Eighteen tests.
One session.
A new floor for what a teenager can do.

At Alpha, we believe that building an audience is an essential skill students must learn to achieve success in our modern world. We fully acknowledge the dangers of social media, especially among teenagers. "Doom" scrolling, social comparison, chasing validation, and allowing an algorithm to control a teenager's attention can have very real, negative effects on young people, and we take these risks seriously. For this reason, we are not arguing that teenagers should simply spend more time on social media and we certainly do not dismiss the real concerns that have led schools and governments to heavily restrict its use.

Our philosophy on social media use can be summarized in the following way. Social media is the primary way in which ideas spread. It is the fundamental component in how businesses find customers, how experts establish credibility, and so much more. More importantly, it is not disappearing. Our approach to social media is similar to our approach to AI. We do not believe that shielding students from a powerful technology that is essential to success in a modern world is a better choice than preparing students to use it well. Instead, we want to teach students how to interact with social media productively, and more importantly, safely.

One of the core parts of our instruction to students on audience-building is teaching about social media in its entirety, which necessarily includes educating students on its dangers, including misinformation, an unhealthy focus on attention-seeking, interactions with strangers, and the permanence of what is posted online. We do not want our students to be naive about these risks and we are careful to ensure we educate them appropriately.

An important distinction we focus on is teaching students the difference between being a "consumer" and being a "creator." The version of social media that is most concerning is passive consumption – opening an app, scrolling for hours, comparing yourself to others, consuming entertainment selected by an algorithm, and measuring your worth against what you see. That is not the behavior we are trying to encourage.

In fact, we want students to develop the opposite relationship with these platforms. Instead of opening social media and asking, "What can I consume?", we want them asking, "What can I contribute?" In other words, what did I learn today? What idea can I explain? What did I try that failed? What have I figured out that might help someone else? What am I building? What do I believe that is worth discussing? This is the context in which we teach audience-building.

Why building an audience matters

An audience does two extraordinarily valuable things for a young person. First, it creates one of the best real-world feedback loops available. Rather than relying on feedback from a teacher, parent, or friend to tell a student whether an idea is good, an audience allows students to put their thinking in the real world to see how real people respond. This type of feedback is infinitely more valuable for a student. Through building an audience, people will engage or not engage, which is feedback in and of itself. People will disagree. They'll ask questions. They'll ignore ideas that do not resonate but share things they find valuable. They'll point out weaknesses the student did not see. The exercise of building an audience connects directly to another core life skill we teach at Alpha, which is the importance of receiving critical feedback. We build the resilience in our students to grow past merely tolerating criticism into seeking it out because they recognize that it is the greatest gift you can receive. Building an audience creates endless opportunities to receive that feedback from people who have no obligation to tell the student what they want to hear.

Second, an audience gives students distribution. Creating something valuable is only half the challenge. The second half of the challenge involves learning how to get it into the hands of people who will find it valuable – or equally important, understanding why they don't. This is an especially important skill for teenagers. For most teens, their natural instinct is to focus entirely on building. Many spend enormous amounts of time making an app, writing a story, designing a product, producing a film, or developing an idea, but then hesitate when it is time to actually put that work in front of other people. Naturally, distribution is scary and feels more vulnerable.

However, being a great builder without learning to become a distributor places a very hard ceiling on the impact of what you create. One of the essential concepts we stress to students is that building and distribution are not competing skills, but rather, two halves of the same process. You must be able to create something worth caring about, while also earning the attention of the people who might care about it.

Importantly, when a student develops deep expertise in a field and builds a community of people who recognize and value that expertise, which is our goal for all of our high school students, that community becomes an extremely powerful asset for a student. When the student eventually writes a book, launches a product, makes a film, starts a company, builds an app, creates a nonprofit, or produces something else of value, they do not have to begin from zero. They already have people who know their work and trust their thinking.

This is the idea students encounter during the first week of school when they read Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans." Kelly's argument is that meaningful success does not necessarily require reaching millions of people. A relatively small community of people who deeply value what you do can provide the foundation for an extraordinary amount of future work. Importantly, the goal is not to simply accumulate followers, which is the traditional goal of teenagers on social media. Rather, it is to become someone whose ideas or work are valuable enough that other people pay attention and continue to do so.

Why teach this during Bootcamp?

