The defining characteristic of a successful individual in our time is going to be the ability to learn new things by self-teaching. If you’re not already on that page, you need to flip to it.

Our health is impacted heavily by stress, and our work needs to be a source of stability. Success is simply a good life in which there isn’t too much stress from a career that doesn’t sit well or bills that cannot be paid because there is not enough money. By improving our skills regarding self-teaching, we can learn to make choices that are consistently good — that is, choices that will consistently take us closer to things we want and diminish our stress load, while also meeting our needs. We can also learn new skills quickly by harnessing the power of our own curiosity.

Have you ever been in a situation, perhaps in a classroom, where someone expected you to learn something you just didn’t care about?

What were the results like?

For many of us, the results aren’t great in this sort of situation. But, to take comic book fans as an example, many fans can recite absurdly large amounts of memorized lore. The difference is that the comic books are something people care about. Forced learning, like the sort we’re often subjected to in school, doesn’t let us pursue our real interests. It dictates the subjects we should learn to us, hoping to cover the bases and educate us in sort of a well-rounded way that may simply not speak to our interests. Many very bright people have trouble in school. So we assume we’re dumb and try to find a job where we can squeak by, maybe. Forced learning doesn’t work — see Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire if you’re skeptical of this.

The good news is nobody’s dumb. True variance in intellectual capability is actually a fairly small amount between human beings — we’re so genetically similar to each other that this almost certainly explains NOTHING in terms of the differences between success in school. Unless you have a serious handicap, the problem is most likely that you aren’t being exposed to something that you care about — or perhaps you’re not in an emotional place where it is possible to succeed.

Interest is a major predictor of academic success.

Everyone has a favorite thing, and we all know our favorite thing better than almost anyone else. This happens because we learn quickly when we care about what we’re learning. In this article, we’ll walk through the self-teaching process in a general way and develop a few principles of autodidacticism that anyone can use to improve their self-teaching skills.

Technological progress is rapidly outpacing the old standards. We all need to learn new skills and adapt, just to keep up. And frankly, it’s a tough process that hurts a lot — just admitting when we’re wrong can be very painful and difficult! Imagine being great at school and excellent at work all your life, then realizing suddenly that you need a new tool to continue to succeed in the contemporary workplace.

Disorienting, jarring, disconcerting — it isn’t a fun experience. Many of us have gone through it. You might feel like you’re not good enough, but really you’re just in a place where something is broken. Perhaps the most healthy way to think about it is to simply acknowledge that you need a minor software update to be more successful.

I’m an intriguing case in some ways, having avoided scientific coursework as a youth only to get sucked into the scientific realm as an adult. I taught philosophy classes, sold phones, and led a biotech company’s research department — quite the unique resume! But, combine a refusal to settle for less with a unique passion and you’d be surprised what can come of it all. Everyone has unique passions, so the only nudge any of us could possibly need is the grit it takes to refuse the first ten thousand “no” responses to get to the “yes” at the end of the tunnel.

Rolling with the punches
I learned a lot online. The online forums of the early ‘00s were a treasure trove of information to technically-inclined people, as engineers and professional mechanics explained their results and the relevant theory. This situation led to the rise of the person who could choose a goal, innovate the simplest and most cost-effective way to get there, and build incredible machines for remarkably small investments of time, labor, and money.

Yes, I’m arguing that you could say that my success in building over-performing loudspeaker setups for parties when I was in college and my ability to use nitrous and computer software to create winning setups that were reliable at the drag strip both stem from an underlying cause: I am an autodidact. My interest guides me, which is more blessing than curse, although it has caused the occasional problem for my GPA.

To become an autodidactic creator, whatever the interest blooms into, the trick is to give in to your inner child. You have to find out what the most interesting thing in the world is and learn to invest your time in it to yield a return.

