Self-Education Is Getting What You Want Out Of Life
Using Outcome-Based Learning To Learn How To Build The Life You Want.
For most people self-education is mental masturbation.
They pride themselves on reading very hard books.
They listen to podcasts over music because songs don’t teach you anything.
And they hoard impractical, abstract concepts, just to feed an ego - that desperately wants to feel smart - which creates a shield of fake knowledge protecting them from the harsh nature of reality.
This was me for 95% of my 22 years of being alive.
It hurt once I learned that physics doesn’t care what you know, only what you can do.
We are conditioned by formal schooling to believe that intelligence equals how much you know.
This is why you see so many smart people stuck bearing lives they hate, and dumb people who are far happier than you.
I can’t think of anything sadder than having a head full of theories but a life full of holes.
So I’ll ask you this question now:
If you’re so well educated, how come you’re not living the life you truly want?
Formal education is for getting what other people want out of your life, whereas self-education is for getting what you want out of life.
Self-education is the crossy road between your current and desired reality.
In the last 10 months I’ve built a part-time one-person business. I am literally getting paid to self-educate on profound ideas I love. And I didn’t do it by reading articles on how to become a Substack bestseller or by studying how to build a personal brand for 4 hours per day.
Fuck that.
This newsletter will teach you the philosophy I used to achieve this - and what I’m still building toward - along with how to use outcome-based learning (or project-based learning), so you can stop learning just for learning’s sake, and start learning toward building the life you want.
You’re only smart if you get what you want and avoid what you don’t
Most people who succeed in formal education do so based on having more willpower than others, not necessarily because they’re the smartest in the room.
Formal education conditions you into a low-agency state.
*gasp of shock*
The problem is that you have no control over your life because the education system makes you believe intelligence is about knowledge acquisition.
Not agency.
Because the education system cares only for teaching you what you need to know that helps their desires, while giving you zero freedom to follow your own interest and curiosity-based discovery... which is what learning should be.
And most people don’t care about studying what they’re told is ‘important to know’ by a curriculum they haven’t made.
So the ones who can force discipline, who have more willpower than others, they’re the ones succeeding.
But willpower is a finite resource compared to desire, which is not.
Interest is the great, often invisible leverage you have in life.
Desire is far more powerful than discipline.
If you know how to channel it correctly, you can forget about willpower for the rest of your days, and you will never have to work a day in your life either.
I used to be a big gamer.
I loved nothing more than staying in my room until 5am playing tycoon and business simulators until I physically could not keep my eyes open any longer. Tea, chocolate, and the calm that came with knowing the world was asleep, and I was awake, so I had nothing to feel anxiety over.
There was a reason I did this.
The desire to do it was stronger than the desire not to do it.
It was only when I started lifting weights - and thank fuck for that - that my brain just... clicked.
It reprogrammed itself within 2-3 weeks. Because the desire to lift weights for 4 hours per week was now far stronger than the desire to play video games for 25+.
The benefits I saw (increased alertness, not tired walking up stairs, pure dopamine while benching to my heart’s content) meant there was no chance in hell I was substituting that for an hour of Minecraft ever again.
I’m not against video games btw. I just think there are better games in real life to be playing.
Reprogramming your mind is always talked about, and yes, it is easier said than done. But it’s simpler when you understand the mechanisms working unconsciously inside your brain.
Desire beats discipline. Every. Single. Fucking. Time.
Why?
If what you do feels like work, you will lose. If everything you do feels like fun, you can outplay and out-fun everyone else, who are all too busy working, and escape all competition entirely.
I would have been writing this newsletter regardless of Profound Ideas ever existing. It’s just that every article would’ve been collecting dust inside a second brain for no one else to see.
Long form writing is my vessel for self-education.
It is not work to me. And because of that, I will never work a day in my life doing it. It’s what I desire to spend all my time, energy, and thinking capacity toward building for every one of you legends.
