Transcription
Let's play a game for a second. I want you to spot the pattern between these profound thinkers.
Leonardo da Vinci was born illegitimate and barred from formal education. He never learned Latin or Greek, the quote unquote essential languages of the educated elite.
Nicola Tesla envisioned the first AC motor fully formed inside his mind while walking through a Budapest park. No laboratory, no institutions, no permission, just a brain that refused to think within limits.
Socrates hated writing. He believed books would destroy human memory. He wandered Athens asking questions that made powerful people uncomfortable and the tyrannical government executed him for quote unquote corrupting the youth when all he did was teach them how to think for themselves.
Dioynes lived in a barrel. Alexander the Great, you know, the guy who conquered most of the known world before the age of 30, once found Dioynes sunbathing and asked if there was anything he could do for him. Dioynes had one request. He asked him to stop blocking his sunlight. He had no credentials, no system, and he refused to be domesticated by anyone.
So, did you spot the pattern? Formal education called every one of these thinkers a failure. But why? The education system rewards you for hoarding facts. It rewards you for memorizing names, dates, and statistics. It rewards you for complying with a curriculum you did not choose. And worst of all, it tests you on these metrics inside an exam hall, then releases you into the world that tests you on none of them. Life is lived in the arena, not classrooms.
I'm speaking a lot from personal experience here because I played this game and won it. I set the grades record in my school back in 2022 in my secondary school, I school, like I don't know what, like four years now. And there's absolutely no way of saying that without sounding arrogant. I apologize. But I forced myself to rope memorize everything. Chapters ticked off, pages of linear notes per week, memorized word for word, hours logged like a factory worker. And you know what I learned? Absolutely all practical real-world knowledge. In everyone else's eyes, my friends, my family, my teachers, I was a perfect student. But I was learning at an incredibly suboptimal rate.
I'm telling you this because I'm not here to lecture you from a pedestal, but from a place of regret. I always believed that the sacred answers to genius level learning lied in treating my mind like a storage vault. I was an archiver of information and not an architect of ideas. I hoarded information. I confused inputs with outcomes. I thought the quantity of work defined the quality of learning. And it doesn't. The system rewards motion not mastery. Think back to the names that I listed out at the start of this video. They didn't let their curiosity get shut down, their interests get restrained, or their agency get controlled. You shouldn't let the outcomes of your schooling determine the outcomes of your life ever.
Now, just before we begin, I just want to do a little quick announcement that I have a new self-education guide that is out at the minute. I will leave a link to it down in the description below if you'd like to check it out. But yeah, let's get into the video.
Physics is harsh. Something either happens or it doesn't. A bridge holds or collapses. You lift the weight off the floor or you don't. You win the jiu-jitsu competition or you lose. You get strangled or you break your arm. Reality is undeniable and unforgiving about what you care, feel, or think. And I think your learning should prepare you for that profound idea. But most people learn like they're preparing for an exam that will never come. They hoard information. They build elaborate systems to store said information. They confuse the feeling of learning with the fact of learning.
Upon a lot of walking and thinking while brainstorming this newsletter, I think there are two types of learner. Number one, the archavist. They treat the mind as a storage vault. Success is measured by inputs. So books read, hours logged, notes taken. They think they're building new knowledge by doing all of this work, but it's very fragile. It's not true knowledge. Every piece of information sits alone. It's very isolated. It's not integrated into the schema of knowledge that's inside your own brain. It's usually put onto a second brain software or the notes app on your phone or a page of notes and then whatever learning system that they have, it requires constant maintenance because it's not really a proper learning system because knowledge is not built on a page or in a second brain software. It's built inside your own mind and that's where all the information should be going, nowhere else.
The second type is the architect. They treat the mind as a spider's web. Success for this type of learner is measured by outputs. Problems solved, projects completed, reality influenced. Learners who are architects focus on building webs of knowledge inside their own brain. And here's the thing, a well-built web doesn't get bigger and more complex over time. It gets smaller, denser, and more general.
