wanted my work to be the best it could be, and that's what I give my students, feedback to help them make their work the best it can be, and people like that.
So, it's work that's worth doing, and it makes my job way more pleasant. So, if it takes a little more time some weeks, it's a lot less emotional labor, and I will take that trade any day.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can this work for other subjects? Could it work for astrophysics?
Elisabeth Gruner:
There are a lot of people who are doing work on grading in sciences, so it can work differently. There are a lot of different methods.
For example, I actually talked last week with Professor Heather Miceli, who teaches at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island.
She ungrades a general education science course, but there are also Clarissa Sorensen-Unruh, and I can't remember where she's located, but she ungrades upper division chemistry courses, and in science courses, often what ungraded work looks like is students, again, turn in lab reports or problem sets, or whatever it is, and they may, in some cases, then be given an answer key or a rubric by which they can grade their own work, and then identify where they went wrong, why they went wrong, and try and then come back and learn from their mistakes, and take another assessment later and see if they've achieved that learning, if they've achieved mastery in that subject.
I have a colleague actually, on my own campus, who's teaching neuropsychology in an ungraded format, and students are turning in portfolios of their work, and for them it's a very authentic assessment as well, because a lot of their work is public facing.
They're doing work that's going to actually be used outside the classroom. So, it has to be right, because it's not just her looking at it, it's not just the professor grading it, it's actual practitioners. She's teaching them how to use these caps that they affix to their heads with electrode, and how do you use that, and then how do you interpret the data from that?
And if they don't get it right, they've got to fix it until they do, because they're teaching other people how to use these things.
So, there are lots of different ways that ungrading can work, but the core of it is a commitment to student learning. The baseline is professors, and I think all college professors want their students to learn, but I think folks who are ungrading are thinking, "Maybe intrinsic motivation is going to work better in my class, than the extrinsic motivation of the grade."
Guy Kawasaki:
So, do you think that this can only work at the college level, because at the college level, people have self-selected right?
So, could this work in high school, could this work in elementary school, intermediate school, or do you have to wait until you have highly motivated students at the end of the pipe?
Elisabeth Gruner:
People are doing it in high school, and there's certain school systems, Waldorf Schooling, Montessori Schooling, Emilia Reggio.
All of these were actually developed, even though we know them now as kind of elite private schools that only very selective people can go to, they were all developed as schooling for underprivileged children in the early part of the twentieth century, and they are all experiential kinds of learning, a lot of them have to do with learning through play, learning through experience, and moving on when you learn one thing, and then you move on to the next thing after you've learned it.
For example, Montessori schools are famously not age-based, right? They're more kids in larger groups, than just all your four year olds here, but you may have three, four, and five year olds, and you have kids who are at the same skill levels doing things, and showing each other how to do things.
So, you can do this at any level.
In fact, schooling wasn't graded, not routinely and not across all levels until really the late nineteenth century, and not in a consistent, shared way that everybody used in the US, until the middle twentieth century.
So, it's actually a relatively new innovation, and it's something that we don't need to do. Kids like to learn. Grades turn things into prizes and punishments, and take away the pleasure of the learning itself, but if you take away the prize and the punishment, you get to experience the pleasure of it a lot better.
Guy Kawasaki:
And why haven't more teachers embraced this? Forget professors for a second.
Elisabeth Gruner:
It can be done in K through twelve, and it is being done in K through twelve. I'm not going to pretend that it's easy for everybody.
A lot of the movement in K through twelve, especially in public K through twelve, over the last several decades, has been towards standardized testing, outcomes, metrics that people can measure, and it can be really hard to move against that trend.
Even ungrading is not utterly incompatible with that. You can just move to a sort of competency-based model. Do you know it, do you not know it? Or you can move to three grade system or something, excellent, acceptable, still working, or something.
There are many different ways of doing it, but it would mean moving against a kind of ranking system that we've gotten really comfortable with and good at in the US. We're really used to it.
So, people can do it in individual classrooms, as long as it doesn't disrupt the more general flow of the measurement system that the entire school system is working with. It would take a concerted effort by entire school boards, school districts, education departments, to really make a big move against it in a concerted way, but individual schools, they can do it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right now, we have so many school boards making sure that math techs are not teaching critical race theory, and, oh my God.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I know. I know. I know, it just makes me sad.
Guy Kawasaki:
I know.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Who would want to be a teacher? I mean, it just...
