Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve finished the guide on learning anything. I sincerely hope this helps you realize your full potential. To gain a deep understanding of any skill or topic, and do it while having fun and not wasting time.

Summary

Let’s recap.

To learn anything, apply the four principles.

• Do it. When in doubt, do anything. When it’s too big, break it down into smaller actions.
• Time and time again. Practice it regularly, with breaks, over a span of at least a year.
• Feedback is crucial. Analyze what you did, so you can keep doing the good things, and try something else for the bad things. Design your environment to make quick and constant feedback easy. Involve others.
• Experiment regularly. Try something stupid, try something fun. Without experimentation, you get stuck wherever you currently are in the learning process—forever.

You can remember these—and related tips—through these properties of our brain. It grows through …

• Association: our brain is a network of neurons. Do a variation of things, desire a variety of stimuli. Connect all you learn with what you already know. Deep networks is what we’re after.
• Challenge: apply desirable difficulty. If it’s not hard, if you don’t fail, there is no growing. But not everything that’s tough is good for learning.
• Attention: whatever you give attention, grows. Both good and bad. Use it to keep your mind on positive thoughts and “failing forward”. Use it to disallow intruding thoughts of negativity or self-doubt.
• Physical Fitness: good physical health and regular movement has been proven to boost performance of your brain more than you could ever know.

Now go and become awesome!

Famous people who did it too

There are scores of successful, famous people who never got a degree in whatever they do. If we go back further in time, some didn’t even go to school at all.

Of course, this is confirmation bias. For each of them, there are certainly countless others who never succeeded, and that’s why we haven’t heard from them.

I just want to remind you that it’s possible. That you can see and hear the effect of learning this way at the highest level.

Quentin Tarantino learned filmmaking by taking existing films (physical releases back then) and splicing them into his own edited versions of them. (And by watching a lot of films, too.) He did the work and played around with the skill. Then he tried to create even more movies, and became good at it.

Agatha Christie was homeschooled. When she went to school a few years, later in her life, she found it difficult and disappointing. This is a quote of hers:

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”

Albert Einstein stopped going to school, feeling stifled by the strict learning and structure. He was told he’d never amount to anything. Then he became one of the greatest physicists ever.

Charles Dickens barely went to school. After a few years, he had to quit to work a job and provide income for his family. Then he became one of the household names of English literature.

Henry Ford mixed going to school and working at the farm for eight years. Then he left to work in a machine shop. Interested, always curious, he learned about engines … and of course invented cars and the Ford brand.

The Tech Trio of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. All dropped out of college nearly instantly because it did nothing for them. They had a dream, a vision, a skill-set they build in their own time. And they became the most powerful people in the world.

Stephen King famously was a janitor and wrote more than ten books, rejected constantly, before somebody accepted him. Now he’s perhaps the most recognizable author world-wide.

We also know the story of J.K. Rowling being rejected over and over, before someone finally gave her a chance. That’s not even the interesting part. When reading, I find the first Harry Potter book consistently the best and most tightly written of them all. Because she was forced to constantly revise and improve it, hoping to get a publishing deal, it’s much better written than the later books. That’s what feedback, iteration, and time gives you.

Lastly, I mentioned Brandon Sanderson a few times in this guide. Yes, he studied English. But he mentions on his own website that it did nothing for his writing career, except make a few connections and generally have a good time with others. He did not become a good writer through school, or talent, or sheer luck. He sold twenty million books because he has been writing book after book for twenty years. Even the most unlucky and untalented of people, are bound to improve considerably by doing that.

The final, complete example

I’ll conclude with the last examples of my own journey and my own work.

Everything I do now for a living, everything you see on this website and elsewhere, I taught myself. Nothing came from the educational system, even though that was 90% of my life and gave me several high-value degrees. Programming, graphic design, building websites, writing books, designing games, the list goes on.

For each of these topics, I applied all I taught in this guide.

The first few years, I didn’t know all these things. That’s when I applied the lessons I learned from school—doing “self study” and all that—and consequently learned nothing.

After that, the loop of failure and growth started. I spend a good 5+ years

• Building websites that went offline after a month
• Creating games that were so difficult or unclear that nobody wanted to play them
• Writing the first chapter(s) of many novels, all of them terrible in their own way
• Writing songs with lyrics that make even young adults cringe

My environment complained. Everyone told me I was crazy, or stupid, or doing useless things. My parents thought I wasted my time and, probably, didn’t really understand why I did what I did. That’s the downside of this approach. Progress isn’t easy to see or measure. It feels risky, out of control, because it is. You’re applying yourself and waiting for your brain to form the networks, the intuition, the deeper understanding.

But after that period I could finally prove the value of this approach. I could produce professional work. I could get paid for some of the things I do. (Still not much—let’s not kid ourselves, I’m an artist—but it’s something.) I could write a full book that was readable, interesting and had a professional lay-out. Showing that to friends or parents, they suddenly understand what I was doing and consider me an actual “writer”.

As I said: nobody will share your vision or your dream, until you achieve it and show them. In the end, everybody learns by themselves, because nobody can put information inside your brain from the outside.

I think it took 10 years, but that includes many years where 80+% of my time was wasted on school or other circumstances. In actuality, applying this approach for 3–4 years should’ve been enough. And that’s with four different unrelated topics I tried to learn! (Programming, Design, Writing and Music.)

Hopefully this website and this guide proves how far I’ve come. I think its design and quality of writing are quite good, but let me know if you think otherwise. That’s feedback and I love that :)

It saddens me to see so many settle into that comfortable state of doing what they were told and following the beaten path from school to job. Seeing that, knowing how they dream of learning some other skill, of writing that novel or changing their life.

I sincerely hope this guide helps prevent this sad situation for at least one person.