No one taught you to dismantle.

I’ve spent years watching people stack credentials like someone stacking bricks against a door that no longer exists. Master’s degrees, diplomas, certifications with English names that sound like a promise of stability. And then they step onto the field, into the real market, and discover that no one taught them the only thing that matters: how a system is dismantled to truly understand it. Not the system that appears in the textbook. The system that operates with friction, with traps, with suppliers who lie and margins that evaporate on any given Tuesday.

I learned this late. Late and at a cost that still weighs on me. Because for years I believed that understanding meant having read about something. That having the right definition in your head was the same as having solid ground under your feet. It isn’t. It never was. And the reason it took me so long to accept this has to do with something Carlos Slim has been doing for decades that no one at university will teach you, because the university isn’t designed to teach it.

What Slim does when he buys something.

Every time Slim acquires a company, he doesn’t send a team of analysts with spreadsheets. Or maybe he does, but that’s the least of it. What I find hard to ignore is the other thing: the man calls suppliers pretending to be a customer. He calls the company pretending to be a supplier. He shows up at stores unannounced. He reads complaints. He calls competitors asking for prices as if he were just any buyer. It’s not due diligence in the neat sense of the term. It’s something else. It’s putting your hands into the mechanism while it’s still hot.

There’s something almost obscene about that level of detail for someone with his capital. He could delegate. He could pay three consulting firms and receive a two-hundred-page report with colorful charts. But he doesn’t. And that refusal tells me more about how real understanding works than any graduate program I’ve ever seen.

Because what Slim is doing isn’t verifying data. He’s building a mental model from the inside. He’s feeling the temperature of every joint, every connection, every point where the system creaks. And a balance sheet won’t give you that. A balance sheet is a photograph taken from afar, in good light, where nobody looks bad. What Slim is after is the photo taken at three in the morning, with direct flash, where you can see the cracks.

The trap of passive learning.

I know what I’m about to say sounds too clean, so I’ll say it with the suspicion included: formal education trains you to receive information, not to build it. You sit, you listen, you take notes, you repeat it on an exam. Knowledge reaches you already chewed, already packaged, already with the correct interpretation attached. And you accept it because the alternative is uncomfortable: it would mean you have to go looking for it yourself, with dirty hands, with no guarantee you’ll find it.

Deconstruction inverts that. When you dismantle something, you don’t receive. You tear. You ask. You collide with answers you didn’t expect. You get the interpretation wrong and you have to go back. It’s slower. It’s dirtier. It’s more tiring. And precisely because of that, what stays in your head has a different density. It’s not stored information. It’s understanding with scars.

The protocol no one is going to give you.

I’m not going to dress this up as a five-step method because it isn’t one. It’s more of a discipline of attention, a way of directing curiosity toward a concrete object until the object gives in and shows you its seams. But I can tell you how I do it, because I’ve done it enough times to know where I stumble and where I don’t anymore.

I start from the outside. I look up the company, the business, the model in question. I read everything: positive reviews, negative reviews, the advertising they run, who they’re talking to, what they promise. I look at competitors not as enemies but as mirrors: what do they do differently and why? What promise do they not make, and what does that tell me? This can take an hour if I’m disciplined. Longer if I get lost in details that don’t matter.

The trap here is confusing volume of information with understanding. They’re not the same.

Then comes the part that costs me the most, and teaches me the most: I call. I call as a customer. I ask dumb questions. I ask about guarantees, about timelines, about things I already know to see how they respond. I pay attention to tone, to speed, to whether they transfer me three times or whether someone actually resolves things. Then I do the hard part: I call as an angry customer. As a customer who wants to return something. As a customer who doesn’t understand the bill. That’s where the makeup falls off. That’s where you see the real business, the one that doesn’t show up on the website.

And then, if I have access to the numbers, I look at them. But I don’t look at them the same way anymore. They’re no longer cells in a spreadsheet. They’re the numerical translation of what I just lived through on those calls. How many customers do they need to stay alive? What happens if they lose their main supplier? Where’s the real margin, and where’s the margin they show the bank? I map relationships. I map dependencies. I look for the point where one single broken piece takes down everything else.

Three hours. Sometimes less. Sometimes more. The first one you dismantle takes three hours because you’re clumsy, because you don’t know where to look, because everything seems relevant. The tenth takes thirty minutes because you already know what to ask, what silences to listen for, what evasive answer betrays a crack.

Practice doesn’t make you faster. It makes you more precise. Those aren’t the same thing.

Knowing is not understanding, and that has a price.

