How could the novel’s protagonist, Martin Eden, go from uneducated sailor to literary phenom and public intellectual in just three years of self-directed study? It was unrealistic.

Jack London’s response? The verbal equivalent of an eye roll:

“Critics have complained about the swift education one of my characters, Martin Eden, achieved. In three years, from a sailor with a common school education, I made a successful writer of him. The critics say this is impossible. Yet I was Martin Eden.” ¹

Indeed, the two had much in common.

They were both intense, obsessive, and starving for knowledge and literary success. And they both acquired an education and taught themselves the craft of writing by “studying immensely and intensely”¹ for three years, outside of any formal program.

Whether Jack London had actually mastered the craft by the time he earned a living from it is up for debate. It depends on your definition of mastery (can one ever really master an art?).

But we can all agree that he certainly learned enough about life and craft to write timeless stories and achieve professional success.

I’ve always been fascinated by the speed and intensity of this self-directed apprenticeship, as well as his overall intellectual growth during that short period.

Today, in this month’s issue of Thinkers, I want to explore how he did it.

Obviously, London was gifted with a work ethic that some might call superhuman, and he had spent a fair amount of time reading as a teeanger.

But there’s more to it than that.

He also studied his craft intelligently, using effective learning and practice techniques that we can all steal and apply to our own self-directed apprenticeships, no matter our chosen craft.

Before I get into the techniques you can steal, I need to quickly recap his self-education.

Jack London’s Rapid & Intense Self-Education

At 19, Jack London decided to make a living from his mind, not his back. He was fed up with industrial-era labor and being a “work beast”, and couldn’t handle mundane jobs like working at a cannery for 16 hours per day.

But, before that transition was possible, his mind required sharpening. To learn the craft of writing and fill his mind with knowledge, he launched himself into a program of intensive self-directed learning.

Over the next three years, London would educate himself in various subjects, from philosophy and sociology to science and literature. In his memoir, John Barleycorn, he describes his obsession with reading during this period: “My waking hours, and most of the hours I should have used for sleep, were spent with the books.” ¹

He would also learn the craft of writing, “studying the writers who succeeded to find out how they succeeded,” and practicing the artform like a man possessed, piling up rejection slips, until one day, his time spent hunched over the books and the typewriter paid off.

In just three years of intense focus, sometimes pulling 19-hour days, Jack London had transformed himself from a common-school-educated sailor into a well-read literary author who could effectively debate politics, talk philosophy, and write timeless, insightful works of fiction and non-fiction.

So how did he pull it off?

8 Self-Study Tactics Jack London Used to Educate Himself and Learn his Craft

I’ve read and re-read the story of Jack London’s self-education across several biographies, autobiographical novels, and articles.

And from his story, I’ve discovered eight self-study tactics responsible for his quick mastery of the fundamentals of his craft.

Below, I’ll share them with you so you can study like Jack London—within reason and build your own self-directed apprenticeship, whether that’s to master writing or something else like carpentry, painting, day trading, or rock climbing.

Maybe not in three years, but in less time than you could without proper techniques.

A secondary goal is to share inspiring highlights of London’s story with you so that you don’t let a lack of formal training prevent you from going after your dreams of expertise with the tenacity of an Alaskan sled-dog.

Because a life of pursuing mastery is a life of endless meaning, growth, and adventure.

1. Go Through a Sampling Period

If you’re going to master something, choosing what to master is an obious and critical step.

But, with so many interests, how do you select one area of focus?

Even Jack London struggled with this decision. When he began his mission to make a living from his mind, he was between four key interests: music, poetry, non-fiction writing, and fiction writing.

To choose between them, he did not go into the desert and trip shrooms until the answer revealed itself to him in the form of a pattern in the clouds. Instead, he tried them out:

“I had four preferences: first, music; second, poetry; third, the writing of philosophic, economic, and political essays; and, fourth, and last, and least, fiction writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible, settled down in my bedroom, and tackled my second, third and fourth choices simultaneously. Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there a creative fever such as mine from which the patient escaped fatal results. The way I worked was enough to soften my brain and send me to a mad-house. I wrote, I wrote everything—ponderous essays, scientific and sociological, short stories, humorous verse, verse of all sorts from triolets and sonnets to blank verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spenserian stanzas. On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day. At times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate out-pouring in order to eat.” ¹

Whether he knew it or not, Jack London was engaging in a sampling period.

In the book Range, David Epstein shows that most world-class performers went through a similar period, where they explored diverse interests before committing to specializing in a skill that best aligned with their natural interests and talents, while presenting the most upside.

The result is cross-training as well as the natural testing of potential life paths. Through this process, Jack London located his greatest opportunity and talent, fiction writing, and doubled down on mastering it.

At 24, when I first committed to becoming a writer, I also wrote widely as well. I hammered out short stories, fantasy, horror, personal essays, social criticism essays, travel blogs, unfinished novels, Onion-style comedic news stories, and B2B blog posts.

This helped me identify where my strengths and natural inclinations were: 1) writing actionable articles and personal essays about self-education, 2) writing fiction that is humorous yet serious.

Now, I am committing to mastering these types of writing, which makes my life of learning a whole lot easier.

By narrowing my focus, I’m able to create a self-directed apprenticeship that is specifically designed for teaching myself specific sub-skills, rather than trying to learn everything that has to do with writing—which is a hell of a lot.

Whatever you’re learning, take some time to play with different skills and styles. Pay attention to which you prefer and which you do the best at. Then, go all in. Explore, then exploit.

2. Make friends with libraries and bookstores

When Jack London returned home at age 19, after a brief stint in jail for vagrancy, he began hustling to sharpen his mind..

First, he enrolled in high school, returning to formal education for the first time in five years. But it was soon obvious that he was not well-suited for classroom-style learning.

Like many of the readers of Knowledge Lust, London was an autodidact at heart.

A quick study, the classroom pace slowed him down. Self-directed, he felt his curiosity stymied by preset curricula.

London’s preferred source of learning was the Oakland library, primarily through the reading of great books.

In a personal essay titled What Life Means to Me, Jack London describes his reading life during this period:

“Then began a frantic pursuit of knowledge. I returned to California and opened the books…Other greater minds, before I was born, had worked out all that I thought, and a vast deal more.”

During this period, alongside this program of self-directed reading, London also prepared for entrance exams into UC Berkeley.

He crammed four years of high school education into one semester, passed the test, and then attended college for just one semester. He had to leave due to financial troubles.

But dropping out did not slow his forward momentum. He continued studying on his own—after all, self-study was his more natural mode of learning:

“I had learned enough from the books to realize that I had only touched the hem of knowledge’s garment. I still lived on the heights. My waking hours, and most of the hours I should have used for sleep, were spent with the books.” ²

We can all get a world-class education from a well-stocked library. Colleges and schools do not have a monopoly on the methods of inserting mental habits, knowledge, and wisdom into our minds.

The key is to read good books, to think over the material, and to apply what you’ve learned. As Jack London and many other great thinkers have proven, one can go far with the 3-part method of read-think-create.

3. Engage in Imitation Practice

In 1897, Jack London arrived in Alaska to search for gold—a pipedream any aspiring artist can understand. He had failed in his first attempt to make it as a writer. Rejection slips had piled up, while his cash had disappeared.

When he returned home a year later, with scurvy and no gold, he re-established his commitment to his dream. This time, he would make a living from his words. He was full of inspiring experiences to turn into fictional stories.

But to do so, he would need a deeper understanding of craft. As he wrote, day after day, he also studied the great writers he looked up to, especially Rudyard Kipling, going so far as copying their writing out by hand.“Determined to acquire Kipling’s style,” Kershaw writes, “Jack copied story after story until he felt Kipling’s cadences were his own.” ³

This is known as copywork, and it’s been used by such writers as Ben Franklin and Hunter S. Thompson to internalize the style and rhythm of great writing.

But copywork is not just for writers. Many craftspeople, from artists and musicians to designers and even athletes, can use this method to learn their vocation.

• Mozart “copied an entire symphony by Michael Haydn for study purposes.”⁴

• Kobe Bryant studied a gametape of Michael Jordan and then tried out his fadeaways on the court.

• New sales reps shadow the veterans and end up imitating their mannerisms and talk tracks.

