Full Product: The Profound Self-Education Guide
Create your own self-education plan to help you build the life you've always wanted.
Before we begin, I highly recommend checking out my paid newsletters on learning how to learn. They serve as excellent tools alongside this extremely practical guide, very much going hand-in-hand. Together, they will give you an excellent starting point for becoming truly self-educated, no matter your learning goals.
It’s why I haven’t gone into detail with regards to the learning science in this guide, but rather with helping you to create a self-education plan that actually helps you to achieve your (life) goals.
The AI prompt that goes alongside this guide will help you to create that plan.
I’ve also included it within its own section towards the end of this guide too.
Table Of Contents
Introduction
Creating the right mindset
The 4 principles of an autodidact
The agency principle
Problems are your curriculum
Anxiety is signal
Create your own profound ideas, or what I call unique knowledge
Reflection questions
Creating your vision
What is a vision?
How to create your vision
Your ideal day and week
Your anti-vision
The so-that test
From vision to action
Defining your first project
Building a project vs taking a course
How to approach your first project
ALWAYS start before you feel ready
Deep work
Psychic entropy
Create, learn, brainstorm
Focused thinking vs diffuse thinking
Scheduling your deep work
Training your focus
The iteration engine
Evaluate, destroy, rebuild
Technique stacking
Tips for getting unstuck
Connections compound
Make connections to everything
Boredom is signal
How to know when to level up
Building your self-education plan (without AI)
Step 1: Define your vision
Step 2: Choose your first project
Step 3: Create your system
Step 4: Start and iterate, iterate, iterate
The big picture overview
Building your self-education plan (with AI)
How to use the prompt
Tips for getting the most out of the prompt
The prompt
Conclusion
Introduction
The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. - Naval
This guide started forming inside my mind nearly 2 years ago.
It was my third year in college. My last proper semester with essays and assignments before I had to spend 4 months working on my thesis project. It was around late October when I had gotten into a rut. I felt I was doing too much. But I wanted to be doing too much. I wanted to achieve everything.
Do well in college. Get two stripes on my blue belt. Read more books. Make more progress in the gym. Start a newsletter.
So, I did an analysis on my life. Which eventually led me towards a profound insight that I think most people do not know.
I used to spend 20 hours per week doing college work. But upon deeper reflection, I was actually only doing about 3 productive hours worth of output per week.
Naturally, in response to this insight, I thought if I did only one hour of college work per day, not only would I double my output in terms of productivity (3 hours vs 7 hours weekly), I would also save 13 hours across the week.
It felt strange at first having my entire days free and doing just enough to move the needle forward each morning.
But it forced me into doing the highest leverage tasks each hour; the needle-moving tasks that would move me closer to my vision which was to complete my assignments to the best of my ability.
The result shocked me since I got every essay done one month early.
Profound Idea: Don’t confuse being busy with being productive.
It didn’t make sense to any sense to me.
So, I tested it with jiu-jitsu and lifting weights because I wanted to see if I was making the same mistakes elsewhere in my life.
I used to believe I went to jiu-jitsu 2-4 times per week and lifted weights 2-3 times per week. Until I looked at my calendar and realized I was training jiu-jitsu 2 times weekly, and lifting was even more sporadic. 1 time some weeks, other times it was 3.
Upon analyzing this, I hit reset:
Jiu-Jitsu - 1-2 sessions weekly
Lifting - 2 sessions weekly with half the volume I would usually do
And guess what.
I made more progress in 3 months on the mats and in the gym (I put on 5kg of muscle) than I ever had before in my life.
All by doing less.
Now I carry this philosophy with me while I write my newsletters
I’ve managed to grow a newsletter audience of more than 19,000+ subscribers in less than 7 months on Substack all with just one hour of writing per day.
One hour. That’s it.
Here’s the big idea I’m trying to get at:
You don’t need to work or learn for hours per day when you know what tasks move the needle forward towards achieving your desired outcome, your vision.
Profound Idea: Small, consistent, quality work beats long, distracted, busy work.
This is the foundation of everything we will talk about. Because this doesn’t just relate to doing work, it relates to learning anything.
Most people don’t know how to self-educate themselves. They consume for hours on end thinking that they’re learning. They watch tutorials on loop and do nothing to put them into practice. They buy courses only to watch them and think they’ve done some “good productive work.” They read one book a week and wear it like a badge of honor, without making any measurable changes to how they live their life every day (and suffering less as a result).
Consumption hell, tutorial hell, learning everything “just-in-case” it will be useful one day knowing damn well it won’t have any effect on achieving an impactful outcome in your life. Call it whatever you want.
