Time to Share

Most online learning platforms were built for the wrong people. For the last decade, an explosion of online learning platforms has promised to “democratize education.”

In practice, most of them were built lazily and designed, often unintentionally, for a very small subset of the population: the ~10% who are capable of learning effectively on their own.

These platforms assume that if you provide branded content, the rest will take care of itself.

Videos of lectures, articles, exercises, maybe a gamification of a curriculum or a forum—and voilà: self-service learning.

But that assumption is deeply flawed.

Decades of cognitive science, educational psychology, and now large-scale data from online learning environments all converge on the same conclusion: most human beings do not learn actionable skills in isolation.

They don’t fail because they are lazy.

They fail because they were never given the right incentives, stimulation, structure, feedback, or human support to be successful in their endeavor sometime taken through heavy personal and financial commitments.

The result?

Massive dropout rates. Shallow learning that never makes it to the proper region of the brain. Frustration. Self-blame. Yet another failed attempt to cope with.

And an entire population told that if online learning “didn’t work for them,” the problem was them.

It isn’t.

The uncomfortable truth about self-directed learning

The study I’m sharing today, The Proportion and Characteristics of the Human Population Capable of Self-Directed Learning, digs into this question rigorously and quantitatively.

Using evidence from neuroscience, learning theory, population-level data, and real-world outcomes (including MOOC completion rates), the conclusion is stark but clarifying:

Only a minority of humans—roughly 8–12%—possess the full combination of traits required to consistently learn complex, actionable skills without external support.

This group exists.

They are real.

They are often brilliant. The ones we admire and read about in biographies.

But they are not the norm.

Yet most online platforms were built as if they were.

This is exactly why we built CodeBoxx.

Not to serve the top 10% who would have figured it out anyway.

But to serve the vast majority who need real assistance, real structure, real role-models, real immersive hands-on experience, real accountability, and real human connection to unlock their potential.

From day one, our premise was simple:

Learning is not a content problem.

Learning is a human problem.

People don’t just need information.

They need coaches.

They need feedback.

They need discipline, deadlines, consequences

They need someone who refuses to give up on them—especially when they are about to give up on themselves.

What we didn’t expect—at least not at this scale—was how universal this need would be.

What makes us most proud

Over the years, CodeBoxx participants have come from radically different backgrounds:

Different ages, Different education levels, Different cultures, Different starting points, Different walks of life, Different aspirations, Different past experiences and Different raw cognitive abilities.

What they shared was not prior knowledge.

It was the need for belief, structure, and relentless support.

The greatest pride of our coaches is not the curriculum we built and evolved over the years nor is it the technologies we use and their successful transition to Artificial Intelligence.

It’s the careers we helped launch because we refused to walk away.

Because when participants doubted themselves, someone stood there and said:

“You’re not done yet.”

That’s not scalable content assumed to be assimilated at the first attempt.

That’s human commitment.

An invitation to read, understand, challenge, and discuss

This essay is not a manifesto. It’s not a marketing piece.

It’s a Shoutout to the human beings of CodeBoxx.

It’s an evidence-based attempt to answer a question that matters deeply right now:

Who can really learn on their own and what does everyone else actually need to succeed?

I invite you to:

📄 Read the full essay (PDF)

Challenge the assumptions

Share counterexamples

Add your own experience as a learner, educator, or builder

If you’ve ever wondered why “just give people content” doesn’t work or why some thrive in self-learning while most quietly disappear, this study is for you.

Looking forward to your thoughts, critiques, and conversations in the comments.