This very newsletter is the result of desire absolutely crushing discipline and willpower tenfold.
Procrastination is literally just your mind telling you it wants to be doing something else more important.
99% of your mental processes are unconscious.
Do you really want to ignore interest, curiosity, and inspiration when it strikes, just because you’ve been told that something is more important to be doing by someone else?
Even by your own conscious mind?
Credentials don’t mean shit for building the life you want
Even though I have a Bachelors degree in Multimedia from one of the best universities in Ireland, nothing I learned from that course applies to my everyday life. This newsletter included.
Most of the modules told me I needed to know this concept, evaluate this reading source, write this 3000 word essay, and complete more group projects than I’d like to admit. I passed every module and got some first-class honours too.
I did all the work, and I have absolutely fuck all to show for it.
I first started writing properly when I was 10 years old.
I wanted to be an actor before wanting to be a filmmaker. I taught myself how to make films at home, with an iPad and a MacBook that survived almost 10 years, which I got for Christmas in 2015. I wrote a ton of screenplays for my own short films. A mix of live-action and Lego stop-motion projects.
I spent every free hour outside of school studying everything that I truly desired. Storytelling. Visual effects. Film Riot. Video essays about the films I loved - while eating every meal, of course!
All of this had a far greater carryover to this newsletter than my 3 year degree.
Moving onto the present day.
Long form writing is my thing. Writing about philosophy, self-development, and psychology, for making you (yes, you) think better, so you can suffer less by solving your own problems better.
And learning science. How to consume information very effectively so I can use learning as infinite leverage. To write and create content of a higher value, faster.
Understanding learning science is a competitive edge within the creator economy. If you can build knowledge faster, you can do, test, and iterate faster than everyone else doing the same but at the average speed.
Everything mentioned here, I learned it all on my own.
I’m not a millionaire. I’m not an expert at anything. I’m still iterating and figuring this out as I go. I’m just a 22 year old Irish dude who writes about what he learns in his spare time. I’m just sharing my writing online and the things I’ve built that I wish I had myself 1-3 years ago.
It’s taken thousands of iterations across months to get here.
Every single skill I use today, to earn half a month’s wage on top of what I already earn in my full-time job, came from educating myself only on problems I needed to solve.
Building an audience of profound thinkers, and slowly - very slowly - creating the life I truly want to be living in a couple of years.
It’s all self-education.
Seriously. Is this not the purpose of education? To help you learn how to build the life you want?
Life is lived in the arena, not a classroom.
When I decided to start this newsletter, I didn’t give my money away to creators teaching you how to grow an audience, while they themselves talk about nothing else but audience growth... while promising to help you grow an audience by doing anything but that - writing about your own fucking interests?
That aside, what I want to share with you, it applies to anything you want. Your health. Your career. A creative skill. A side project. A relationship with yourself or a person you want to give the world to. The process always remains the same.
And the process starts with one project you can work on for 30-60 minutes per day. That’s what I did with this newsletter at the start.
It took that little.
The best way to learn is by doing what you wish to master, and to keep iterating until that becomes true.
I wrote my first newsletter and it was (objectively) pure dog shit.
But now they’re at least not terrible. My writing isn’t for everyone, but you guys seem to like it, and it’s cultivated me an audience of 26k readers in 10 months, which doesn’t feel real to me sometimes. Audience is what defines content as being high or low quality, not necessarily what I think of it.
Every skill I’ve developed in the last 10 months came from a problem I needed to solve. Not a curriculum I paid to receive and had no interest in following once I received it.
If I keep creating and writing the way I am, I should be doing this full-time within the next 6-12 months. If not, I’ll keep iterating until that happens using everything I’m about to tell you.
The desired reality I have is to spend my days creating the things I wish I had years ago, writing and thinking every morning for 2-3 hours, and learning what I want to learn without permission or being told “no.” I’m close to fully achieving it, and I want to show you how to do the same - whatever your goals are. They might even be the same as mine!