We are imitative creatures. Monkey see monkey do.

Leverage that natural imitative tendency to hone your craft.

4. Analyze Effects & Techniques of Masterworks

If copywork helped him unconsciously learn craft, analysis helped him consciously divine the inner workings of effective writing.

Through close reading, Jack London put a magnifying glass over his favorite works, as well as the short stories that were getting published in the magazines, and tried to dig out how the authors achieved certain effects.

London describes this learning strategy in his autobiographical novel, Martin Eden:

“Reading the works of men who had arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by which they had been achieved — the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these he made lists for study. He did not ape. He sought principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly.” ⁵

Whenever I am trying to improve my writing, I do what Jack London did.

I find an author who pulled off what I am trying to achieve. Then I study their writing with an eye for how to improve my own, paying special attention to the choices they made and the techniques they deployed.

Whatever you are trying to learn, finding people who do it better than you and studying them to get into their heads is one of the best ways to progress towards mastery.

Closely observe a master do the skill, identify what they did well, and then emulate them.

Heed Jack London’s advice:

“Study the tricks of the writers [or masters of your craft] who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself.” ⁶

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5. Build a Library of Technical Excellence

Jack London regularly collected passages of his favorite writing for creative inspiration, study, and emulation.

He describes this habit in his autobiographical novel, Martin Eden:

“In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it for himself. He was not content with the fair face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory…and, having dissected, and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.” ⁵

Whatever skill you’re trying to learn, consider building your own technical library. Collect exemplary works and review them often. If you regularly immerse yourself in greatness, it will be hard not to create greatness.

And when you’re feeling uninspired, you can swipe through your collection to generate new ideas, find solutions to your creative problem, and fill you with feelings of reverence for the craft.

Here are some examples of technical libraries:

• A copywriter’s swipe file of effective ad copy, email copy, and offers.

• An interior designer’s photo album of their favorite living rooms.

• A basketball player’s game tape of their favorite plays and moves.

• A carpenter or architect’s blueprints and photos of beautiful houses, furniture, etc.,

Remember: what goes in, comes out.

6. Create a Practice Routine

In addition to his close reading and copywork, Jack London also wrote like mad.

Sick of his tendency for indiscipline, he looked again to his literary hero for guidance, borrowing Kipling’s work ethic.

Jack London “established a routine, which was to last a lifetime, of writing a thousand words per day [aside from Sunday]. If he fell behind his daily quota, he compensated the following morning.” ³

London is far from the only artist to take such an assembly-line approach to their process. As the novelist Gustave Flaubert once wrote: “be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work”.

Routines don’t need to be big and dramatic to make an impact. Over the long-term, all the work, experience, mistakes, and learning add up to something magnificent—intuitive understanding and practical skill.

For Jack London, the hours of practice added up to publication. At age 23, after receiving hundreds of rejections, he finally achieved his goal of selling enough stories to make a living as a writer.

The success rolled in like a tidal wave.

First, an editor accepted a story, To The Man on Trail, a Christmas story based on his time up North.

Soon afterwards, publishers were roaring for a piece of the man from the Klondike. Houghton Miller assigned him a series of short stories about his time in Alaska. It would be called Son of the Wolf, and it would mark the beginning of his literary career.

After three years of “studying immensely and intensely”, Jack had done it. He had turned himself into an insightful, talented author.

Pro Tip: If you want to learn more about how to practice your craft, check out the book Peak, by Anders Ericsson, which goes over deliberate practice—purposive practice that forces you out of your comfort zone and isolates sub-skills.

7. Develop a “Philosophy of Life” through broad study

In a letter to aspiring writers (that could’ve been written to any creative), Jack London harps on the importance of developing a philosophy of life—that is, a unique POV, composed of ideas, beliefs, and experiences, through which to interpret the world.

“Every permanently successful writer has possessed this philosophy.” ⁷

He elaborates on why this unique philosophy matters as a unifying force for your otherwise scattered thoughts and learnings:

“If your knowledge is sparse or unsystematized, how can your words be broad or logical? And without the strong central thread or a working philosophy, how can you make order out of chaos? How can your foresight and insight be clear? How can you have a quantitative and qualitative perception of the relative importance of every scrap of knowledge you possess? And without all this how can you possibly be yourself? How can you have something fresh for the jaded care of the world?” ⁷

To create his own philosophy of life, Jack London read across many subjects: philosophy, literature, psychology, evolutionary biology, and social theory.

This wide reading, alongside diverse experience, furnished him with a point of view that would guide his craftsman’s hand and help him create unique and mesmerizing creations that had his personal signature.

As biographer Alex Kershaw writes, “He was forever exploring new ideas, hungry to extend his knowledge in an astonishing variety of fields.”

He recommends that other aspiring creatives use this same approach of broad study to form their unique POV, while challenging the faulty yet commonly held belief that one should only study subjects directly related to their line of work.

“The only way of gaining this philosophy is by seeking it, by drawing the materials which go to compose it from the knowledge and culture of the world…What do you know of history, biology, evolution, ethics, and the thousand and one branches of knowledge? “But,” you object, “I fail to see how such things can aid me in the writing of a romance or a poem.” Ah, but they will—not so much directly as by subtle reaction. They broaden your thought, lengthen out your vistas, drive back the bounds of the field in which you work. They give you your philosophy, which is like unto no other man’s philosophy, force you to original thought.” ⁷

So go wide.

Follow your curiosity.

Read books across various fields. Ponder big questions. Have wild experiences. And build the filter through which you’ll transform raw material into unique creations that have your mark.

8. Don’t overdo it; don’t forget to live

Jack London’s commitment to self-education is inspiring, but it’s also a cautionary tale.

In his late thirties, Jack was burnt out and suffering psychologically.

He smoked and drank heavily. To sleep, he relied on various painkillers, from good old morphine to his beloved opium, which he injected into his body with hypodermic needles, allowing his frenetic, overworked brain to rest, while destroying his kidneys in the process. At just 40 years of age, he would die from kidney failure.

We do not want to end up like Jack London: exhausted, depressed, and numbing oneself with extraneous drugs.

We do not want to spend 19 hours per day working or studying—it’s inhuman. And it’s how we become burnt out, jaded, and sick.

We must live life, not just think and read about it. Otherwise, we run the risk of ending up jaded and cynical, like Jack London’s erudite sea captain Wolf Larsen in The Sea Wolf.

In the novel, the protagonist, a literary critic, is talking with Wolf Larsen about an illiterate seal hunter. The critic asks Wolf if the man has ever philosophized about life.

“No,” Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness. “And he is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy living it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the books.” ⁸

To avoid this fate of hating our intellectual life, we must not overburden our minds. Perhaps that’s why many literature students at Oxford report quitting reading for years after graduation. It became chorified through overwork.

Life is more than just ideas, stories, and thoughts. Attend to the mental world. Pursue mastery of a craft. But take the slow and steady path.

And keep the hours reasonable so that you may let your mind recover, and so that you may enjoy the other fulfilling aspects of life, such as family, friends, and adventure.

After all, it wasn’t just self-directed study, hardheaded discipline, and consistent practice that helped Jack London sell his stories. The material for them, especially those that take place in Alaska, he got from living an interesting life.

Conclusion: The Illusion That Holds Back Autodidacts

Today, I visited the Thomas Edison museum in West Orange, New Jersey.

Like Jack London, the famous inventor and scientist, was also self-taught, learning what he knew from reading, experimentation, and his peers.

In the world of credentials, formal programs, and MFAs, it’s hard for people to believe they can teach themselves new crafts without teachers and training.

But in most cases, that’s a fallacy, no doubt strengthened by the massive marketing budgets of university programs.

You study history and look back on all these great thinkers, inventors, writers, and creatives, and notice how many of them were self-taught.

They had a goal, and they figured out how to do it. They read. They practiced. They made mistakes. They emulated other great craftspeople. And slowly, they caught on.

If there’s one thing to take away from Jack London’s story, it’s The Philosophy of Dig—the idea that through enough hard work and study, one can find success in a given field.

