## What is this? The Self-Taught Life is a choose-your-own adventure class in personal scholarship. You're going to learn how to teach that one human being you know best in the world—yourself. We start with the most basic questions: What is my life about right now? And what do I want/need to learn to walk that path? Where you go from there will be up to you. Should you decide to go on this adventure, I will be your facilitator and guide as you discern your path and create unique curriculum that will serve as the map for your scholarly travels. ## Why am I making this? One important way I've found meaning, satisfaction, and achievement in my life has been through learning. After being a tech founder for many years, I've realized that part of the next chapter of my working life involves participating in and serving the learning community. This is the start of my contribution. I do not belong to any formal institution and have lived my adult life as an autodidact. I believe being self-taught is a gift and a superpower because I've experienced it. While I've dreamed many times about belonging to higher education and appreciate excellent teachers wherever I can find them, that path hasn't been mine to follow. At least not yet. We now live in a world where it is possible to create your own curriculum for learning absolutely anything, based on your personal values, preferred learning style, and any creative constraints you're able to imagine. Although I do not look forward to a time when much of what is available to read is created by artificial intelligence (and it may be difficult to know the difference), I am a curious technologist. I'm optimistic about the possibility of creating truly custom learning experiences, allowing us to read and explore life and its great thinkers more broadly, more deeply, enjoying a diverse range of thought in our sources of learning. I can imagine this leading to a world in which we encourage ourselves and others to cherish learning as one of life's great pursuits, allowing us to think more critically, better discern truth from falsehood, and truly understand points of view outside our own limited experience. That being said, The Self-Taught Life was not created with AI (it hurts my heart to imagine replacing our human voices with autocomplete), but there are some prompts you can use to help you find good learning materials on your path. As the world changes in ways we cannot yet see, I believe the antidote to fear is knowledge. (Some may say it's love and I agree with that, too; isn't true knowledge—of the self, of others—a way of both expressing and deepening our love?) When we know we can learn what we need to learn to create resilience even in a chaotic environment, we can courageously meet an uncertain future, and perhaps bring our own optimism and intelligence to bear on making that future better than it might otherwise be. But most of all, I'm creating this because learning itself is love. It is a demonstration of our love for this world, and our innate curiosity and desire for discovery. Learning is a beautiful, human act; like art, like dance, like poetry. Like gratitude itself. If you'd like to learn more about where my thinking comes from, [here are my sources](Sources.md).