You just need to understand this profound idea:
Learn only what you need, only when you need it, and only in service of a very clear outcome you genuinely desire.
You’ve waited long enough, let’s get into the good stuff now.
Learning with outcome-based learning
If you want to start your own newsletter, this will help you.
If you want to create something to sell at the bottom of your newsletter, this will help you.
Or if you want to:
Get your jiu-jitsu blue belt
Complete your reading list on Existentialism
Learn about learning science (like me!)
Begin the lifting or healthy-eating routine you’ve been avoiding
Start improving your relationships by one small percentage each day
Outcome-based learning will help you crush these goals.
Learning is learning, no matter the goal or context, and this is how you achieve the life you want by learning how to achieve it.
I’ll give some practical examples/walkthroughs too. You guys seem to love those.
Here’s the full process explained as best as I can explain it.
I - Define your desired reality
I’m learning about physics atm, so I’m going to make some profound connections!
David Deutsch argues in The Fabric of Reality that we make sense of the world through explanations.
Not facts or data, because they themselves can only be understood by being explained, which makes sense.
Explanations are models of how reality works, that we build, evaluate, destroy, and rebuild over time.
There is no such thing as a perfect explanation, only an explanation that can be refuted less and less.
Funnily enough, a good vision for your life works the same way.
It’s your best, current explanation of the life you want. And like any good explanation, you refine it as you learn more about yourself and the world.
i.e. the fabric of reality :)
So why bother aiming at something if it’s going to change anyway?
Because your mind will aim at something regardless. It will just be unconscious. A mix of other people’s expectations, social media algorithms, and whatever thoughts scream loudest that week.
Realising this, I personally think you’d might as well have the say in where your attention goes.
There is no difference between picking an aim and asking what the meaning of your life is - they are the same question.
And here is a profound idea most people don’t understand about aiming at something.
Your life is either improving or it is decaying; maintenance does not exist.
Think of a library full of books (I imagine my college library for instance).
There is a system for keeping the books organised so people can find what they need. Maybe by topic or in alphabetical order. But the moment you stop putting effort into that system, the moment the employees stop keeping the books organised and shelved away neatly, the library becomes a chaotic mess.
Nobody can find anything, and the value in going to that library... disappears. You could have went to the campus pub, or to jiu-jitsu instead of spending an hour finding the book you wanted.
Your bedroom works the same way.
We all know the world’s best clothes organisation system:
The chair.
Not too dirty, the chair.
Will wear it tomorrow, the chair.
Not arsed to put it away, the chair.
And the chair is fine for a couple days. But then the days pile up. And by the end of the week it takes triple the effort to sort through the pile than it would have taken to maintain it for 15 seconds daily.
Life is no different.
Without a vision to always keep chipping away at, entropy (disorder, chaos) will increase. Which is scary. You don’t ever stay the same. You’re either drifting forward or backward.
But here’s the good news.
You don’t need to believe you will achieve your vision.
Even moving 1% closer means you are building toward a life you want, rather than drifting through one you don’t. You don’t need to aim for building a log cabin on one of the moons of Jupiter. But you CAN think up a pretty fun morning routine and try to make 5 minutes of it a new daily practice.
Building means you’re not drifting.
So start with one question.
What does your ideal day or week look like?
For example, what would smashing an average Tuesday look like? Because that’s what’s going to matter in 3-5 years.
Then run it through what I call the “So That” test. Keep asking “so that what?” until you hit the desire.
I want to start a newsletter.
So that what?
So that I can write about what I’m learning.
So that what?
So that I can build an audience around my ideas.
So that what?
So that I can eventually get paid to think, write, and learn for a living.
That’s your compass. Every learning decision should get filtered through it. If it doesn’t it means you are learning for learning’s sake, and not your own. That’s pointless.
II - Choose one project
One project.
30 to 90 days.