Our ultimate goal is for audience-building to serve as a feedback loop and a means for distribution. As students build deep expertise in a field they care about, audience-building becomes an application of that expertise and serves as the first real-world test of whether the student's expertise and creations based on that expertise are valuable.

However, students just entering high school are not there yet. They have not yet developed the depth of expertise required to teach or contribute valuable ideas about a particular subject and we certainly do not want them pretending to be experts before they are. This is why, during Bootcamp, we teach the fundamentals of audience-building through building in public.

Building in public means documenting something real that you are actively doing. It's documentation of what you tried, what you learned, where you struggled, what worked, what failed, and how your thinking is changing. Bootcamp gives every student an authentic journey to document immediately. A student does not need to have deep expertise in a topic to be able to discuss what they learned or tried today.

Building in public has historically been a low-stakes way for students to learn the mechanics of building an audience before they have developed the expertise that will eventually become the substance of that audience. They learn how to communicate clearly, provide value, explain an idea to a stranger, understand what resonates and what does not, and publish something, observe the response, and most importantly, iterate.

As students move beyond Bootcamp and deeper into Alpha High life skills curriculum, the content changes. They are no longer primarily documenting the process of learning. They are developing genuine expertise in an area they are passionate about and using what they learn to contribute something valuable to the world. They are becoming a "creator," not just a teenage consumer. The audience-building skills they practiced during Bootcamp give them the tools to make sure those ideas actually reach people.

Why 100 non-student followers?

The 100-follower goal is an objective early benchmark for whether a student is beginning to understand how to build an audience. Without an objective outcome, a student could post every day to an account followed only by classmates and then have a teacher subjectively decide that they had done a good job. Wherever possible, that is not how we want Alpha students to experience mastery. Rather, we want students to have evidence they can see for themselves.

The 100-follower benchmark asks a straightforward question: Can you contribute something interesting or valuable enough that a small group of people outside your immediate student community voluntarily chooses to continue listening? It is not intended as a measure of a student's popularity or worth. One hundred followers is obviously not the ultimate goal of building an audience. It is simply an initial competency benchmark.

Safety comes first

Our decision to teach students how to navigate social media does not mean we are casual about putting young people online. Our ultimate priority is always student safety. We make it clear to students that learning to build an audience does not require a student to publish their real name, photograph, location, schedule, or other identifying personal information.

Students are encouraged to use anonymous or pseudonymous accounts. In fact, some of our most successful student accounts historically have been anonymous, and students are shown examples of anonymous accounts so they understand from the outset that their identity is not their product. That option is particularly important for students who feel anxious about posting publicly. They can practice developing ideas, writing, publishing, interacting with an audience, and receiving feedback while maintaining separation between that work and their personal identity.

Importantly, some students want to build under their own names, photographs, and school. When students want to make that choice, we allow them to do so, assuming their parents are okay with it. We want our students to post in a way that feels authentic and safe for them, whether that is posting under a pseudonym or using their identity.

As discussed, our ultimate goal is for students to gain the ability to build a community around their own expertise and ideas. However, that is something that takes time. During Bootcamp, students begin by building in public around what they are actively doing and learning each day, and because Alpha is a significant part of that experience, it naturally appears in a lot of what our students post. Students do not need to identify Alpha in order to share what they are learning or building. Students can talk about something they tried that failed or a skill they are developing without naming their school or revealing their identity and several of our students choose to do that through anonymous or pseudonymous accounts. Ultimately, we want them to learn the fundamentals of audience-building so they have a toolkit for connecting with anyone in the public square.

As students progress to more challenging life skills curriculum, that is exactly what we expect them to do.

At Alpha, we believe that one of the most important life skills a young person can develop is the ability to receive critical feedback. As with all of our life skills, this skill is valuable far beyond school. Anyone who attempts to become excellent at something eventually encounters criticism and rejection. Because of this, our goal is not to eliminate those experiences from our students' lives, but rather, to prepare our students to navigate criticism with confidence and emotional control.

Even more than this, we want our students, especially when they reach high school, to fundamentally transform the way they view critical feedback. We do not want them to see it as something embarrassing or threatening, but rather, as a gift. Someone is giving you information that you may not be able to see on your own, and that information gives you an extremely unique opportunity to get better.