Most people are in the first group. They are archavists, and I was one when I was in school. My geography and Irish classes were spent copying notes off the projector into our hardback copies that we could return to later on at some other point for revision. But nobody asked the question as to why couldn't we have just been given the notes directly off the slides to revise at some other point because the system conflates motion with mastery. Chapters read, thousands of words of linear notes written, four to six hours of studying completed after school and not a second less. None of this focuses on the knowledge that's ultimately being built inside your own brain. It focuses on the work you do to feel like knowledge is being built. You can spend an hour reading a textbook, but that error in isolation does not mean you have anything made to show for it.
And this is why I hate second brains for knowledge acquisition. They externalize what should be happening internally inside your own brain. You cannot outsource tacet knowledge to a note-taking app. The knowledge must live inside you and not in your tools or your software. Michael Palani defined tacet knowledge as the things you know but cannot fully articulate. Think riding a bike or driving a car, reading a room full of people, or thinking through a problem that you've never experienced before. You cannot store this type of knowledge inside of notion, Obsidian, or Eden. No matter how much I love Eden.
And here's the profound idea as to why. Compression is understanding. The more that you understand a topic, the less information that you need to actually physically show for it. A novice needs a thousand facts. A master needs a handful of principles that generate those facts from first principles. Physicist David Deutsch thinks that a person who truly understands physics doesn't know more facts. They know fewer, more powerful principles that can generate the facts. I'm currently reading through I haven't read the beginning of Infinity yet. I've read the first like page or two and it just completely up my head. I just was like and I'm on page 11 of the fabric of reality. This took me about 5 days to get through the first 10 pages because it's just quite a lot, but it's really interesting. So, I'm talking about it now. Mastery is about needing less before knowing more.
And here is another profound idea that will sound backwards until you think about it. The harder you have to work to remember something, the less likely you need to be learning it. Forgetting is not a failure of memory, but a biological judge of relevance. It's your brain correctly filtering information that does not serve your survival or your vision for the life that you want to have. And there are three reasons as to why this is the case.
Forced relevance is fake relevance. If you have to force yourself to remember something, you are fighting against your own biology. The information isn't connected to anything you care about. It has no roots. And that's why isolated information gets weeded away. Whereas connected knowledge develops roots and becomes immovable. You cannot trick your brain into caring about anything. You can only choose to learn what you actually care about. Interest cannot be faked and it can only be found by living your life inside the arena. This proves you're not living life in the arena. In the arena, relevance is automatic. You remember what keeps you alive. You remember what solves your problems. You remember what moves you toward your vision. In the classroom, relevance is artificial. It's fake as. You remember what's on the test. You remember what the teacher said would be important. You remember what you need to pass. Then you forget it the moment the exam is over. If you're forcing yourself to memorize things or to remember things, you're still in a classroom. You're still in a lecture hall. You're still in an examination center. And you know it yourself. These are not real life. The best way to learn is through doing in real life inside the arena.
And our third point is that the system conditions you to confuse effort with learning. If you're working hard to try remember something, you will always feel like you're actually learning. The hours of struggle feel meaningful and productive. And the key word here is feel. But you're not learning. You're building a library that will collapse in the moment. The external pressure of teachers, lecturers, and formal education telling you what to do disappears. And this is why most people, older generations specifically, think of education as something that can be finished. And I don't think there's a more dangerous idea than that one. If you want to stay stuck living with the same mind you had at 22 while you're 65, keep thinking of education as something that can be finished. An immature mind is a closed mind.
All of this builds up an illusion of mastery. Motion with no progress, effort with zero output, the feeling of knowledge without the proof to show for it. All of this reframes everything, which is really good news. You do not need a better note-taking system. You don't need a second brain. And you don't need to read 52 books a year. Just stop hoarding information and start building a mind that can survive the unforgiving nature of reality because physics, like these books, won't test you with an exam inside a classroom.
Now, let's talk about the profound self-education plan. The goal here isn't to lock yourself away from life studying for 12 hours a day. What you want is agency. The capacity to walk into any domain of life, identify what matters, learn it without permission, and build something that didn't exist before. This isn't so much a curriculum, but a calibration tool. These principles are going to compound across time if you keep using them inside the arena as you were living your life and trying to solve problems every day.