A measurable outcome you can point at (or even hold) when it’s done.
Not five projects.
Not a vague goal like “get smarter” or “be more productive.”
One thing, one fucking outcome.
The project is your curriculum, like your list of problems you have in your mind.
It must require skills you don’t yet have - and that gap between what you can do now and what the project demands is exactly what you need to learn.
If you can complete the project with what you already know, the project is not doing it’s purpose, which is to develop you beyond your current skill level. Let me walk you through a few examples.
Example I - You want to complete a reading/study plan
If I wanted to best study a topic, let’s say, existentialism, I would write about it.
Why?
Writing is formalised thinking.
If you learn how to write, you learn to structure and organise your thoughts with your own brain (not with a machine).
I find it sad that so many people outsource this organising of ideas to AI. Most writers today probably couldn’t write without using it.
I would give myself a 1-2 week deadline for writing 2-3k words on the topic. Create a very shitty outline immediately, and research (learn) to flesh it out. An outline consists of questions the reader might have about the topic. Same applies to the writer writing.
Create a list of sources.
Encyclopaedias, books, web pages, YouTube videos (always be listening to one on walks), and AI especially. AI for learning is highly underutilised because it can meet you exactly where you are with your current understanding of a topic, and help you build directly from there.
If you have the knowledge, then idea generation should be easy.
I’ve written a ton of guides on learning to help you build knowledge 10x faster than most learners, which you can explore here. It includes both of my full digital products too.
You can also download my Guide To Profound Reading directly if you’re not interested in joining the paid-tier. It will help you to remember, understand, and retain everything you read.
If writing isn’t your thing, create a presentation, a speech, draw a mind map from memory, and create for yourself. The best avatar to create for is you.
Example II - You want to learn to write long form content
Write one long form post and post it every Sunday.
No exceptions.
Spend 1-2 days learning, thinking, and outlining. Spend 2-4 days writing 1-2 sections per day. On Saturday night, schedule to send it out Sunday morning, and repeat the process weekly.
Aim to make 1 improvement with each newsletter.
Better introductions.
Less rambling.
Hooks. Attention mechanisms. Copywriting frameworks for outlining. Idea density.
Ask AI to break down and analyse a piece of writing you wish to learn from, and ask it to be your learning/writing coach, but let it teach you to write by hand. We don’t need anymore of that AI-writing flavour that stands out like a sore fucking thumb.
12 newsletters, one per week for 3 months. That’s the project.
I’m starting a series of guides on my long form writing/content creation process, that attracted my audience to 26k+ subs writing one long form post per week. The first guide covers the most important step in the entire process that I see very few creators actually follow - you can read it here.
Example III - You want to learn guitar
When I got my first acoustic guitar, I spent my mid-term break playing it 24/7.
Great acoustic tracks from Sons of Anarchy (I was watching it at the time) with the transition from the C chord to the G chord being the devil himself.
Slagging me, mocking me over my shoulder every time I played...
It was only through playing songs that didn’t have this transition, that I improved it indirectly.
Lot’s of doing.
Lot’s of different songs, different chords, different tempos.
In learning science, isolation means death. Your brain will dump isolated information because it’s not connected to anything relevant. How many car redge numbers have you seen today. How many do you remember?
Because they’re not connected inside a big picture web.
Sometimes the best way to achieve an outcome is by trying to achieve it indirectly. There’s more outcomes inside an overarching big picture project than just one.
Something to consider.
III - Iteration
The 10,000 hours rule is half true.
It would be better to call it the 10,000 iterations rule.
If you’re not iterating you are learning passively, since iteration requires an action to adjust.
Here is what an iteration actually looks like.
(1) You act.
You try achieve something you think you can or can’t. Maybe you write your first essay or Substack article. Maybe you attempt a new jiu-jitsu sweep. Maybe you try to explain The Myth of Sisyphus to your girlfriend over coffee.
