Discussion about this post

User's avatar
laura gao's avatar

Messages I've gotten from TKS alum since writing this piece:

"this was so beautifully written laura. over the years I’ve had the same conversation with others many times and yet everyone stayed afraid to actually voice it out publicly in fear of still being wrong because it was against what tks preached. wishing only the best for you!!" -- astha, tks 20-21

"I could talk for hours about this!! I literally got this feeling the first day and u described it perfectly. TKS does feel exclusive in the sense that they want u to cut out ppl who are not deemed to have an “unconventional” mindset when I’ve learned that you can learn anything from anyone and that a true impacted is someone who does not distinguish ppl begin between 'conventional' and 'unconventional.'" -- anon, tks 20-22

"read this and started tearing up. no one has articulated how i felt so perfectly laura" -- anon, tks 20-22

"they always talk to us like this, reading this gives me mega flashbacks. i blocked the gaslighting out of my head. at face value we were told not to question them and blindly obey and they absolutely manipulated us with guilt omg. it's crazy how writing this is bringing back stuff u didn't remember. like i totally forgot about alllll of this." -- tks 20-22

and a dozen more!

Expand full comment
Andrew Wu's avatar

love this post, so so so proud & glad for you, and looking forward to the next chapter : )

wanted to add a thought. i found this quote from a tks director (found at the end of the link here) pretty unbelievable:

https://www.tks.world/story

"If we can train Olympic level athletes from a young age, why can't we train Olympic level CEOs and innovators?"

like my thoughts on this are something like:

- a huge, huge amount of children who are reared from a young age for anything world-class - in this case, athletics - are straight-up mistreated. sure, a lot of them really love whatever sport they are doing, but in a lot of cases that's parents living vicariously thru their children

- for every olympic level athlete who comes out of getting trained like this at a young age sound and healthy, there are hundreds of failure stories we haven't heard of (survivorship bias!)

like you cannot be SERIOUS. how is "we can train olympic level athletes from a young age" a thing that is GOOD to compare tks to?! no, we freaking can't! this works for like 0.1% of the people trained in this way and causes immense damage to many others, like, do we have any idea how risky and silly that is? how many people trained to be the best in some sport that due to biological limitations CAN'T BE, burn out, and lose out on some other potentially much more rewarding career? how many artists, poets, mathematicians, physicists have we sacrificed to the altar of childhood sports? how many merely GOOD tennis players who could've been GREAT basketball players if they'd been given more time to explore, etc. like god damn

Expand full comment
28 more comments...

No posts