But this is being busy. Not learning. It’s consumption that doesn’t fuel creating the life you want to live.
The big picture idea: Their life isn’t changing as a result of what they’re learning.
Because is this not the purpose of education? What about self-education?
The enemy we are attacking here is learning without an outcome. If you can’t point to a measurable change in your life like a skill acquired, a project completed, a problem solved, then you haven’t learned anything. You’ve consumed, but you haven’t done anything with what you’ve consumed.
This self-education guide is not like most self-education guides.
It will not teach you how to memorize faster or take better notes.
It will show you how to achieve measurable outcomes with just 30-90 minutes of focused learning per day, guided by a vision you actually want to achieve.
This is a system for learning through action.
Not consumption. Not memorization.
Action.
By the end of this guide you will have a self-education system that compounds. Where 30-90 minutes per day creates more progress than most people make in months of scattered effort.
Keep this idea in the back of your mind as you read: the only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.
This guide will help you achieve this.
One more thing before we begin:
This guide is for anyone who wants to learn anything. Whether you’re a college student trying to actually retain what you study, a full-time parent learning a new skill on the side, a creative building something from scratch, or someone who just left formal education and realized they were never taught how to learn in the first place.
The principles here are universal, but the application is based on your own context.
Let’s start with the most important step which is mindset.
Creating the right mindset
Profound Idea: You do not need permission to learn anything, and the best way to learn anything is to do.
I will repeat that again.
You do not need permission to learn anything, and the best way to learn anything is to do.
I would recommend burning this profound idea into your skull.
This might seem like common sense to a lot of people, but I can’t necessarily assume it either. Modern life says you need experience to get a job, and you can’t get experience without having a job. So, most of us naturally steer towards getting degrees, to say we are qualified to start working a job, even if we don’t have much experience.
This is what most people think of when it comes to education.
That education is something that can be finished.
That education is completed once you obtain a credential, when you finish a course, or when your teacher stops telling you what to do, and what to learn.
All of this is learning with permission. There’s no agency.
One result of this type of learning is that we become conditioned to consume:
We consume so we can get a status title
We don’t create our own unique solutions to anything
We aren’t taught how to solve our own problems
We think of learning in terms of what we must know, and not outcomes we can achieve to help improve our lives
This is a status game.
Credentials is a status game. You’re not learning to become competent. You’re learning to signal the appearance of competence. There’s a difference.
Learning should be a natural game.
Your newsletter audience is growing or it isn’t
You win the jiu-jitsu competition or you don’t
You lift the barbell off the floor or you can’t
You can explain the book you read simply or you can’t
You can break apart a car and rebuild it or you can’t - regardless of whether your degree says you can
Another issue with credentials is that they can lie.
Nature doesn’t lie.
If two people can tear apart a car and rebuild it the exact same way, but one of the persons has a degree in engineering and the other one doesn’t, is any one less of an engineer than the other?
The purpose of learning is to prepare you to become capable of achieving an outcome. Not status titles. Status titles are fake. But competence can’t be faked.
A note for students: I am not saying your degree is worthless. A multimedia degree is going to be very different in terms of usefulness compared to a nursing degree or an engineering degree. But what I am trying to say is don’t confuse the credential with the competence. Use your time in school to build real skills and not just to pass exams. This guide will help you do both.
Profound Idea: Just because you’re informed, does not mean you are enlightened. Just because you know something, doesn’t mean you actually understand it, or that you can actually use it to achieve a worthwhile goal and thus change your life.
I truly discovered all this once I started my newsletter.
I learned more from doing 6 months of weekly problem solving and iteration than I did from 3 years of doing college essays and projects.
College might have gotten me a degree, but my newsletter got me a real physical outcome beyond a beige, standardized page that says “I am competent.”
Now, let’s introduce a cool term I only learned recently.
I never knew what an autodidact was until I started researching for this guide.
According to Oxford Languages, an autodidact is a self-taught person.
There’s something HUGE hidden beneath this definition.
Society teaches you to solve external problems and not your own. To consume, consume, consume, and never how to think about what you’ve consumed. The world wants you to consume and comply, not think and create.
This is the big shift we’re going to make.
The autodidact has one thing most university students don’t have and that’s agency.
The autodidact takes initiative and responsibility, and therefore they have agency:
Agency is the ability to solve your own problems and iterate with ruthless consistency without permission.
I want this guide to help you stop thinking about learning and self-education in terms of:
Consumption
Credentials
Needing permission to learn or do anything
Instead, I want this guide to get you thinking about learning and self-education in terms of:
Creating your own solutions to your own problems
Creating your own answers to your own questions
Thinking about what you consume for longer than you spend time consuming
Outcomes, goals, aims, targets, whatever you want to conceptualize it as - did you achieve what you wanted to achieve or not?