Guy Kawasaki:
Seriously.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Who would want to be a teacher? Okay. I'll ask you that. Who would want to be a teacher with what is encountered today?
Elisabeth Gruner:
What is astonishing to me and what actually gives me great hope is every year, I have students who want to be teachers, because every year, I have students who themselves had a teacher who made a difference for them, or maybe who had a teacher who harmed them, and they want to undo that, both those things can be true.
But just this year, I worked with an honors student who spent all year working really hard writing a thesis on reading and writing in young adult literature, and he's going to go off and be a high school English teacher, because that's what he really wants to do.
And I'm delighted, and I'm a little bit worried, because I think it's a really hard profession right now, and it's hard for reasons that have nothing to do with how good a teacher he's going to be, and that just breaks my heart.
Guy Kawasaki:
If you said, "All right, so you're going to work for low wages, you're going to have to maybe even use some of your own money to buy supplies, and school boards are going to tell you what you can and cannot teach, having not even read the book that they're trying to ban," that's why it's God's work.
Elisabeth Gruner:
It'd be hard to sign up for that. I know.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yes, yes.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I know. It's hard.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, do you think that the death of the SAT dependence, except for MIT, do you think that's a good trend?
Elisabeth Gruner:
I do, and I see this as somebody who always actually did really well on standardized tests, because I figured out how to game them, and I think maybe that's why I'm deeply suspicious of them, because I knew even when I was taking them as a junior in high school, that they were gameable.
I figured out that there was a trick to them, and I thought, there's a trick to these. So, I know the trick, but some people don't, that doesn't seem fair. And there's just, every year, we get more and more evidence that what they measure is, what zip code do you come from? What your parents' income is, what school district you come from.
They're not measuring your ability to think hard, and to be creative, and to be thoughtful.
So, I think it's great. The further away we move from them, the better. The high school GPA is a better predictor of performance in college. We've known that for years.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's some irony there, the ungrader.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I'm aware, I'm aware of that, but I still do contribute to my students' GPAs, right? They still do get grades.
Guy Kawasaki:
Right. You must have a campus-wide reputation for this is a very different kind of class, how it's done, et cetera.
Do you think you've had students take English because of your system?
Elisabeth Gruner:
So, I've been doing this for about four years. Students were taking my classes probably primarily because I teach children's literature, even before I was doing this, and that's all right with me.
People think children's literature is going to be easy, and I don't necessarily mind that it has that perception, because I want to get people in my classroom who actually might be afraid of an English class, who might not want to take an English class, because I think that I can teach them the value of an English class the value of reading.
If they're taking it because they think that it'll be easy because I don't give grades, or they think it'll be easy because I teach children's literature, that's okay with me.
What I learned from them is that given the opportunity to do work for its own sake, most of them will, and if they don't want to, they're grownups, it's college, and they will know that they haven't done the work, and so will I, and that does get reflected at the end of the semester, and that's okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
My last question for you is some young person is listening to this and says, "After this, I'm interested in becoming a teacher." What's your advice to that person? How do you pursue that path?
Elisabeth Gruner:
Well, you pursue it with your eyes wide open. As I said to you just a minute ago, I have students who pursue it every year.
I have a daughter who's trying to pursue it right now, actually, and I'll be honest, what we said to her was, "Do it if you can't imagine yourself doing anything else." So, think really hard about this, because it's a hard job. There-
Guy Kawasaki:
That's a hell of a bar. Wow.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Okay. So, she wants to be a college teacher in the humanities, and there are no jobs. There is actually a teacher shortage of K through twelve, so my students who want to be K through twelve teachers, I say, "It doesn't pay well, but you'll probably get a job, and if you want to do it, go in with your eyes wide open."
My students who want to get a PhD in the humanities, I say, "Do it if you can't imagine yourself doing anything else, and be aware that you may spend six years getting the degree, and then not be employed in the field of your choice."
So, you have to be okay with loving the process, and-
Guy Kawasaki:
You got any good news?
Elisabeth Gruner:
I mean, the thing is that I think that is good news, because again, it's the same thing that I'm doing when I ungrade my classes.
I think the process of reading and writing is valuable. I think the process of learning is valuable, and I am not a particularly goal-oriented person. I have been remarkably fortunate in my life, and I do not discount that, and I graduated from both college and graduate school in recessions.
