Self-Education Guide: Learn ANYTHING Faster than Everyone (30mins a day with 3 profound principles)
The profound thinker's guide to self-educating.
If you’re not learning, you are dying.
I always got learning completely backwards.
I remember when I bought Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics in Eason about 2 years ago. I remember so vividly, upon picking it up, reading the back of that book thinking “yeah I’m gonna learn this so deeply so I can build a bulletproof and virtuous character.”
That seemed to be the only bit of thinking I did in relation to that book - the fucking blurb.
I tried to memorize the book’s entire logical argument line by line.
After 3 weeks and (I don’t know how) many hours spent, I managed to “self educate” myself on the first 3 chapters. I had marked up the book beautifully with pencil and ruler, had memorized all these one-liners, and had set myself a worthwhile learning goal of reading a great classic Greek text.
But I didn’t understand any of the book in my own words.
I only understood the book in Aristotle’s words.
Then, after much iteration and error correction, I realized I didn’t know the difference between consuming information and actually thinking about what I was consuming.
This is a mind map I drew 2 weeks ago.
This is 150 pages worth of notes encoded inside my brain - in visual form - from reading The Gulag Archipelago:
This is what most self-education guides fail to really teach you in a practical way.
The thinking behind the fancy curriculums.
This guide will help you go from being an isolated, memorization machine, to an integrated, connected thinker, who can create original solutions to any problem.
Self education has less to do with personal development than with staying cognitively alive in a modern world designed to numb your mind to death with cheap stimulation.
To be truly educated is to be a thinker that integrates and connects their ideas.
To become what I call a profound thinker.
All it takes is 30 minutes a day.
But first we need to address the suffocating issues that most self-education guides completely ignore.
Keeping your mind alive
You do not need to read more books.
You do not need to waste your time writing fancy fucking notes that look like they’ve been puked on by a highlighter.
You don’t even need a detailed learning plan or a proper curriculum.
You think you need all these things.
But when you’ve read a single page from a paperback book, you’ve already forgotten it before you’ve turned to the next page.
Maybe you can’t read any more than a single paragraph before your mind starts forgetting, because your learning is so damn isolated.
You swear to yourself that you cannot learn with any method other than rote memorization. Taking notes. But what you’re doing is slowly developing your own procrastination system that prevents you from thinking.
Just because you’ve encoded an entire chapter’s worth of notes onto a page does not mean you’ve encoded this information inside your brain.
You can use these learning techniques all you want. Notes. Flashcards. Mind maps. Reading, rereading, and more reading.
But they’re all pointless if they’re not helping you process information - thinking.
These techniques are supposed to amplify your thinking, but you fail to distinguish your techniques from what the techniques are supposed to encourage.
If you’re not thinking inside your own head, you are not learning. And if your learning methods are not encouraging you to think more often and to a deeper level, those methods are wasting your time. Your learning is not defined by your tools and methods, but by what’s happening inside your mind.
I sound like a fucking robot, but most people struggle to learn anything because they simply do not think.
They just consume.
And you give yourself all these vanity metrics:
Read 52 books a year (you’ve really thought that deeply about each one?)
Read 10 chapters this week (ok, but does this mean you are actually thinking?)
Write notes for 3 hours (what. about. thinking?)
You consume and you collect information, but never turn any of it into authentic knowledge.
And even if you do know something, you can’t do anything valuable with what you know.
You’re a walking AI chat who can barely give an original solution to a problem people actually fucking care about, and you’d rather let yourself believe that you are “self learning” by wasting hundreds of hours a week “studying,” keeping loads of philosophical quotes in the back of your mind as party tricks.
Maybe you have doubts. Maybe you can’t see any good reason for why you should educate yourself.
But you need self-education.
If not, you’ll wander around with no understanding of how the world works. You’ll act stupidly and suffer stupidly as a result because you won’t know any better.
When you say something that happens to upset someone (for some reason), or you hate your job (and never question why), or you unconsciously pick up a bad habit that hurts your mind, your body, your soul, or your purpose; and you suffer because of these things.
It’s because you haven’t thought about them.
If you happen to be suffering in some area of your life, you need to know how to think about creating a solution - this is the purpose of self-education. So you don’t suffer any more than you need to.
And the goal of learning is not to collect information, but to process it into something else entirely different.
You need to think more than you consume.
Let’s talk about that now.