All of this shapes whether you can create the life you want to live, and whether you can achieve the goals you genuinely want to achieve.
Again, is this not the purpose of education?
The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge. - Aristotle
A pretty nice quote to sum it all up thus far.
Let’s carve another few profound ideas, or principles, into your skull.
The 4 principles of an autodidact
I would now like to run through the 4 principles that make someone an autodidact.
These will be the most important mindset shifts you must make in acting on this guide.
These are not four separate ideas.
They are a cycle.
Agency leads to problems.
Problems reveal anxiety.
Anxiety points to where growth lies.
Growth produces unique knowledge.
Unique knowledge reinforces agency.
Agency → Problems → Anxiety → Synthesis → Agency (and repeat)
1. The agency principle
You are the architect of your own self-education journey and therefore your life.
You choose what your goals are, what to learn, when to learn, and how to achieve them.
You take full blame for your own education; therefore you have complete control. This is a great burden to bear. You must figure this all out for yourself and then learn from your own journey. You have total freedom too, to learn anything, anytime, without permission.
Agency requires reflection.
After every learning session, every project session, every hour of focused work, evaluate. Without fail.
What worked?
What didn’t?
What will I do differently tomorrow?
The key insight here involves mixing learning and creating into one workflow. Learning feeds creation, and creation reveals gaps in learning.
They are not and should not be separate activities.
2. Problems are your curriculum
Every obstacle is your next lesson.
Obsess about this and you’ll always have motivation.
You will always feel challenged enough to never feel bored when sitting down to learn or build anything.
Without problems, you are not learning anything because comfort means stagnation and therefore boredom. In flow psychology, happiness is found in progress.
If there’s a profound idea to memorize right now, it’s that one - happiness is found in progress.
So you literally want to be getting stuck. This is when you get to learn something.
Think of every problem as an opportunity to level up.
You solve problems as you encounter them, not in advance.
For example, for the last six months, outlining was the bane of my writing process. I knew something was wrong, but I kept pushing through without ever really thinking about it. It was only when I stopped and evaluated my biggest bottleneck that I identified the issue.
And when I found it, I didn’t spend hours watching outlining videos. I watched one video and immediately tested it. I built an outline so I could get feedback. Then I evaluated the feedback and solved the next problem (how much detail, how much fidelity and so on).
This is the cycle.
Problem → Attempt → Feedback → Evaluation → Next Problem
You need a marathon of small problems solved. This is why every stresses about “consistency.” But most people aren’t talking about staying consistent however, they’re talking about sprinting consistently across time in the right way with the right form in the right direction.
And each problem solved compounds on the previous one. Eventually you either reach your outcome or become so skilled that your outcome is forced to evolve to reach just beyond your current level of skill.
3. Anxiety is signal
You are literally becoming someone new in the self-education process so it’s natural to feel anxious.
Anxiety is a signal that you’re moving into the unknown because it takes effort to grow, and you cannot grow without discomfort.
Don’t shy away from anxiety. Ever.
That which you most need to find is where you least want to look.
This is a profound idea from Jungian psychology.
Confront everything your heart wishes to avoid and make the unknown known to discover who you truly are. That’s another profound idea to really think about one night while sitting on the edge of your bed in complete darkness.
So, I say if you don’t know what to do, that’s good.
That’s your signal to find your first obstacle.
Solve it, then repeat.
Just start. The pathway forward always reveals itself through action and not contemplation.
4. Create your own profound ideas, or what I call unique knowledge
Do not place boundaries between subjects and always connect everything to everything.
If learning something helps you achieve your desired outcome, or gain more clarity on your vision, learn it.
You will never need to think outside the box if you’re thinking within multiple boxes simultaneously.
Think like a polymath. Look for patterns across everything you consume, and always keep thinking about making connections. This will make everything you learn feel relevant, familiar, and purposeful.
This is the highest level of self-education: synthesis.
Synthesis means making connections across books, videos, domains, and past experiences into specific solutions.
Answers.
Habits.
Behavior changes.
Insights that didn’t exist before you created them.
This is a higher level of abstraction than AI can reach.
AI can summarize. AI can connect the obvious. AI can imitate.
But profound ideas - your unique knowledge - can only come from your taste, your experiences, your friction, and your irreplaceable perspective.
Perspectives are the new oil for this very reason.
Here’s a quick example from my own writing.
