Jared Castro

Jared was born in Guatemala and arrived in the United States before his first birthday. He has spent his entire life doing one thing, learning how to learn, and then finding ways to help others do the same.

He didn’t know that was what he was doing for most of it. He just knew that he could get good at almost anything he genuinely wanted to learn, because he had an ability to take complex processes and break them down into steps he could easily follow. 

Nobody taught him how to do that. It developed on its own, out of need, out of genuine desire, out of the kind of attention that a person pays to something they actually care about learning. He carried that ability through his art and music. He served a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Guatemala, where he learned to speak, read, and write Spanish, and where he discovered, while simplifying complex doctrinal language for the people he was teaching, that genuine clarity isn’t the dumbing down of difficult ideas. It’s the sophisticated, disciplined work of finding the human truth inside them.

This is when he started to hear it for the first time.

I really like the way you teach. 

He studied Graphic Design at the University of Galileo, learning Photoshop and how to use a computer for the first time at the same time. Then one day a friend showed him two simple color modes for a brush tool in photoshop. Something ignited. Within a year his digital paintings were featured in worldwide artbooks, on the cover of art magazines, and he had become the only first-year graphic design student at his university ever to be asked to give workshops on digital painting to them and other universities around the country. 

For over a decade he worked as a graphic designer alongside investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, managing directors, and marketing strategists, people who taught him, through the sheer force of their professional expectations, what genuine excellence looked like and what it required. He learned to pitch like an entrepreneur, brief like a creative director, and manage milestones like a project manager. He built brands. He built businesses. He built a professional framework that the education system never gave him and that this book exists to pass on.

He describes himself as a Learning Experience Designer, someone who creates engaging, human-centered educational experiences by applying the principles of instructional design, psychology, and genuine human connection to the learner's journey. He became a teacher partly as a researcher. He wanted to know what licensed teachers are actually taught and what they actually go through. He couldn’t get those answers alone in a whiteboard room.

So he became one.