So before we get into the plan, I want you to carefully pay attention to this analogy I'm about to explain that makes this entire plan work. Imagine someone who wants to learn guitar. The archavist struggling to play a C chord buys an 8-hour course on music theory in response to their bottleneck. They study scales, blues, chord progressions, history of guitar, all that yada yada. And after a month, they know everything about the guitar, but they still can't play a C chord. But the architect does something different. They hit the same wall immediately. They can't play the C chord. So what do they do? They Google the C chord. They learn it. They try to play it in a song. Now they hit a wall again. This time it's a G chord. They look that up. They learn it. And so on. That is a true story. By the way, the G chord used to be the bane of my existence. When I first started playing guitar, I could just never play it for some reason. That is the whole self-education philosophy inside of a single analogy. You don't learn then build. you build, then learn only what you need, only when you need it. And here is how.
Step one, let interest guide you. Most self-education advice starts with goals. I think that's backwards. Goals are logical. They come from your conscious mind. They're often borrowed. Things you think you should want because someone else wanted them. Whereas fascination is biological. It has more depth than logic. It's your subconscious mind telling you where your leverage lies. If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it's a distraction. Keep looking. That is a quote by Naval. I really love the profound idea that you don't have your interests, your interests have you. Interest is the ultimate form of leverage in life. Stop asking what book should I read or what course should I buy. Hear the signal that already exists coming from your own heart and soul just by asking yourself what can I not stop thinking about every single second of the day. Your fascinations are not random. They are signal. So start listening to them and follow them. Interest is the best leverage you have in achieving anything you want in life. They are a compass toward potential, becoming who you could and should be.
Step two, define what you're building. Fascination without direction is just curiosity. Curiosity is truly beautiful. Yes, but it doesn't build anything in isolation. You need a vision, not a 10-year plan, not a mission statement, just an answer to one simple question. What do I want to exist in the world that does not yet exist? A newsletter, a business, a body of work, a skill that solves a problem plaguing your everyday life, a way to help people one to three steps behind you. The vision is your compression function. It tells you what matters, what connects, and what can be discarded. It filters signal from noise. Busy work from productive work that moves needles and pulls levers. Without this, every piece of information you consume, every book you read, every podcast you listen to, it's all going to feel equally important. And if you try to learn everything, you will learn absolutely nothing. I think fully digesting that profound idea will make you realize that 95% of the information you consume on a daily basis is an absolute waste of time. Like 98% of what you consume is just noise. It's not signal. And most of what you do is just maintenance work. It's not actually productive work. So stop learning everything and start learning what's needed.
Step three is to choose one project. A project is not a goal. A goal is abstract. A project is a concrete real physical thing or outcome. Get healthier is a goal. Getting your first win at the grappling industry's jiu-jitsu competition is a project. Learn marketing is a goal. Writing and publishing four newsletters this month is a project. See the difference? A project does three things that a goal cannot. One, it creates stakes. Failure becomes visible when you're building something real. Two, it creates feedback. Reality tells you what works and what doesn't. You can't get this from a textbook, and only an immature mind can deny objective feedback. Three, it creates context. Your brain now has a filter for relevance. Like we've said, when you read, watch, or listen, your subconscious flags what's relevant to the project and discards the rest. This is why you remember things that connect to your interests and hobbies. and forget the things that don't deliberate practice. So living inside the arena, it requires a project. It's non-negotiable. You cannot deliberately practice learning. You can only deliberately practice doing something specific that leads to learning and choose one project, not three, just one.
Step four is hunt, don't hoard. This is where most people get it wrong. They think learning comes before building. So they consume courses, books, podcasts, tutorials. They fill their minds with information they don't yet need for problems they haven't encountered. So flip it. Start building. Hit a wall. Then go find the answer. Then go search for information that you need to jump over the wall or to smash through it. This is how you hunt for information. You have a specific problem. You search for a specific solution. You find it. You apply it. You move on to the next problem. Think consuming eight hours of guitar theory before touching your white Fender Strat versus learning the C chord only when your favorite song demands it. Hunting is how you make forgetting information work for you and not against you. When you hunt for information that's for a very specific problem that's blocking you in the moment, like in the immediate present. It's going to be relevant. You're not going to forget it. Isolated information gets weeded away. Connected knowledge develops roots and becomes immovable.