I’ll let him promote it, since he writes with more force than I do:

“A strong will can accomplish anything…There is no such thing as inspiration and very little genius. Dig, blooming under opportunity, results in what appears to be the former, and certainly makes possible the development of what original modicum of the latter one may possess. Dig is a wonderful thing, and will move more mountains than faith ever dreamed of. In fact, Dig should be the legitimate father of all self-faith.”

So pick a skill. And get digging. Craft your own self-directed apprenticeship and start learning. Engage in deliberate practice on a daily basis.

You control how far you’ll be able to go.

Thank you for reading!

Please, in the comments, let me know if you like the Thinkers series. It takes me a while to research and write these biographical essays, so I want to make sure they’re worth doing!

And if you are interested in learning more about Jack London’s life, check out the sources below.

I highly recommend reading and ’s The Life of Jack London as a Case Study in the Power and Perils of Thumos—it was my first real intro to Jack London’s life and a huge source of inspiration and guidance for me as a 24-year-old who wasn’t sure what to do with his life.

Happy studying!

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Sources

1. John Barleycorn, by Jack London

2. What Life Means to Me by Jack London

3. Jack London: A Life, by Alex Kershaw

4. Good composers borrow, great ones steal by Georg Predota

5. Martin Eden, by Jack London

6. Getting into Print by Jack London

7. On the Writer’s Philosophy of Life by Jack London

8. The Sea Wolf, by Jack London

9. The Life of Jack London as a Case Study in the Power and Perils of Thumos, Brett & Kate McKay

The injection of novelty seems to create a fresh burst of curiosity and attention, and I can read for longer periods than if I just stuck to one book in a single session.

In case you missed it, here’s a quick refresher on the technique:

1. Bring 3 books (or reading materials) to one sitting.

2. Start with one book.

3. Read until your focus or curiosity begins to fade.

4. Then switch to a completely different book—new subject, new genre, new author—and so on.

Since writing that article, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to pick 3 books for these sessions that work well together to produce specific intellectual and emotional results, like enhanced creativity or a deeper appreciation of a classic work.

While you can simply bring whatever three books you’re currently reading to your book scroll sessions, you might be a synergy-junkie like me and want to invest more intention into your selection of books.

This article will help you do that!

Today, I’m sharing eight subject/genre pairings that work especially well for book scroll sessions. We’ll call them “book stacks” for short.

There’s The Literary Scholar Stack, The Interdisciplinary Deep Dive Stack, The Down-Ramp Stack, and others. I’ll explain each and give 3-book examples to help you build your own.

Each stack idea caters to a specific type of reader and serves particular learning goals, whether that’s to become a more creative writer, a deeper reader of classic literature, or an expert with nuanced opinions on a specific topic.

Alright.

Let’s make reading books an addicting, nutritious, and well-balanced intellectual feast:

1. The Mind, Heart, Hand Stack

This stack pairs an analytical book, a narrative book, and a personal development/craft/skill-acquisition book.

For example:

1. 30 minutes reading a book about political theory

2. 30 minutes reading a classic novel

3. 20 minutes reading a book about the art of communication

This way, in one sitting, you cover multiple bases of a well-rounded self-education. You think. You feel. You learn a practical skill.

You challenge your mind and acquire knowledge. You feed your imagination and strengthen the right hemisphere of your brain. And you learn some practical tips for performing at a higher level in some important field, craft, or skill.

2. The Interdisciplinary Deep Dive Stack

Read more

New experiences.

New sensations.

New information.

That’s why your phone is so addictive.

It’s why you can’t stop scrolling on social media, despite feeling like crap while doing it.

A phone offers an endless stream of novelty, and that stream catches us and sweeps us away, time and time again.

What if we created a healthier stream of high-quality information?

One that made us smarter and more at peace instead of stupider, overstimulated, and anxious?

What if we were to take that novelty-seeking tendency of the brain and use it to addict us to a healthier habit—something we actually feel good about doing?

Like reading books.

Today, I’ll briefly cover a technique that does just that.

You’ll learn:

• What book scrolling is

• 4 best practices for scrolling books

• 1 way it boosts your creativity

Book Scrolling: What is it?

I can sit down and read most books for about 45 minutes before I start to lose focus and mental energy—especially more difficult ones like history, philosophy, or classic texts.

I start concentrated and energized, but those feelings gradually degrade over the session. They’re often replaced with grogginess and restlessness.

Even if I take a 5-minute break, the second reading session with that same book is never as good or as long as the first.

Now, what happens when I introduce another book from a different genre into the rotation?

What if, after the 45-minute session with history, I now switch to reading literature, personal development, or psychology, just like swiping my thumb down on my YouTube shorts feed?

When I switch genres, I get a new burst of curiosity, energy, and concentration that enables me to read for another 30-40 minutes, with the same level of focus and curiosity I had when starting the first book.

That second reading session feels effortless compared to how it would’ve felt if I hadn’t switched books.

That’s book scrolling in a nutshell.

But here’s a quick definition:

Book scrolling is the act of reading multiple books from different genres in one sitting, cycling between them when your brain starts to lose focus or tire out. It’s a technique to help you read in an engaged fashion for longer. It boosts your reading stamina so you can read more books.

How to book scroll (4 best practices)

Book scrolling is pretty explanatory.

But here are 4 tips for making it as addicting and satisfying as your social media feed (alright, almost as addicting):

1. Bring 3 books, all different genres or subjects, to a reading session: The change in genre makes the novelty-seeking part of your brain happy. Right now, my three genres are typically classic literature, a book on my Autodidactism Mastery Subject Reading Plan, and an opinion essay.

2. Switch when your brain starts to rebel: When your mind starts to feel foggy, restless, or unfocused, then it’s time to scroll. Obviously, know why your brain wants to switch. If you’re eager to scroll simply because the material is difficult to understand, stick with it—that’s how you develop your mind.

3. Aim for 25-minute sessions per book, and increase over time: This will help you slowly build up your attention span and ability to sit comfortably in the same information pool for a prolonged period of time.

4. Consider taking 5-minute breaks in between: A quick break doing a mindless task like walking around your block or lying in bed on your back will give you time to think about and digest what you just read. It’ll also just let your brain recover a bit. I will say, I’m often so excited to read the next book—to scroll!—that I skip the break.

A Possible Customization: If you are engaging in other self-directed learning practices, like commonplacing or listening to lectures, you might use these instead of introducing another book. The key is to switch things up when you get bored!

Conclusion: The Unexpected Benefit

Book scrolling boosts your reading stamina and helps you read more as a result.

But it has an added benefit to your creative and intellectual life as well.

By exposing you to several different ideas, subjects, and authors in one sitting, book scrolling creates opportunities for original creative association.

You increase your ability to find interesting connections between unrelated topics and build new ideas, stories, or thoughts on top of those connections.

Book scrolling is not dissimilar to Ray Bradbury’s advice to new writers. He told them to read 1 essay, 1 short story, and 1 poem every night before bed.

In the wise words of the statesman of Science Fiction:

“What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields.”

Broad self-study is one of the keys to originality.

So start filling your head.

Start scrolling more books and fewer short-form videos.

Your mind will be happier and sharper for it.

If you like this idea, check out my article on 8 book stack ideas for your next book scrolling session.

• My questions for you:

  • What 3 genres are you going to try book scrolling with?

  • Do you already do something similar to this technique?

But it was senior year, and like many of my classmates, I was suffering from a debilitating case of senioritis. So I coasted, and nothing really stuck.

A decade later, for whatever reason, my interest in the subject re-emerged.

Maybe it was all the Lord of the Rings I had been watching? Maybe it was struggling through historical or political conversations with my historically informed friend?

Maybe it was the fact that my grandmother, a serious history buff, had recently passed away, and this was my way of grieving and reconnecting with her?

Whatever the cause, over the last four years, I’ve been reading a fair amount of European history.

Recently, I embarked on a DIY course on World War 1, an experience which provided me with plenty of intellectual stimulation, and a fair bit of horror.

Today, I want to help others self-study this fascinating subject.

This self-education roadmap is how I’d structure my studies if I were to approach studying European History from scratch. It’s an 8-step process for learning the subject on your own, outside of school.

Whether you want to become a history buff, teach the subject, write historical essays, fill gaps in your formal education, talk more persuasively about current events, or just feel better about your modern-day predicaments by comparing them to the far more inconvenient frustrations of the past (like the black plague), following this roadmap will give you the foundation to achieve those aims.