For me, there are a few big ones: philosophy is the backbone of our worldview, health is the single greatest determinant of our happiness, and technology is our ability to manipulate the world around us. I’ve made my living in all three of these fields, and have recently begun to experiment with creating narratives that draw from all three sources. This seems to be a major breakthrough for me, but I struggled for years and even earned an advanced degree in philosophy. No doubt is left in my mind: grit is the key to eventually finding the one thing you can do better than anyone else.

Whether you want to figure out what matters to you and build a life that allows you to pursue that, or if you already have your end goal in mind, the steps to mastery of self and life are remarkably similar.

The autodidactic approach
Autodidacts don’t have anything all that special about them aside from the basic human characteristics we all have in common. They’ve only learned one real skill: they know how to find out what speaks to them. This quick tutorial won’t change your life, but if you find yourself interested in it, it may help you feel a bit more secure in the process of living the sort of life you choose for yourself.

If you’re reading this for the tutorial, you likely already have an idea of what you’d like to teach yourself — but if not, don’t worry. You can always come back to the article when you’ve answered that question. You can also think through multiple different possibilities and compare the results you get if you like.

First, investigate the direction you’ve chosen (or gauge your interest in different directions by doing this process for a few things) with these two questions:

• What’s the most interesting thing in the world to you right now?

• Why is that the case?

You’ll want to put some thought into the first question to save yourself time on the second one. It may be that there’s some small problem that’s caught your attention and you’d be better served by focusing on other areas. That’s a part of managing your time. But if you find that your view seems justified upon investigation, you’ll want to read on.

Now that you’ve identified the subject of your study, you’ll need to lay out your knowledge to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses relative to it:

Explain the basics to yourself by writing a short essay or speaking aloud into a recorder app.
Review your creation. How could it be more thorough? Are there serious problems or areas where you don’t have the knowledge you need to answer open questions?
Having identified a goal, the basic concept here is simply to define a path that will lead you to completion of that goal. When you’ve determined what it is that’s keeping you from being where you want to be, you’ll be able to divide the task up into smaller chunks and this will help you figure out how to solve each problem along the way. In some cases, you may not be able to get where you want to be due to financial or other concerns that are not easily overcome. In this case, you may want to choose a new goal.

The key process here is self-critique. You want to use critical thought to refine your answers until you’re completely satisfied with them — then forget about it, wait a month, and review them again. More questions will come in handy during this part of the process:

• What’s changed?

• What’s the same?

• How close do you actually feel to having some tangible goal that will lead somewhere you want to go?

We all have a lot to learn by stating our views, or essentially creating how-to guides that explain our thought process. The next trick, once you’ve got a handle on the general way you want to go, is to make it social.

Other people have different thoughts than we do, and if we let them help us refine our views, we end up stronger as a result. This involves finding like-minded people and working with them to identify differences between your views on relevant subject matter, then reconcile it all by resolving any contradictions.

Other benefits
You’ll also find that opportunities to work with people in your network may arise from time to time. They may not all be a perfect fit, but what your task has been up to this point is to work out which way to go — so you won’t have much trouble choosing unless you get a great set of options, and that’s a problem you want to have, if you have to have one!

You’d be surprised where this process can take you. Some people master crafts, others become famous. Others are just entertained and engaged in life. For me, there has been a sort of ascent as I developed my ability to explain various concepts at a remarkably high level. The problems that let you know you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge always push you to expand that knowledge base, and in so doing you may eventually find yourself reading scientific papers and trying to create novel explanations of things that matter to you. When you’re able to create such a thing and provide strong evidence for it, you’ll be able to earn a living by doing it — and that’s the dream!

None of this is to say it is easy to become an autodidact. The need for others to share your interest is somewhat constrictive at times as well. And society recognizes expertise over logical explanations because there are so many unknowns wherever new research is ongoing, so be sure to factor any necessary credentials into your planning.

I’ve recently finished up a cellular and molecular biology course which included the mechanisms by which CRISPR Cas9 is able to be used to modify DNA, for example, and much of the course content was not known last time I went through my basic science classes back in 2002 or thereabouts. I am glad I’ve had the opportunity to return for these classes, because I will be much better prepared for medical school with a fresh grasp of all of the material.