So, I know whereof I speak when I say there aren't jobs, there haven't been for a long time, but people who are process-oriented, people who are willing to do the work, will always be able to make something for themselves, and I really do believe that.
I really do believe there's a place in this world for people who will just keep doing the work, and I think institutions don't love us back, jobs don't love us back, so you don't do them for that, you do it because the process itself is valuable, and it takes you where it takes you.
Guy Kawasaki:
I had a guest named Mark Manson, and he wrote the book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, and I think the most useful insights, really in all my podcasts, was that when you discover a shit sandwich that you love to eat, you know that you have found your passion or your interests, because when everybody else thinks it's a shit sandwich but you love it, like for example, there's a lot of things about writing, I think, and podcasting, that is a shit sandwich, primarily the editing process.
And so, I think to be a good writer or a good podcaster, you have to love to edit, and that is a very shitty process, but I love it. And so, that's why I know I love podcasting.
Elisabeth Gruner:
See, editing's my favorite part of writing. It's-
Guy Kawasaki:
Me too.
Elisabeth Gruner:
... getting the first draft down, that's pulling out your fingernails, but once you've got something on the page, editing's fun.
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't know who said it, but somebody said it like writing is you open up a vein, and you pour your blood onto the page.
Elisabeth Gruner:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So, I love that, but people have asked me what it's like to write, and for me, I hope you don't get offended by this as an English teacher, but for me, I tell them that basically, my first draft, I am trying to vomit stuff out as fast as I can, and then for the next year, I'm trying to get vomit down to only the nutritious things, so it's refinement of my vomit, and a lot of people can't wrap their mind around that metaphor.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I've been a practitioner of the Anne Lamott, Shitty First Drafts for many years.
So, I'm with you, I'm definitely with you there, and I really do try to get my students to move, because I think for a lot of us, again, you read people's writing that just, it's so beautiful, right? It shimmers, and you think, "I can't put a word down until that word shimmers," and you're just never going to get anything on a page if you're waiting for that, I really do try to help my students be willing to excavate, or do whatever you have to do to get...
For me, it's the shitty first draft or the vomit, whatever it is, to get to something better. And the thing is, that it's slow, and college does not reward that these kids are taking five classes in fifteen weeks, and they're supposed to be writing long papers for say, three of them? That's hard. It's really hard.
So, we do what we can.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have loved this topic, and I have loved talking to you.
Elisabeth Gruner:
I've enjoyed it. I hope you can edit it into something beautiful.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, the beauty is there.
I hope you come away from this episode with a greater appreciation of reading, of writing, and of grading.
Her concept of non-grading grading is very interesting, and when all is said and done, how much does a grade really matter? It's what you learn, not what grade you got.
I'm Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People.
I have a remarkable team behind me.
Somewhat ironically, maybe hypocritically, they are all A students.
Peg Fitzpatrick, Jeff Sieh, Shannon Hernandez, Madisun Nuismer, Drop in Queen, A+ surfer of Santa Cruz, Luis Magana, a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz, and Alexis Nishimura, who is completing her college applications.
If you're on the admissions committee of any college, you may be seeing a letter of recommendation from me, for Alexis.
Do yourself a favor, admit her.
All the best, Aloha, and Mahalo.

Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable.
With decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy’s questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.
Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world with practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable.
Listen to Remarkable People here: https://wavve.link/remarkablepeople
Text to get notified of new episodes: https://joinsubtext.com/guy
Like this show? Please leave us a review -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!
Thank you for your support. It helps the show!

Guy Kawasaki is on a mission to make you remarkable. His Remarkable People podcast features interviews with remarkable people such as Jane Goodall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Marc Benioff, Woz, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Bob Cialdini. Every episode will make you more remarkable.
With his decades of experience in Silicon Valley as a Venture Capitalist and advisor to the top entrepreneurs in the world, Guy’s questions come from a place of curiosity and passion for technology, start-ups, entrepreneurship, and marketing. If you love society and culture, documentaries, and business podcasts, take a second to follow Remarkable People.
Listeners of the Remarkable People podcast will learn from some of the most successful people in the world with practical tips and inspiring stories that will help you be more remarkable.
Listen to Remarkable People here: https://wavve.link/remarkablepeople
Sign up to get text notifications for new episodes: https://joinsubtext.com/guy
Like this show? Please leave us a review -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!
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