Even though the roadmap is designed to be followed sequentially, feel free to hop around and adapt it to your needs and interests. It’s your education, after all. There’s no single best way to self-study a new subject.

Why Study European History?

European history is dramatic.

It’s full of horrific wars, heartbreaking catastrophes, and magnificent revolutions that have created the world we know today.

If you live in the West, studying European history is studying yourself. After all, your worldview, culture, domestic habits, social structures, and public life are a result of things that happened a long time ago.

If you are outside the West, studying the subject is also beneficial to your self-understanding, since Europe has had such a strong influence on other parts of the world, for better or worse...

Why else should you devote time to studying European history?

Here are the reasons I find most persuasive:

• Gain a better understanding of the present: History provides the context for understanding today’s economic trends, social dynamics, and political structures.

• Become enlightened, not informed on current events: In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler makes the distinction between being informed and enlightened on any given issue. Being informed means accumulating facts. You know what happened, when, and where. But you can’t see beyond the current discussions of the issue, like those on TV or social media. When you are enlightened, you grasp the deeper meaning. You have insight into why it happened, how it connects/compares to other events, and the potential implications. The historical context you get from studying history facilitates this deeper understanding.

• Improve your ability to think about and debate contemporary issues: Churchill once said, “A good knowledge of history is a quiver full of arrows in debates.” The enlightened view discussed above makes you a more adept writer and speaker on whatever current event, political issue, or social trend you’re discussing. James Madison, the most influential person at the Constitutional Convention, got that way by studying ancient history.

• Draw lessons from the laboratory of human experience: You witness leaders and people with influence make decisions and see the consequences unfold in real-time. You live vicariously through them and gain experience through reading, which helps you make wiser choices in your own life.

• Find role models and anti-role models: Some of my biggest role models first appeared to me in history books, including Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln. You get to stand on the shoulders of giants, see how they lived and worked, and emulate them.

• Learn multiple subjects at once: To set the scene and explore all causes and effects, a single history book often touches upon economics, politics, culture, art, philosophy, and other fields of inquiry. Even when you’re reading a history book that is specifically political history or cultural history, it’s still interdisciplinary. Someone writing about ancient Rome’s politics, for example, likely has to bring up facts about its economy and social structure to make their core argument.

• Better understand classics of European literature and philosophy: If you like reading classic novels like Middlemarch or great works of philosophy like Fear and Trembling, gaining historical context about the periods in which they were written will help you appreciate them more deeply and catch more references.

The last reason? Because it’s fun!

There are few better escapes than a trip back in time—as long as you don’t actually have to live there (although, some of them did drink beer for breakfast, soooooo).

What you’ll learn in this self-education roadmap

Today, you’ll learn:

• The 8-step plan to build a foundational self-education in European History

• Recommendations for history books and online courses (organized into a sequential learning path for autodidacts)

• Tips for effectively reading history books

• How to responsibly skim a history book (according to a Historian)

• How to organize your self-directed studies after completing the roadmap

• The best ways to find history books worth reading

• 5 best practices for self-studying history

Alright, let’s get into it:

1. Watch Crash Course European History for an Introduction

Crash Course is one of my favorite resources for getting a broad introduction to the field I’m learning about.

They have an entertaining European History course that starts in medieval Europe. Give it a watch to get a sense of the timeline and bring the most significant events into your awareness.

This will prime your mind for future study and provide scaffolding on which to hang new information, thereby boosting understanding and retention.

The series does have one major flaw.

The producers seem to have passed over a few key events, mainly the rise of Sauron and the battle of Minas Tirith. But I guess Tolkien was right when he wrote: “History became legend. Legend became myth”.

No but seriously, the series is edutainment at its best. The creator is knowledgable and the content fun to consume and relatively sophisticated, but critics do say he tends to prioritize the narrative over historical nuance.

As with any historical content you consume, consider the creator or historian’s biases and use your critical thinking skills!

Pro Tip: There are also so many fantastic European History documentaries on YouTube, like the one I was watching about The Rise of Napoleon.

2. Read a Few Modern, Popular European History Books

Now that you have a mental map of European history, consider picking a topic of interest and reading a history book about it.

Maybe you find yourself mysteriously drawn to beheadings and executions and therefore want to learn more about the French Revolution:

I specify contemporary books (written in the last 50 years) because the language in these books will likely be more similar to the style you’re used to reading.

Something written in the 16th century by a celibate monk might be hard-going, and when you’re first breaking into a subject, you don’t want a book’s difficulty to slow you down and bounce you out of the self-education project. I abandoned a project a while back for this very reason—I got stuck on Herodotus’s Histories and gave up.

I specify "popular" (commercially popular, that is) because popularity is a good sign that these books have been written for people with no specialized knowledge of the topic covered. Any curious, intelligent reader can read them with profit.

Obviously, you can read books written for specialists too. I know that when I’m starting in a new subject, I want to reduce friction to get the ball moving and start building up curiosity that I can later unleash on more difficult texts.

Now for some recommendations...

One of my favorite modern classics is A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman.

Both commercially successful and respected by scholars, the book covers the black death, chivalry, the Hundred Years’ War, and other nasty events, while also tracing the life of a French knight who, if there is an afterlife, is probably pretty psyched about his recent rise in celebrity.

Tuchman is one of the best non-fiction writers I’ve ever encountered, and she did a great job of making me incredibly grateful that I wasn’t born in 14th-century France.

If you like cultural history, I enjoyed From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present.

It introduces you to so many key thinkers, artists, and influential figures who have contributed to Western culture, writing, science, politics, and art.

You may also want to start with a biography, as these books tend to follow a narrative structure and are easier to stick with than a history book that centers on arguments—just my two cents.

If you are interested in both World War 1 and literature, I have to mention Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

Fussell, a literary and cultural historian, uses firsthand accounts from soldiers, such as autobiographies and poems, to demonstrate how trench warfare forever changed the way English people perceived the world.

It’s a fascinating and moving book that does a great job of transporting you into the minds of those serving on the front lines of history’s first mechanized war.

Consider Adding Historical Fiction to Your Reading Diet

Historical fiction set in Europe is a fantastic gateway drug into European history.

A few of my favorites:

• War and Peace (Napoleonic wars, a classic)

• The Nightingale (WW2 France, fast-paced)

3. Learn to Read History Books

There are several ways to read a history book.

You could read for fun.

Or you could read to make a critical assessment of the book.

As a beginner, you’ll benefit from a reading strategy that falls in between those two extremes—an approach focused on learning, understanding, and reflection.

I’m not going to take a highly critical, scholarly approach—analyzing each argument, weighing the evidence, evaluating sources to see if they’re faulty.

I’m certainly not going to head to the academic library and dig through their sources in an effort to disqualify the argument and blast them on academic exchange forums to increase my status as a self-taught history buff. If you want to do something like that, go ahead. That’s honestly badass.

But I find that reading like a historian or a book critic is most satisfying and worthwhile to those who already have a good amount of experience reading history.

Use a critical-lite approach to reading history books

Think critically about what you read, but not to the point of turning the reading experience into serious work.

Write in the margins. Disagree when you feel a point is unsupported. Take notes if you wish. But there’s no need to overdo the critical analysis at this point in your education.

Instead, focus on enjoying the book, understanding the core arguments, learning interesting stuff, uncovering insights about human nature, and using the material to reflect on your own life and times.

If you want to read critically without going overboard, here are some questions to focus on answering as you read:

• What is the author’s core argument, and do I agree?

• How does their argument differ from those of other historians?

• How does the author make their case? What are their main supporting points?

• Does the author have any bias? If so, how is it affecting the argument?

• What types of sources does the author use?

• What did I think of the book—what was most interesting, surprising, or fresh? What did I wish it included or covered in more detail?

A short note on historiography and disagreement between historians

It’s worth reiterating that history books present arguments—attempts at an answer.

This means that two serious, highly skilled historians can arrive at completely different conclusions.

For example, historians disagree about the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. Some, like Edward Gibbon, blame radical Christianity and barbarian invasions. Meanwhile, some modern scholars put more blame on environmental factors screwing up agriculture. Then there are those dreamy rebels in ripped tweed jackets who say Rome never fell, but simply transformed.

