Control Your Curriculum or it Will Control You
Universities get a lot of hate these days, and much of it is justified. But the biggest benefit of going to University is that we can view it as a curated content stream. Despite some inefficiencies, we can be confident that we’re covering the basics needed to develop a foundation for a given field.
Compare the rigid list of learning materials in a college course with that of the open-ended infinite deluge of content fed to us by social media algorithms. The novelty gained per unit of effort is much higher with social, but it mostly results in circular movement rather than forward movement.
The good news is that we can apply the university model to anything we wish to learn or practice. To make progress, it is essential that we curate our own content. This is the foundation for auto-didacticism.
4 Ways to Curate Your Content
Syllabi
Looking at university syllabi is one of the most effective ways of developing your own curriculum. Most syllabi are available for free by just looking up the course number for a given university course.
Prefer Depth
Most books are written for the average reader and the mildly curious. They are not written for the exceptional or the obsessed. To go deep on a topic, commit to reading difficult material. Have a preference for textbooks, academic journals, and other rigorous materials.
Look to Your Heroes
Create lists of the people in the field you admire. Build your own database of knowledge. If you are learning art or design, look through the works of Van Gogh or Paul Rand and analyze them. If you are learning programming, go through some codebases of great programmers like John Carmack or Linus Torvalds. Create a shrine if you must.
Be a Builder
Social algorithms encourage us to be passive consumers first and producers second. We have to flip that around with intention by creating project milestones for ourselves. Otherwise we slip backwards into the pool of slop that leads to the destruction of our potential.
At a minimum, do the exercises in the book. Ramanujan got good at math by doing the exercises in a math book by George Carr. Great masters of painting copied the previous masters until they got good. We must practice the fundamentals until they become innate.
By following these tips, we can start to free ourselves from the dull grip of social algorithms and tailor our learning experience toward tangible goals. As Zig Ziglar said, “You cannot make it as a wandering generality. You must become a meaningful specific.”