(2) You get feedback.
Not from a teacher. Not from a grade. From reality. From physics. The newsletter gets zero engagement. The sweep doesn’t work because your hips are in the wrong position. Your girlfriend stares at you blankly because your explanation made no bloody sense.
(3) You reflect.
You ask what specifically went wrong, and what do I need to learn to fix this problem?
(4) You integrate that feedback into your web of knowledge.
And you act again, but a little better.
This is how knowledge actually gets built. It’s probably the only productivity strategy you ever need.
Deutsch argues that what, how, and why are the three most important words in understanding explanations. An explanation is not a fact you memorise, but rather a model you build, test against reality, and rebuild when it breaks or could be better.
That is exactly what iteration does. It’s an engine.
You are not learning information. You are building explanations for how reality works and testing them inside the arena of your life.
Burn these three questions into your skull for me:
What did I do?
How well did I do it, and why?
What is the one thing I need to learn or fix before the next session?
That is the entire iteration engine. Three questions. Asked honestly. Every single second of every day.
IV - Follow desire... but watch it carefully
If you don’t want to do something, there is a chance you shouldn’t be doing it.
I mean that. Desire is signal. It is your unconscious mind telling you where your energy wants to go. And as we covered earlier, desire beats discipline every single time.
But be careful.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Last week, I tried having a day without a schedule. No structure. No time blocks. Just pure freedom to follow whatever I felt like doing.
And it was great until it wasn’t.
By 2pm I had written 300 words of my next course and nothing else. I didn’t even write a newsletter section that day. I had lost the structure that lets desire run free like the walls of a playground that let you play without wandering into traffic.
Here is a pretty profound idea I took from that day: I can write about anything I want in my newsletter. Total creative freedom. But I have 30-60 minutes a day to do it. That is the only constraint.
Desire without structure is chaos.
So, desire needs a cage.
Because desire can lead you toward the right problems worth solving but only if you know how to evaluate from a meta-cognitive perspective.
You need to watch yourself to see if desire is telling the truth.
Sometimes desire is signal…
…and sometimes it’s avoidance.
The difference is simple. Signal moves you toward your project. Avoidance moves you away from discomfort. They feel identical in the moment. Learning to tell them apart is the skill that separates self-education from self-indulgence.
So, follow desire... but watch it carefully.
Here’s a profound idea worth restating:
Learn only what you need, only when you need it, and only in service of a very clear outcome you genuinely want to achieve.
Go learn something cool and useful. You have everything you need now.
If you want AI to help you create your plan, and study my learning philosophy more in-depth, you can download The Profound Self-Education Guide:
Here’s what you’ll get:
The 4 principles of an autodidact (how to become profoundly self-educated)
Vision-creation exercises (Ideal Day, Anti-Vision, So-That Test) to define what life you’re building
The complete system structure: Daily Tasks → Weekly Targets → 3-Month Horizon
How to define and approach your first project
The iteration engine framework (Evaluate, Destroy, Rebuild) for permanent 1% improvements
AI Self-Education Coach prompt that builds your personalized plan conversationally
Deep work principles and scheduling techniques for 30-90 minutes of focused learning per day
This is the exact system I used to (learn how to) grow to 26,000+ newsletter subscribers in 10 months while working full-time.
You can read the first two sections here on my Substack for free.
If you subscribe to my Substack, you’ll get:
Pre-reading checklist (bookmark 1) - Guides you through the reading process for maximum retention
Encoding checklist (bookmark 2) - Gives you the correct questions to be asking while reading, to process information into knowledge as effectively as possible
A secret discount link to my paid tier
It’s all in the welcome email :)
If you’re not interested, no hard feelings. I really appreciate you being here.
Thanks for reading, I know your time and attention is very valuable.
I tried taking that into account as much as possible with this newsletter.
You’re an absolute legend.
- Craig :)
Very interesting, thanks so much and keep writting!