Step five is do 30 to 90 minutes of deep work daily. Not four to eight hours like I was told in school. Not when bloody inspiration strikes and not only on weekends. 30 to 90 minutes a day, every day on one project. What's important is that you do the work daily. Physics says that when you do the work doesn't mean. Just get it done every day. 30 to 90 minutes. Let me give you an example. I write my newsletter first thing in the morning. If I have to go to work, I'll write it before work. One to two sections per day, 60 to 90 minutes. That's all I need to move the needle. But it's done every single morning. And it's how I've gotten my newsletter up to 25,000 subscribers in the last, I don't know, like 9 months now. It's only like one to two sections of my newsletter every single day. But it's done across time. Physics doesn't care about your schedule. It cares about your output. You don't deadlift 155 kg one day because you've manifested your weight to doing it. Your nervous system can handle that load because you're used to training with heavy loads across months and years. You can because you do. The same thing applies to your project. You either move the needle forward today or you didn't. There's no almost. There's no I didn't feel like it. You either did it or you didn't. The needle moves, the needle doesn't.
Step six is compress what you learn. Do not take notes on what you've learned. Compress what you already do know. Here's the difference. Notes are a record of what someone else has said, while compression is a record of what you understood. Take the Fman technique for example. Take a concept, explain it in simple language as if teaching a child. Identify the gaps where your explanation breaks down. Return to the source and simplify further. This is compression. You're not adding information, but you're removing information until only the principles remain. And to create something that has weight, it lies not in adding new parts, but in having no more parts to remove. That's how you create like a piece of writing, a song, a newsletter that feels dense. After every deep work session, spend 5 minutes compressing what you've learned into one sentence. If you can't, you didn't understand what you've just done. So, go back and try again. Learn some more.
If you're already subscribed to my newsletter and you read all of my newsletters, first of all, thank you. And second of all, you already know what I'm about to say, but here it is. Knowledge must live inside your own brain. Not in your notes, not in your second brain software. Not in a notion database, but inside of your head. I think I say that in every single newsletter that I write, and I will continue to keep saying that. You are the second brain.
Step seven is iterate against reality. The step that most people skip. They learn, they build, they compress, and then they put their creation away into the attic for storage. Do not do this. I say show your work. Publish the newsletter. Show someone the project. Put the work into the world. Show your work to the rest of the world. Reality is the only valid feedback loop. It's impossible to pass a self-education course. What you should do instead is you iterate until your output works in the real world and gets you some value in exchange for it. Don't perfect in private. Iterate in public. Every iteration will teach you so much more than a month of studying by shoving your head into a textbook because reality does not grade on a bloody curve or with a percentage based out of 10 or 100. It tells you the truth. I think this is why I love markets. Your product sells or it doesn't. Your newsletter is growing or it ain't. You can't just up an excuse as to why your high value content isn't being seen or cared about. If it's not attracting attention and if that attention is not being turned into interest, you are the problem. Take responsibility for everything and stop blaming the algorithm. It will give you more control than those who keep wanting control. But outsource it at every excuse they are able to make.
The vision gives you direction. The project gives you stakes. Hunting gives you relevance. Deep work gives you output. Compression gives you understanding. Iteration gives you truth. That is the entire self-education plan. and just make sure you do it every single day.
If you would like to download the profound self-education guide, you can do that down in the description below. It's the exact learning system or productivity system that I use to grow my newsletter to over 25,000 subscribers on my Substack in about 10 months while also working with a full-time job amongst other things. Go read the landing page. I talk about it there. You can also read the first two sections of the product completely for free over on my Substack. I also want to just say thank you to all of the people who have bought the product. The feedback has been very overwhelming in the best way possible and thank you so much and I'm really happy that's helped so many of you guys out. If you subscribe to my Substack, you'll get two printable bookmarks that you can print out to help you remember more of what you read and you will also get a secret link that will give you a discount to my Substack paid tier. If you're interested, it's all in the welcome email. Just enter your email, click subscribe, it's in the welcome email. If not, no hard feelings. Thank you for watching. I know your time and attention is very, very valuable and I think you're an absolute legend. Have a great day.