Receiving critical feedback is inherently connected to two other important qualities we want our high school students to develop – resilience and self-confidence. A resilient and confident young person can hear something critical without it affecting their strong sense of self. They can hear criticism without interpreting it as a judgment of worth. That is our ultimate goal.

That is why "receiving feedback" is a life skill we explicitly teach, beginning in kindergarten. For our youngest students, the starting point is extremely simple: "I can receive feedback without crying." At five years old, this is the first step toward learning that being corrected does not mean you are "bad" at something and that feedback helps you grow. From there, the skill progresses throughout elementary and middle school.

Importantly, in high school, we welcome students who have been at Alpha since kindergarten as well as students transferring from very different educational environments. That is one of the primary purposes of our high school Bootcamp. Before students progress into the advanced high school life-skills curriculum, Bootcamp is designed to ensure that every student has demonstrated at least the foundational life skills we expect an Alpha student to have developed through eighth grade. Receiving critical feedback is one of those foundational skills.

Our parent-feedback challenge is part of that Bootcamp progression. In this activity, students practice several fundamental components of receiving feedback at once. They hear something uncomfortable from someone they love, manage their emotional response, and begin to see criticism not as something shameful, but as information that can be used to grow.

That progression is deeply connected to resilience and self-confidence. At first, students may need significant support simply to tolerate criticism. However, over time, they learn that they can hear something uncomfortable and still be okay. This experience builds evidence for a student that they can handle hard things. That is resilience. And it builds a form of confidence that does not depend on constantly being told that you are doing everything right.

Why ask parents for critical feedback?

Parents are chosen intentionally. In our receiving feedback workshop, students learn about The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, a book designed to teach founders how to elicit critical feedback from conversations even when the person they are talking to has an incentive to be supportive. Its central message is that you must ask questions in a way to avoid politeness, reassurance, and the instinct to tell you what you want to hear so that even someone like your Mom, the person who loves you most in the world, can give you information that actually helps you improve. In the absence of customers, there is no one better to test the ability to elicit critical feedback than your actual mom. The purpose of the exercise is not for parents to enumerate a long list of flaws. Instead, students learn to ask parents thoughtful questions such as, "What is something I do that could hold me back if I don't change it?" or "What is a piece of feedback you've tried to give me before that I haven't listened to?"

Parents are intentionally chosen for another reason as well. Learning that someone can love you deeply and still see areas where you need to grow teaches students that criticism and care are not opposites. In fact, the willingness of someone who loves you to tell you something difficult is itself an act of care.

Why do students experience the exercise together?

Students experience this exercise and receive the video recordings of their parents' critical feedback in a group setting, which is also intentional. Most teenagers' default mindset is that criticism is evidence that something is uniquely wrong with them. If everyone else appears confident and successful, receiving difficult feedback can feel isolating. Our goal is to teach our students the opposite, which is that everyone gets critical feedback. The "smartest" person in the room gets critical feedback. The "most confident" student in the room gets critical feedback. There is nothing shameful or taboo about that. People who have never seen this activity don't see the bursts of laughter when a parent tells their child – including the child themself – they're bad at video games. Or the way students cheer each other on after someone receives a particularly tough piece of feedback. Or the wave of "same" when a parent gives a piece of feedback to a student that other students have received as well. These moments turn something that could feel isolating into something shared and normal, which would not happen if it were not a group setting.

Because we experience this in groups, no student is being singled out as "the kid who needs criticism." Everyone is practicing the same skill because everyone has things they can improve.

Why use a heart-rate monitor?

One of the first obstacles to a young person – and frankly, any person – in the ability to receive difficult feedback is the physiological response. Someone can explicitly understand that feedback is useful but still become anxious or defensive before they have had the opportunity to actually receive or learn from it. So part of learning to receive feedback, especially initially, is learning to regulate your emotional state.

For most students, in order to pass, they must learn strategies such as breathing techniques. The fitness heart-rate monitor gives students immediate biofeedback while they practice that skill. The educational purpose is not to study students or draw conclusions about their psychology. Rather, it gives the student an objective signal that something is happening in their body and an opportunity to practice – over and over again – bringing that response back under their control.

Emotional regulation makes it possible for students to actually receive the gift of the feedback. If their physiological reaction takes over the moment, they may never hear what the other person is trying to tell them. Learning to regulate that initial response creates enough space for the student to listen, think, and decide what they can learn.