You can know what EBITDA is. You can recite the definition in a job interview and look good. You can even calculate it for three different companies in a class exercise. And still not understand that the number can be dressed up, that there are legitimate ways to inflate it, that a CEO can grow it for one quarter by cutting maintenance and destroying the business two years down the line. Knowing the definition doesn’t protect you from that. Understanding the mechanics does.

Same with barriers to entry. You can repeat the concept from memory. But understanding why Slim’s telecommunications network is almost impossible to replicate requires you to have thought about the cost of physical cabling, the municipal permits in every city, the contracts with local governments, the time it takes to build something that already exists. That’s not a definition. It’s a map of concrete frictions. And that map is only built by dismantling.

In a world where everyone has access to the same information, where any piece of data is two clicks away, the advantage isn’t in knowing. The advantage is in understanding. In being able to look at a business, a technology, an institutional structure, and predict what happens if you remove one piece. What happens if the supplier raises prices twenty percent. What happens if regulation changes. What happens if the founder leaves. That’s understanding. And no classroom gives you that.

What this has to do with your life and not Slim’s.

Ironic, isn’t it? I talk about the richest man in Latin America as if his method were accessible. And it is. You don’t need to buy Telmex to dismantle a system. You need a phone, a notebook, and the willingness to look stupid asking questions. You need the patience not to understand on the first try. You need to accept that you’re going to call a place and they’re going to treat you badly, and that’s also information. You need to stop waiting for someone to hand you knowledge already organized, with an index and a bibliography.

This isn’t romanticizing poverty, and it isn’t saying the degree is useless. The degree is useful for passing bureaucratic filters, for meeting visa requirements, for keeping an HR department from discarding your résumé in three seconds. It’s useful for that. It isn’t useful for understanding. And confusing the two is the most expensive trap I’ve seen people in their early and mid-twenties pay for.

Unschooling isn’t a manifesto against the university. It’s an observation: the motivation to learn has to come from curiosity, not from the fear of not having a piece of paper. The method has to be direct investigation, not passive reception. And validation has to be your ability to apply what you learned to a concrete decision, not a grade on a transcript.

Maybe it’s just my own stubbornness keeping this thread going. Maybe there are forms of formal education that do teach you to dismantle, that do force the student to call, to visit, to get their hands dirty. There probably are. They’re rare. They’re expensive. And most people don’t have access to them. So the point stands: if no one is going to teach you to dismantle, you teach yourself. With three hours and a phone. With the discomfort of being a difficult customer. With the patience to have the pieces not fit on the first try.

The fatigue of seeing the whole board.

There’s a moment, after dismantling enough things, where the enthusiasm fades and something else is left. It’s not cynicism. It’s a specific fatigue: the fatigue of someone who now knows that every system has a crack, every model has a point of failure, every institutional promise has fine print. It’s not that knowing this is useless. It’s useful. But it weighs. It weighs because it takes away the comfort of believing someone else is in control, that the structure is solid, that the path is already drawn and you just have to follow it.

I’ve reached that point several times. And every time the temptation is the same: stop dismantling. Stay on the surface. Go back to the recipe. Pretend the system is coherent because it’s more comfortable than knowing where it creaks.

But I can’t. Not anymore. Once you see the seams, you can’t stop seeing them. And that, which is a form of exhaustion, is also a form of freedom. Because you no longer spend energy sustaining an illusion. You no longer strain to pretend you don’t know what you know. And that freed-up energy is exactly what you need to move, to decide, to build something of your own on ground you already know.

Now I see it. And that changes what I can do with what I know. It’s not optimism. It’s simply that the fog lifted and what’s left is ground. Ground with rocks, with slopes, with soft patches where you sink if you don’t watch where you step. But ground, at last. And on ground you can walk. In the fog you can’t.

Sharing this isn’t generosity.

I’m not writing this because I believe I have an answer others don’t. I write it because clarity, once you have it, becomes suspicious if you keep it to yourself. There’s something in the act of ordering what you see and putting it into words that forces you to verify whether you really understand it or only believe you do. It’s a test I give myself every time I publish. And if it also helps someone out there in the fog, at that point where they still believe a degree is going to save them, then the effort of writing has a meaning beyond my own need to order things.

There’s no guarantee this works. There’s no guarantee that dismantling three businesses turns you into someone capable of building your own. There’s no guarantee of anything. Not in this, not in the market, not in the institutions that promise stability. The only thing there is, is practice. Repetition. The first business you dismantle takes three hours and you don’t understand half of it. The tenth takes thirty minutes and you see things you didn’t see before. The fiftieth you dismantle in ten minutes and you no longer need to call because you recognize the patterns. That’s all there is. That’s the education you give yourself when no one else is going to give it to you.