In my newsletter titled “How to become dangerously articulate,” I connected Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus to articulation; embracing uncertainty while speaking to pushing a rock up a hill. I layered this with my own personal experiences like struggling to speak aloud in school, shyness as a silent killer of opportunity, my discovery of philosophy and psychology and creative thinking when I was a late teen.
None of that came from a textbook. It came from doing. From solving problems. From reflecting. From synthesizing.
This is unique knowledge.
And it’s one of my most read newsletters on Substack with 150,000+ reads as of writing this.
I encourage you to create your own unique knowledge and share it to the world, because it might help some people out.
Reflection questions
I would recommend saving these questions somewhere safe, somewhere that gives you easy access to them before you start learning anything.
Read these questions before and after your 30-90 minute learning sessions.
This will prime your mind to recognize the principles while you’re actually doing them.
Then, you can reflect on your learning afterwards to see what you failed to do. These are your next problems to solve in your next learning session.
What problem did I encounter today?
What did I learn from trying to solve it?
What would I do differently next time?
What connections can I make between this and something else I know?
What is still unclear or unresolved?
This is the mindset I want you to cultivate over the coming months and years. And don’t worry. You have your whole life to keep practicing and improving with these 4 principles in mind each day.
But a mindset alone cannot change anything unless it has a direction.
That’s what we’ll build next.
Your vision.
Creating your vision
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. - Nietzsche
Interest is the ultimate form of leverage in life.
Because what feels like fun to you will feel like work to other people.
This is your “why.”
If you are interested in pursuing a goal - starting a newsletter, entering a jiu-jitsu competition, reading The Myth of Sisyphus - it’s because it has a purpose in relation to a big picture vision you want to achieve.
Your “why.”
If you’re not interested in learning something, it’s because it doesn’t feel relevant for achieving your vision.
It doesn’t feel purposeful.
That’s why a lot of people go through school just not caring about anything. The “why” in our education system is obviously to pass an exam to achieve a credential, but most people don’t care beyond that. They don’t see how passing an exam will help them achieve what they want in life.
Worse than this, most people don’t even know what they want in life to begin with, which worsens the problem.
Without a purpose behind your learning, it will feel incredibly difficult in all the wrong ways.
Profound Idea: Learning should be difficult, but it shouldn’t feel meaningless.
So, why create a vision?
Most people start learning without having a clear outcome in mind.
No vision.
No direction.
No measurable, clearly defined outcome which they want to achieve.
They just watch tutorials all day and get stuck in consumption hell.
You can learn a lot in 6 months, but it doesn’t mean you’ve actually achieved anything.
This is what makes learning feel irrelevant, meaningless, and boring - purposeless.
A vision is a filter.
It defines what is, and what is not, worth learning.
Without a vision, you’ll learn everything “just in case.” I’ve wasted thousands of hours using this mindset.
With a vision, however, you will learn only what’s necessary, and only when it is necessary.
You’ll know what paragraphs to skip.
What isolated details to ignore.
What parts of your writing workflow don’t matter anymore.
What specific jiu-jitsu takedown to work on defending.
Create a vision, and everything you learn will compound toward what you want through a necessity filter.
What is a vision?
A vision is not a rigid 10-year plan with every detail written down perfectly.
Profound Idea: A vision is not a perfect plan or a final destination, but rather a rough direction that is always evolving.
When you see your vision as a compass, a guiding light that can change, a direction, you can commit to it freely.
Why?
Because your vision will change as you change as a person.
As you gain more knowledge.
As you achieve more of your goals.
A vision is a direction and not a destination.
Your vision should guide your decisions without locking you into one path for life.
It’s a compass and not a map.
This is why rigid goal hierarchies don’t work (in my personal opinion).
If you write down a perfect 10-year plan with 5-year milestones, 1-year goals, monthly targets, and weekly tasks, all of it mapped out in a document, you will spend more time updating that document than actually doing the work.
This is busy work, not productive work.
It doesn’t move the needle. And the reason why is iteration.
Every time you try something, you learn. Every time you learn, you adjust. Every time you adjust, your goals shift slightly. This is how it should be.
Iteration is the daily practice of trying, missing, changing, and trying again. It’s embedded in everything you do, or it should be at least. And rigid goal hierarchies collapse under iteration; they require constant rewriting which pulls you away from the work that actually matters.
Direction is all you need.
How to create your vision
Let’s go through the vision-creation process.
Spend no more than 1-2 hours on this. You don’t need a perfect answer right now, but it’s very important that you complete this step regardless.
This is the foundation for everything we will go on to discuss.
Open up a document or grab a blank page. You will be writing about what your dream life would look like.
This self-education guide is going to help you achieve your dream life.
Get ready to start writing.