If you’re anything like I was when I first started studying history, this “up for debate” attribute might make you feel like history books are a crapshoot—why study them if there’s no real answer?

Well, first off, there is a consensus, which is as close as we can get to a real answer. You can read a few articles about the book you’re reading to get a sense of where the book builds on or contradicts that consensus. The author will usually tell you this in the introduction as well.

Second, the fact that everything is up for interpretation is a great thing for your mind and your reading experience.

It’s an invitation—to think, to judge, to push back, to participate in this lively, ongoing conversation about how the world came to be. It’s an opportunity to sharpen your critical thinking and engage in the great debate.

Read a couple of books on the same topic (dialectical reading)

To form a more informed and nuanced understanding of historical topics, read a few books by different historians.

Consider finding historians who disagree on the topic, either mildly or strongly, and read them back-to-back.

This is called dialectical reading, and it’ll help you use productive tension to generate a sophisticated understanding—the real opposite of black and white thinking that plagues so much of online discourse these days.

Skim when appropriate (that’s how you finish these massive books!)

I used to struggle to finish history books.

I’d get to page 200, then fall off the project.

After reading some golden advice from a Historian, I realized the cause of my failures.

I was reading the book as if it were a work of philosophy or a classic novel. I was reading every word and giving each one the same level of attention.

But in a history book, some words and some parts of the book aren’t as important as others, especially if your overarching goal is understanding the main points.

That’s where skimming comes into play.

Now, skimming a history book is not necessary—I do it infrequently because I enjoy most of what I’m reading—but it’s a useful strategy to have in your back pocket for saving time, which is important for autodidacts with so many darn interests!

According to Historian Zachary Schrag, here are the most important parts of a history book you should read without skimming:

• The title and subtitle. They tell you what the book is about and something about the author’s major argument.

• The introduction lays out the argument, contextualizes it, explains how it differs from other positions, and defines the book's overall goal. Later, if you want to sound fancy at a dinner party, you can say "the author ultimately failed because he was unable to [prove, demonstrate, etc.,] the argument due to [misinformation, faulty assumptions, lack of information, etc.,].”

• The opening paragraphs and closing paragraphs of each section are also jam-packed with info. They introduce and wrap up the major argument of that section. In between is typically the support, evidence, and nuance.

Here’s an overall skimming strategy to use in the middle of the book at the paragraph-to-paragraph level:

Treat each topic sentence like the title of an article in a newspaper, and read the paragraph if the title is interesting (or something you disagree with).

Professor Zachary Schrag puts it well when he writes:

“The topic sentences have the same function as headlines in a newspaper. They give you a brief glimpse of the paper”s contents, so you can decide which areas demand more detailed exploration. In other words, read quickly through the parts you believe; read slowly through the arguments of which you are not convinced.”

For more tips, read Schrag’s full article on How to Read a History Book. The man did write The Princeton Guide to Historical Research, so it’s worth seeing his thoughts.

I personally like to skim infrequently.

I probably end up reading 9/10 paragraphs in a history book. But that’s just because, as a writer, I feel guilty if I don’t read everything an author has written. Additionally, I am one of those people who can work up an interest in almost anything, for better or worse.

Find a skimming strategy that works for you and refine it over time.

Steps 4–8 walk you through the specific books, courses, and reading strategies I’d use to build a genuine foundation in the subject — you’ll also find 5 best practices for self-studying history and a rewarding reading project my friend and I have been pursuing for a few years now.

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The idea that you should only be learning subjects that directly relate to your business projects and career goals is not the way to go.

It’s certainly not the path towards a fulfilling intellectual life.

Wide-ranging book knowledge is rarely useless.

There’s this trend I’ve noticed online, where well-meaning creators tell viewers that they’re learning wrong.

That the only smart way to learn is to:

1. Start working on a project

2. Encounter challenges

3. Identify information/skill gaps

4. Find a course, video, or book to learn the skills or concepts necessary to overcome that challenge and move forward on the project

I have nothing wrong with that project-based learning process—learning exactly what you need to learn to play that song or build that product.

I use it to learn new skills to a point of proficiency.

Where I get agitated, though, is when this reactive, vocational learning style is positioned as the only useful way to engage in self-education.

I don’t like content that, either explicitly or implicitly, purposefully or accidentally, makes people think that doing something like picking up a 19th-century sociology book is wasteful because it does not solve some problem or result in some immediate tangible economic result.

And I hope I haven’t mistakenly implied that in any of my articles about more practical types of learning, like how to acquire expertise or learn new skills.

The argument I’ll present today is that it’s rarely inefficient to pursue your curiosity and acquire knowledge unrelated to your current projects and career.

Call it an ode to “useless knowledge”.

Random learning—liberal learning!—deserves a spot in everyone’s self-education

We all need to make time to read what makes our brain smile, without any consideration to how it will help us get rich, promoted, or hired.

We need to spend time learning for learning’s sake:

• Listening to random lectures on ecology just because the subject calls to us

• Reading 3 books on cognitive psychology because it’s interesting

• Struggling through a philosophy book that has no relation whatsoever to your next big career move, or even your current existential crisis.

Studying subjects you may never use or put into practice is not a pointless endeavor. Immersing yourself in the knowledge of the world is not a waste of time. Self-education in a wide range of subjects is not mental masturbation.

Today, I’m not even going to discuss self-study as a hobby or the fact that hobbies are not meant to be instrumentalized—you don’t only cook for the food; you do it for the joy of cooking, the loud music, the smell of garlic.

Instead, I want to make a case for the value of studying a wide range of subjects that are totally disconnected from your current projects, goals, or needs.

5 Hidden Payoffs of “Random” Knowledge

A lot of people, especially in my generation, seem to think that reading a history book is only worthwhile if you’re going to write an article on that topic, become a history teacher, or use it in some way that creates immediate payoff.

But no—there is value in acquiring “irrelevant” knowledge.

Not just because it’s fun and enlightening, but also because the knowledge we think is irrelevant is usually not as irrelevant as we assume.

It’s hard to know what knowledge will change our philosophy of life, inspire us creatively, or help us connect the dots to solve some problem in our lives.

It’s also impossible to know if a book’s contents will become relevant or useful later on in life.

For example, George Patton didn’t know his historical reading as a child would pay off and make him one of the greatest generals to ever live.

Gaining wisdom is a mysterious process.

So here’s my approach to defending learning for learning’s sake.

I’m going to share 5 ways that random, broad, “impractical” learning—especially reading books that have no relation to your goals or projects—is far more relevant and impactful to your life than you may think. Winning at trivia is not one of them.

Hopefully, this article will help you guard yourself against arguments, originating inside or outside your own mind, that are trying to convince you to never learn or read anything unless it’ll pay off immediately in the form of money, success, or status.

Here we go.

1. It’s all grist for the mill

The proverb, “it’s all grist for the mill,” is the belief that every piece of information—even seemingly irrelevant or trivial knowledge—will at some point come in handy.

It’s one of my favorite sayings, not just because it gives my pragmatic brain the liberty to mess around in subjects that bear no relation to my projects or challenges, but because it’s proven true so far in my life.

Many times in my life, knowledge gained in the past has helped me accomplish, or better understand, something I’m going through in the present—be it a tough business decision, an article I’m writing, or a conversation with a friend.

I’m not alone in this experience of past learnings that felt random at the time, suddenly surfacing at exactly the right moment.

Take Harry Truman. When he was reading Plutarch’s Parallel Lives as a young man, he had no clue that later in life, when he was president, the wisdom he gained about human nature from that 2nd century collection of biographical essays would help him understand, read, and negotiate with peers and foreign leaders.

Again, wisdom works in mysterious ways.

Some examples of random knowledge serving as grist for the mill:

• A writer describes the flowers at a wedding using the terminology of astronomy

• A party-goer tells a witty joke that rested on her ability to reference literary figures

• A scientist dreams up a new physics experiment inspired by a psychology experiment

• A contractor trying to close a sales deal recalls the way a protagonist in a novel persuaded a similar type of person

• A marketer remembers from his history reading the cause of a huge social trend and thinks of how he can create a similar catalyst

When we read randomly, we fill ourselves up with all sorts of ideas, tactics, insights, and perspectives that will, often in some way we cannot foresee, help us solve some problem or produce something of value in the future. Random reading is not useless reading!

