For the second half of 2018 I will be embarking on a new self-education project. It will be an iteration and improvement on my original post-college learning experiment graduate unschool, which I recently completed. The project will be a 6 month program of my own design where I will be learning and making progress towards six different courses. Although each course will have a goal or intention associated with it, the pursuit of each course will be more focused on exploring a topic or experimenting with a part of my life than achieving a specific outcome. For that reason this second term (Term II) of my Graduate Unschool project will conclude at the end of 2018, where I will reflect on the progress I’ve made, and reevaluate my life to see which topics I am interested in exploring further, and which I have either sufficiently explored or lost interest in. This will allow me to develop new goals and structural changes to align the project with the state of my life in early 2019. Committing to the courses for the next six months will give me enough time to explore a new (or new layer of) a field without overcommitting to it. I have also found that it is sufficient time to complete an interesting project and to notice long term changes in my life. Deadlines are also important because they prevent us from using procrastination as an excuse to over extend something. For example, I am out of practice with writing, and one way to get better at writing is to write pieces, put them out there, reflect on them, and try to improve on your next piece. If you spend too much time writing individual pieces (particularly in the early stages of exploring writing) you won’t be able to develop a tight enough feedback loop and your progress will stagnate. For that reason I have given myself a 50 minute deadline for writing these articles. I may not have had the opportunity to communicate major pieces of my message, but because writing one of these articles only takes 50 minutes, I can always just start another one to communicate the pieces I missed out on, and strive to do better in the process. This same idea applies to a six month deadline on my self education project. While it may be difficult to decide what we want to do for the rest of our careers or lives, it becomes much easier to be decisive when it is reframed as a six month experiment. I don’t know if I want to be writing Artificial Intelligence software 25 years from now, but at the end of this six months I’ll certainly know how to, and I’ll be able to decide what I want to do next. This gives me an exciting outlook on my life, because I’ll be able to do scores of potentially life changing projects which helps me feel confident that I will be able craft the life I want, even if I don’t know what I’ll want in the future. So bear with me as I struggle my way though these rough articles and imperfectly executed projects. What you are seeing is the resistance I’m facing as I challenge myself and try things that make me uncomfortable. I’ll improve, but the resistance will also increase progressively, because my goal is not to have an easier life, but to be able to bear greater loads and get more out of life.
Up next: What I’ll be studying.