The metric also reflects a broader principle in Alpha's approach to life skills: whenever possible, we want students to have an objective way to know they have mastered a skill rather than relying on a teacher's subjective judgment. That distinction is important to us because we are trying to build earned confidence. If mastery depends on a teacher's judgment, a student can always wonder whether they truly succeeded. However, an objective metric removes that uncertainty. It gives students the concrete evidence that shows them, "I did this," a much more powerful foundation than adult reassurance.

This is not supposed to feel effortless

We also want to be clear that learning to receive difficult feedback is not always comfortable. A student may feel nervous before the exercise. A student may feel nervous after the exercise. Their hearts may race – most do. They may feel embarrassed or tense. We do not think the existence of discomfort means the exercise has failed. In fact, in many ways, it illustrates why this skill needs to be taught.

If receiving meaningful criticism were always easy, there would be little reason to practice it. The challenge is learning what to do when something does affect you. To be very clear, this does not mean our goal is to make students distressed, nor do we celebrate distress for its own sake. The ultimate goal is not discomfort, but rather, capability. We deliberately begin with feedback from people students know and trust and provide support while they practice. And we celebrate mastery in a big way, because learning to stay grounded, hear hard feedback, and use it to get better is a major accomplishment worth being proud of.

Our goal is that students build their capacity to receive critical feedback gradually, surrounded by people who care about them, rather than encounter difficult criticism for the first time when the stakes are much higher and no one has ever taught them how to respond.

The ability to do hard things, and perhaps more importantly, a student's belief in their ability to do hard things, is foundational to everything ambitious students will eventually want to accomplish. One of the mindsets we aim to instill in our students is that when something becomes difficult, students do not see themselves as victims of that difficulty. As we discuss with our students, life, by its design, is going to consistently put them in situations they did not choose with tasks they do not enjoy, people they do not agree with, setbacks they did not cause, and circumstances that can be extremely frustrating. It is important for us to teach students to understand that they will not always control what happens to them. However, what remains squarely within their control is their response.

During Bootcamp, students read from a series of books about hard work and high-performance cultures because that is the type of culture we aim to establish at Alpha High. These books include James Kerr's Legacy and Jocko Willink and Leif Babin's Extreme Ownership. Legacy emphasizes humility and the idea that no one is above doing the unglamorous work required of the group, which is captured in the All Blacks' practice of "sweeping the sheds." Meanwhile, Extreme Ownership goes even further, specifically on personal agency: when something goes wrong, the productive response is not to begin with blame, excuses, or everything outside your control. Rather, it is to remain in control of the situation and figure out what you are going to do next.

This rationale is what this Bootcamp challenge is built on. We want students to understand that experiencing something that is difficult does not equate to being powerless, even if it initially feels that way. Discomfort is not synonymous with unfairness. We share with students why this mindset is important. It is because every meaningful pursuit will include circumstances that feel unfair and unpleasant. A student who is used to responding to those moments by focusing on why they should not have to deal with them gives away a tremendous amount of power, but a student who instead asks what is in their control keeps that power.

That is why we have a Bootcamp challenge specifically designed for students to do something difficult without complaining. Importantly, this does not mean students should stay silent about something unsafe, nor does it mean they cannot feel frustrated or tired. They will – and should – feel all of those things. Rather, the distinction we want to show students is that experiencing a difficult emotion does not have to lead to adopting a powerless story about it.

The "Dirty Jobs" challenge creates a simple – and fun – environment in which students can practice this mindset. Students provide direct feedback on the types of challenges included. The work is uncomfortable, physically demanding, and unglamorous by design. Students have to secure the job themselves, show up, complete it to a real standard, and continue working even when it becomes unpleasant.

The narration requirement is a critical part of this activity because victimhood often shows up first in language. This language often takes the form of blaming, catastrophizing, or repeatedly focusing on unfairness. By requiring students to narrate the experience without victim language, we are asking them to become conscious of that pattern and practice replacing it with language of agency, ownership, and action.

A single Dirty Job will not create this mindset permanently. Bootcamp is about establishing a standard and giving students a memorable opportunity to practice it. As the challenges they take on at Alpha become much more ambitious, the circumstances will also become much less controlled. Things will go wrong. Other people will disappoint them. Plans will fail. They will encounter problems they did not create.

Our goal is for their instinct in those moments to be: I may not control what happened, but I control what I do next.