2. Form a philosophy of life

Your philosophy of life is your unique perspective on things—your POV.

Almost everyone has a philosophy of life, but very few have a nuanced, wise, personal, and useful one.

Some peoples’ boils down to “Life is pointless, so I might as well dedicate myself to doing absolutely nothing.”

My 18-year-old self’s philosophy of life was probably pretty close to: “Be cool, have fun, and hang out with friends”.

Boring!

Perhaps that’s why most people just conform to what everyone else is doing. Their philosophy of life isn’t compelling enough to keep them from following paths of least resistance.

How do you develop your philosophy of life?

Having experiences and reflecting on them helps, of course.

But, to speed things up, you can also simulate experiences through wide reading. That is exactly what Jack London recommends.

To London, the key to creative originality was a philosophy of life, and the way to get a personal philosophy was broad study.

“The only way of gaining this philosophy is by seeking it, by drawing the materials which go to compose it from the knowledge and culture of the world.”

He continues, discussing the value of acquiring broad knowledge across subjects, writing to the skeptic:

“What do you know of history, biology, evolution, ethics, and the thousand and one branches of knowledge? “But,” you object, “I fail to see how such things can aid me in the writing of a romance or a poem.” Ah, but they will—not so much directly as by subtle reaction. They broaden your thought, lengthen out your vistas, drive back the bounds of the field in which you work. They give you your philosophy, which is like unto no other man’s philosophy, force you to original thought.”

Every bit of information you encounter and consider shapes your philosophy of life. To form an original, useful one, take in quality ideas, stories, and thoughts from a broad spectrum of thinkers across many different fields.

Synthesize what the brightest have to say about how to live, and then tweak it to fit your own predilections, values, goals, and life situation.

Also, check out ‘s work on building a personal micro-philosophy—he understands this concept much better than I do.

3. Discover your authentic interests and callings

In the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”, David Epstein shows that world-class performers often go through a sampling period: a phase of exploring diverse interests before committing to specialization in one.

This rule directly relates to leading a fulfilling intellectual life.

One has to test out many disciplines and subdisciplines, paying special attention to their level of curiosity and abilities, before they can pick a few to master.

Imagine if at 24, I decided not to study US revolutionary history because it was unrelated to my sales quota and writing goals.

I wouldn’t have realized my deep interest in The Founding Fathers, and I may have never written 5+ articles on the self-educations of these historical figures, the seed for my new biographical series “Thinkers”.

Further, I would never have discovered an area of knowledge that is, to this day, a place for intellectual adventure and respite from the more practical learning I’m doing.

We should sample new fields every couple of months or years. For all we know, that subject could very well lead us to our next big profession, project, or obsession.

Reading may even help us discover our calling—or, as Robert Greene calls it, our life’s task.

4. Unlock creative, interdisciplinary thinking

What made Leonardo Da Vinci’s work so compelling was his ability to combine seemingly unrelated concepts from different fields into new and interesting ideas.

His creative process was like bashing two stars from different galaxies together. The result: a supernova of creative originality.

This is the power of the polymath, the promiscuous lifelong learner.

Thanks to your broad knowledge, you can look at a problem and bring unique insights, methods, and perspectives from multiple disciplines. You have more tools in your toolkit.

For example, take the creation of my long-term self-education planning framework. I was desperately trying to balance random reading and practical reading, breadth and depth, and pursue multiple interests while gaining mastery in one.

I needed to create a way to go about my self-education that hit all those marks. The revelation came when I was studying a project management topic: prioritization systems. Immediately, I had the idea of the 4-pronged approach to designing my self-education.

Sometimes the solution to your problems is hiding in that random book you flip through in the library. You never know!

5. Foster social connection and deepen relationships

The most interesting person in the room is usually also the most interested person in the room.

• Interested in other people.

• Interested in life.

• Interested in a wide range of topics.

A person with wide-ranging interests inevitably studies and learns about a wide range of topics. And this breadth of understanding enables them to enter many different conversations:

• Discussing Spanish cooking techniques with the host of the dinner party

• Talking Russian history with the father

• Playing backgammon with the niece

• Debating international affairs with the drunk uncle

You don’t need to be an expert to talk engagingly about a subject.

You just need to know enough of the basic terminology and concepts to understand the speaker, add commentary every once in a while, and ask relevant questions.

They don’t even have to be very good questions. If you’re talking to someone about their favorite subject, and letting them riff, they’ll love you for it, and you’ll have fun, provided you have enough contextual knowledge to engage.

(another reason I hate talking sports betting; I can’t for the life of me work up the interest to learn about it, so when someone says “the line” I zone out.

The ability to talk with a wide range of people about their specific interests will open doors for you.

People will say you’re sharp. They’ll think you’re interesting.

They may even hand over the deed to their house if you talk with them about their esoteric interest in the history of whaling—all because you chose to be, in your reading life, broadly interested.

Creating balance in your self-education between reactive, project-based learning and curiosity-driven “random” learning

The battle between practical and impractical learning shouldn’t exist. First of all, almost all knowledge is practical in one way or another, as I’ve hopefully made clear in this article.

But we should also strive to include both vocational and liberal learning in our daily lives.

For example, I study classic literature every morning. And I study history and other subjects in the evening. That’s my liberal self-education, my “impractical” reading.

And, then, throughout the week, as I’m working on projects, I learn new skills and concepts that I need to complete them. And I do deliberate practice to improve as a writer. And I read to research topics I’m writing about. These are the more project-driven learning activities.

A fulfilling intellectual life includes both.

So enjoy your forays into random subjects. Know in your heart that these intellectual adventures are more beneficial than others may think. You never know what treasures you’ll bring up.

And never let anyone tell you that reading a book outside your field or unrelated to your current projects is pointless.

If someone does, politely call them a philistine, quote some dead philosopher, and scare them off with a barbaric YAWP!

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During this period, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and wasted a lot of time.

Taking too many notes, setting unreasonable reading targets, engaging in reading perfectionism — these are just some of the ways I’ve screwed up as an autodidact.

In this article, I’ll share my 7 most cost…

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During the pandemic, when I wasn’t playing Skyrim, reading classic novels, or building my freelance writing business, I was trying to figure that out.

I took several online courses and read some of the classics of the field — paying special attention to Rousseau and the political thinkers of the US Revolution.

And I struggled my way through long, amateur-hour phone calls with my friend Ted, who was also trying to self-learn the basics of the subject, as well as several with a Gov Major friend who challenged my thinking and interpretations and often made me feel rather stupid—in the best way.

The thing is, I did it all rather haphazardly, without much structure, which led to some headaches and knowledge gaps I’d like to help you avoid.

This guide is my attempt at a systematic approach to self-learning political philosophy outside of school through books and online courses.

The 9-step roadmap is designed to take you from an absolute beginner in political philosophy to someone with the knowledge to have productive conversations with graduate students in the field.

Through this process, you’ll also become better at political discussion and cultivate a more nuanced understanding of ideas like democracy, justice, liberty, and power. This contextual knowledge should, in theory, help you think more deeply and critically about today’s political events, issues, and opinions.

You’ll also have a lot of fun considering big questions like how to build the ideal government or what it means to be a just individual.

The roadmap is meant to be followed sequentially, as each step builds on the prior. But feel free to jump around as needed, letting your curiosity off the leash from time to time.

Quick Note: I don’t pretend that this is the only way to get an introductory understanding of this massive subject. If you have other suggestions for resources or approaches, please share them in the comments!

1. Start With “An Introduction to Political Philosophy”

I wish that, before plunging into the classics, I’d read Jonathan Wolff’s “An Introduction to Political Philosophy”.

It’s a fantastic gateway into the subject. It’s no wonder that University professors often assign it as reading for their political philosophy 101 classes.

In this book, Wolff—a political philosopher himself—introduces you to some of the major debates of political philosophy:

• What is the state of nature (a world w/o government) like?

• What makes a state legitimate? Is it consent from the populace? Effectiveness?

• If the state is justified, who should rule it? Philosophers? Normal citizens?

