Self-Education Through Books Reading about a skill feels like progress. Often it’s the most comfortable way to avoid the discomfort of actually getting better at it. There’s a trap that catches thoughtful, bookish people more than anyone, precisely because they’re thoughtful and bookish. You want to get good at something — cooking, coding, writing, … Read more
Self-Education Through Books You can get remarkably far on self-study — if you read like a student instead of a fan, and know exactly what books can’t give you. It is one of the quiet privileges of literacy that almost any field of human knowledge is, in principle, available to anyone willing to read. The … Read more
Self-Education Through Books Before search engines and note apps, thinkers kept everything worth remembering in one book. The method still works — arguably better than what replaced it. Here is a problem every reader knows intimately. You read something genuinely striking — a sentence that reframes how you see things, a fact you want … Read more
Self-Education Through Books A pile of recommended books isn’t an education. A sequence is. Here’s how to design your own. There’s a particular kind of ambition that strikes most curious people sooner or later: the desire to really learn a subject — not dabble, not skim a few articles, but understand it the way someone … Read more