Staying on top of your field, even if you’re an expert when you start out, will be a lifelong journey whether you’re in medicine, technology, or “pure” science, including the liberal arts— and keeping up with these subjects will make you happier and healthier and more financially fit even if you do something else for work.

My path: an example
I started off as an economics major when I first enrolled in college. Finding the subject matter tedious and irrelevant (Assume perfect information? You’ve got to be kidding me!), I made my way to the political science department and then began to study philosophy. My interest in the “big questions” such as free will and theology led me to a deeper level of engagement with the subject matter of my courses, which elevated my GPA in turn.

Upon graduation, I had a plan: law school. But I became ill with anxiety when taking the LSAT, and took that as a sign. I threw my plan away and worked retail for a few years, where I sold cell phones and learned about what made them tick. This was 2010, and the new smartphones were on the rise. I made a lot of money but I also found myself deeply interested in the various components and operating systems available, which led me to join the community at XDA Developers and could have resulted in a career as a developer if I hadn’t made the mistake of moving to Dallas for a promotion. To escape this misdeed and the misery that came along with it, I went back to school for a master’s in philosophy.

The plan in getting my MA started off as the Ph.D track, but funding cuts and general frailty in the philosophical discipline cut me off there. I went back to my tech roots after teaching for a year. I worked for Tesla and Keller Williams and became convinced I could build a successful company, so I started Paradigm Automation in 2017 and had my first close brush with success. In 2018, I was asked to help start a new company called Zeta Biolongevity with the basic goal of bringing a new kind of supplement to the market and getting it FDA approved to treat diseases such as kidney disease.

The effort broke down when we had difficulty agreeing upon which route to take in the lab, and I had to eat a lot of paste because my CEO didn’t believe I was right. So he listened to our biochemist and our major investors, and I got to learn about how important qualifications are and why. The short answer there is that people trust letters. And experts. So a home-grown master of a given subject can be as good as you like, but investors and executives (even scientifically-inclined ones!) won’t follow your logic. They’ll ask questions sometimes, but they’re people who do not understand that certainty doesn’t exist. They don’t want to help solve the hard problems involved in building a technological product, they want to pay a lot of money to someone who will do that for them and make it look easy.

That isn’t what happened at Zeta. We hired a CRISPR expert who schmoozed our leadership into doing a bunch of low-hanging-fruit experiments and trying to raise more money without doing anything that took us closer to our goals as a company. I remember the moment I knew I was leaving: our main investor, who I honestly liked a lot for his hands-on and extremely helpful role most of the time, listened to my plan to prove we could manipulate the mechanism in two weeks. He didn’t seem to understand. He just shot me a blank look and said “that’s five or six years out.”

That’s five or six years out.

I was dumbfounded. I’d just told him how to get it done in two weeks. I reasoned that he didn’t want to risk the project failing, and gave him the benefit of the doubt, but we had to do something and they chose to let the Ph.D lead. Her projects all failed, and I left the company to attend medical school so the next group of investors I work on a project with will allow me to actually do what I do best and innovate.

There have been a lot of difficult emotions on the journey. It has been a painful process, learning all these hard lessons about human nature and what it takes to succeed in the business of science.

However, I have many great reasons to believe that success is just around the corner. Not just for me, personally, but for all of the online autodidacts who are willing to take the risks involved in figuring out what to do and doing it well.

Blockchain technology is taking off. Soon, it will be easier than ever to raise money for new ventures. It will also be more important for investors, executives, and consumers to understand the core of this technology than ever before. Social networks will involve more and more of the fundamentals of blockchain: un-deletable posts, easy sharing of value both in terms of knowledge and in terms of currency, and support for increasingly obscure interests.

That’s why it’s going to be so important to be able to decide what to learn and learn it — opportunity will increasingly be governed by knowledge. For those who are willing to accept this challenge, the future holds a great deal of promise despite the threats of COVID-19 and climate change and the Doomsday Clock. We just have to take it one step at a time until we get where we want to be.