Along the way, you’ll encounter summaries of arguments from some of the greatest political thinkers in history — Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke, Plato, Rawls, etc.

Reading the book early in your self-education will enable you to place the classic texts you read later into the right context of this great ongoing conversation.

2. Learn How to Effectively Read Philosophy

Reading philosophy is a lot different from reading histories, novels, or even works of sociology or economics.

Philosophy texts are typically systematically presented, finely tuned, complex arguments, often expressed in language that seems written as if the goal was to confuse the reader.

In other words, they’re freaking dense.

Therefore, to get the most out of a philosophy text, you’re going to have to slow down, read actively, jot down notes, and challenge yourself to think intensely.

In a 45-minute reading session, you might finish only five pages. That was about my pace for Rousseau’s The Social Contract.

And that’s okay. We aren’t aiming for speed when we read philosophy. We’re aiming for comprehension and insight.

On re-reading philosophy books

As Historian Michael Sugure says in his lecture on The Republic, “you can’t really read The Republic for the first time, until you’ve read it two or three times.”

According to him, that’s when you’re able to start asking intelligent questions and gain deep insights into what is being said.

This guide from University of Edinburgh on how to read philosophy recommends reading philosophy books twice:

• First Read: Read as you normally would—rather quickly without stopping. You could even skim it if so inclined, reading the opening and closing paragraphs of each chapter. You’re aiming to grasp the big-picture structure. Don’t expect to understand parts that make no sense. You can handle that on the second read.

• Second Read: Slow down a bit. Notice the details. Come prepared with specific questions like “what is the major argument?” and “what are the key points they’re making to prove this?” This is where you’ll begin to take notes.

When you are done reading, if you want to read analytically, as Mortimer Adler suggests in How to Read a Book, write a summary answering these four questions:

1. What was it about, in whole? What was the overarching argument, and how was it structured?

2. What was it about, in detail? What were the major assertions, assumptions, and ideas the author used to support that overarching argument?

3. Was it true, in part and in whole? Was their argument valid and sound? Make up your own mind about the author’s ideas—no need to be perfect here. Taking an attempt is what challenges you to think for yourself and deepens your understanding.

4. So what of it? Why does it matter? How do their ideas relate to other knowledge you have about the subject, current events, or practical applications?"

No need to do this analytical reflection on every book you read, especially if it’s leading to reading perfectionism. Just focus on trying your best to wrestle with the ideas and come up with your own thoughts about them.

If you really want to take your philosophy reading skills to the next level and learn about arguments and how to analyze them for soundness, you might want to grab a copy of A Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods.

This’ll arm you with the intellectual tools to think about ideas, debate questions, and read books like a philosopher would.

3. Take Yale’s Introduction to Political Philosophy

Yale offers a free online course called Introduction to Political Philosophy.

It includes 24 lectures and tells you which readings are assigned for each lecture (a huge bonus for those who agree with me that reading is the best way to learn!).

This course was my introduction to political philosophy, and I learned so much from it.

The lectures are actual video recordings of live class sessions, so it feels sort of like you’re actually in the classroom. And the professor is enlightening and well-spoken.

Over the 24 lectures, you’ll read parts of The Republic, Democracy in America, and other classics in the field.

At first, I was sort of annoyed that he didn’t prescribe the entirety of each book to the class. But now, having read a fair amount of political philosophy (it’s dense), I see how that would’ve been cruel punishment to students who are also managing four other classes that semester.

Anyways, this course is designed to introduce you to some of the main points of each text. Later on, you can go back and read your favorite books if you want (step 7).

If at this point you just want to listen to the lectures, you’ll get a lot out of those too. Personally, I enjoy a lecture now and then during my afternoon walks.

Additional Beginner Course: Consider also taking Moral Foundations of Politics (another free Yale course). It’ll teach you about Marxism, Utilitarianism, and other major political theories. I had an older gentleman email me a while back, saying this course reopened his intellectual life. Check it out!

4. Read The Big Two & Work to Understand Them

The two foundational works of political thought are widely considered to be The Republic by Plato and Politics by Aristotle, both written in Ancient Greece.

Other philosophers you read will reference them often, attacking, upholding, or developing upon their ideas. So work hard to understand them.

If you already read parts of these books in the Yale online course, now it’s time to actually read them from start to finish, slowly, making sure that you use supplementary resources to help you along:

There are various online courses and YouTube videos that’ll help you understand these texts and their contributions to the field they helped create.

Supplementary Material

The Great Courses offers the online lecture series Plato’s Republic, taught by a Professor at Boston University. These 24 university-level lectures should help you form a solid understanding of the text and its major ideas.

I’m also a big fan of Dr. Gregory Sandler’s channel. He’s a professor at Marist College who puts out a ton of helpful content for people trying to self-study philosophy.

Here’s one of several videos about Plato’s Republic:

In his videos, he does a great job of pointing out the most important parts of the text and helping you understand what the philosopher is saying, as well as the argument’s implications.

Here’s one on Aristotle’s Politics:

Another helpful resource for understanding these books, as well as other works of political philosophy, is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has articles on thousands of philosophers, concepts, and books:

Here’s a snapshot of what comes up in its table of contents when I searched Aristotle:

Micahel Sugrue’s Great Minds Lectures on great thinkers are also phenomenal. Here’s one on The Republic:

Pro Tip: Don’t worry about memorizing everything in these books. Focus on developing a basic understanding of their major points and forming your own opinions about them. Many scholars need to re-read these works multiple times, along with secondary sources written about the works, to feel like they truly own them.

5. Learn the History of Political Thought

I’m a junkie for any history of ideas.

I love learning that today’s widely accepted ideas, like liberty or democracy, were at one time heretical. And I find it intellectually satisfying to see how these ideas took shape and gained nuance over hundreds or thousands of years in the fires of heated intellectual debate and productive tension.

Further, a “history of ideas” book helps me sample whatever field I’m studying.

It briefly introduces me to the key thinkers, works, concepts, questions, and movements of any academic discipline’s history, so that I can then better identify which ones I’d like to have for a full-course meal.

For a history of political philosophy, I recommend Political Philosopher Alan Ryan’s magisterial work, On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present.

It takes you through 3,000 years of political thought and covers such remarkable thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Bentham, and Karl Marx. He also gives analyses of the major works and places them in a historical context.

Although reading it in full from start to finish is a great strategy, there are other ways to use a book like this to enhance your self-directed learning in political philosophy.

Another use case is to read the book as needed, dipping into it when you want background, clarification, or commentary on a classic work you’re currently reading or recently finished.

For example, after finishing The Republic, you could go read what Alan Ryan has to say about the work and its influence on the field. This’ll help you develop a scholarly view of each major work, and help you identify and fill some knowledge gaps or misunderstandings.

6. Read Classic Texts of Political Philosophy

At this point, you should be equipped with enough background knowledge to start reading the most influential works of political philosophy.

There are two main ways to go about reading these great books: chronologically and thematically.

Below, I’ll explain both approaches, share their advantages and flaws, and give you some ideas about how to form a reading plan for each one.

A good reading strategy could also be a combination of both approaches. For example, you could read 10 of the most influential books chronologically and then start reading thematically. Just some food for thought.

Chronological Reading

Reading political philosophy classics chronologically by when they were published allows you to see how ideas developed over time.

Also, political philosophers are often responding to or building on the arguments of thinkers who came before them.

For example, when Rousseau wrote The Social Contract, for instance, he had definitely read Hobbes’ Leviathan and Locke’s treatises on government.

Now, what do we mean by classic texts? I usually default to a prestigious university’s reading list to help me answer such questions and form my own reading lists.

For example, check out Yale’s field exam reading list that it assigns its graduate students in political theory.

Here’s the first page of the document:

An ambitious reading plan would be to follow this reading list from start to finish. Note that for many books, Columbia assigns only selected pages, not the entire book.

This is because these sections are what the political philosophy department considers to be the most important for a graduate student in this field to be familiar with.

Also, in some works, like Summa Theologica, these sections might be the parts where the author tackles political questions. The other parts might not be about politics at all.

If you want to do this approach, you could follow Columbia's or some other university’s reading list. That would surely keep you occupied for years.

Usually, the people who do best with a chronological approach are those who thrive in structure and find that having a long-term plan is motivating.

If you do choose this approach, give yourself some leeway to follow your interests. Do some interdisciplinary deep reads.

For example, if you read The Communist Manifesto and want to learn about the society Marx and Engels are so obsessed with tearing down, you could go read Hard Times by Charles Dickens to get a depiction of working-class life during the industrialization of Europe.

Thematic Reading

A thematic reading approach is when you pick a political theme (or a question) and read the political philosophy books that address it.

A theme could be:

• Democracy

• The state

• Totalitarianism

• Wealth distribution

• Race

• Power,

• Any big political topic that interests you

You’d then go read about what political thinkers have to say about the issue. You’ll read plenty of competing arguments, allowing you to form an original, nuanced perspective on it.

For example, if you were curious about the arguments about the state of nature and what life would be like in a state of anarchy (no government), you might read the following classic works:

• Hobbes’ Leviathan

• Locke’s Two Treatises of Government

• Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality (enlightening, one of my favorites)

• Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia

This approach to reading the classics in political philosophy gives you a bit more flexibility and leads to shorter reading plans than the chronological approach—ones that would fit nicely into your 12-week self-education sprints :)

It also enables you to become a relative expert on a topic in the field.

A great way to find key themes and the corresponding books is, once again, to Google comprehensive exam reading lists for political theory departments.

For example, here’s a snapshot of Columbia’s comp exam reading list for graduate students focused on Democracy and its Alternatives:

You could also ask an AI chatbot or Google for philosophy classics on your specific interest area.

7. Mix in Online Political Philosophy Courses

Reading philosophy can be tough on the brain.

When you can’t read because you’re tired or need a break, it’s great to have a few courses to jump into.

I like doing this most when I’m walking. I’ll often pause after the most interesting parts and try to restate what the teacher just said. Muttering to myself, I might look like someone who recently escaped an asylum, but I’m remembering what I learned! Anyway, Adam Smith used to do this all the time, and just look what he accomplished.

Here are two political philosophy online courses worth checking out:

• Justice (free): In one of Harvard’s most popular courses, you’ll learn about social and criminal justice and the philosophy that underlies some of today’s most relevant political issues — affirmative action, same-sex marriage, etc.

• Democracy and Its Alternatives: Learn more about democratic government and how it handles mob rule, inefficiency, dictators, polarization, and other issues. This course is full of case studies that make it hyper-relevant and fascinating.

8. Start Reading Contemporary Political Philosophy

If you want to learn more about post-WW2 political philosophy, then grab a copy of the anthology Contemporary Political Philosophy by Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit.

It includes key articles and essays by many of recent history’s most prominent political philosophers.

Interdisciplinary in nature, the anthology touches on topics in law, national sovereignty, economics, and other relevant areas of knowledge.

Here’s what Professor Christopher Morris has to say about the book:

“An excellent reader, offering a wide selection from the work of the most important or influential contemporary political philosophers. The quality of the selections is high, and the range of topics is broad. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology will serve well in a variety of university courses in political philosophy.” — Christopher Morris, University of Maryland

You could also create a free JSTOR account, where you can access 100 free scholarly articles per month.

9. Create something from what you’re learning (essays, conversations, debates!)

If you want to take your self-directed studies to the next step, retain more of what you read, and identify knowledge gaps, start creating something from what you’re learning.

That could be some ongoing creative intellectual project like YouTube videos breaking down classic texts or private summaries of the book you just read.

Or it could mean studying with others and discussing the books you’re reading and the ideas that are bubbling in your head:

• Find a reading buddy

• Join a philosophy-focused Substack book club, like Commonplace Philosophy

• Enroll in courses that meet over Zoom or in person

This will enhance your learning experience and hold you accountable to study effectively and to think creatively and critically about what you read.

You’ll also get a chance to see how much you’ve learned and developed intellectually from your studies, which is the best way to motivate yourself to read.

Bottom Line: Teaching Yourself Political Philosophy

Through self-directed study in political philosophy, you’ll form an understanding of such key political ideas as democracy, freedom, authoritarianism, and justice.

And in doing so, you’ll be better equipped to engage in political debate, participate in your country’s political system, understand other people’s perspectives, and form coherent, well-reasoned arguments.

You’ll also just have a lot of fun playing statecraft and pondering interesting questions about how to form the ideal society.

And if you want to design your own custom self-education roadmaps to self-learn new subjects, check out my ultimate guide on how to do it.

P.S. If you have any tips for self-studying political philosophy or other resources people might find helpful, please drop them in the comments!

A part of me wishes I could tell W.H. Auden that I study for five hours every day.

But that’s never been the case.

I have neither the brainpower nor the time to engage in such Herculean efforts of self-education.

Even if I had the energy, I’m not so sure I would want to spend that much time staring at words. After all, I’m already a writer.

Instead, I spend around two hours per day engaged in self-directed study—reading, listening to lectures, processing notes, and reflecting on what I’ve read.

The only reason I’m able to hit that number on a semi-regular basis is that I schedule self-education into my daily routine.

While it’s more studying than the average non-student is doing, when you consider that some of my reading is in service of my professional writing career, my routine isn’t that extraordinary.

It’s certainly not as inspiring (or disgusting) as the 19-hour study sessions Jack London was putting in when studying for his college entrance exams.

Yet, despite its relative unremarkableness, my self-education routine still helps me achieve big self-education goals. And if there comes a time when I can only study for 30 minutes per day, I’ll still be able to lead a fulfilling intellectual life.

That’s true for 3 reasons:

• I’m consistent. I might miss a day or two, but for the most part, I do my routine every day (weekends, I’m far less consistent).

• My routine is intentionally designed. The 3 distinct phases help me make progress on specific areas of self-education that matter to me.

• When I’m in a study session, I’m deeply focused on the task at hand. And just like in lifting weights, intensity of effort often matters more than time spent in the gym.

Today, I want to share my 3-part self-education routine and help you build your own.

What you’ll learn in today’s newsletter

Since many of you are striving to hit challenging self-education goals amidst work and family life, I thought it would be helpful to show you how I fit two hours of self-education into my daily life. (and how I spread those two hours across 3 distinct types of studying, each with its own purpose in my intellectual and creative life).

I’ll walk you through my current daily 3-phase self-education routine (and the reasoning behind each phase):

• The Holy Half Hour (wisdom)

• Evening MSRP Studies (expertise)

• Bedtime Imaginative Reading (pleasure + creative nourishment)

Lastly, I’ll share 5 best practices for building your own personal self-education routine.

I don’t expect you to copy my self-education routine. We all have different levels of availability and unique learning goals.

But hopefully, after seeing my routine, you’ll have ideas you can use to build your own sustainable, intentional self-education routine that helps you read more, learn more, and consistently deepen and develop your mind, one day at a time.

My Daily 3-Phase Self-Education Routine

Phase 1: 8 AM—8:30 AM: The Holy Half Hour

Arthur Brooks, a Harvard Professor who studies happiness and meaning, spends 30 minutes every morning in what he calls The Holy Half Hour.

In a podcast with Tim Ferriss, Brooks describes The Holy Half hour as the 30-minute segment of your morning routine that is dedicated to a reflective and/or spiritual exercise that prepares you mentally and emotionally for the rest of the day.

A Catholic, Brooks spends his Holy Half Hour at mass with his wife. Other people might use the thirty minutes to engage in meditation, stoic practice, religious study, or prayer.

A book junkie, I spend it studying classic literature.

Reading a classic work like War and Peace first thing in the morning dovetails nicely with two of my other long-term self-education goals: 1) to become well-read in classic novels, and 2) to study the craft of writing.

But the major reason I do it is for the reflection, enlightenment, and wisdom.

Reading classic literature for wisdom

When you read classic literature, you are engaging in a conversation with one of the wisest minds in history.

Their well-crafted story prompts you to reflect on life’s biggest questions and guides that reflection by showing multiple perspectives, often through dramatization, dialogue, or, in Tolstoy’s case, intrusive narration where he adds moral or philosophical commentary.

While some authors may betray their stance on the question, for the most part, great artists leave it up to the reader to figure it out for themselves. During these reflections, the reader often arrives at conclusions that relate specifically to their own life.

Did War and Peace make me more generous?

A week ago, I read a scene in War and Peace where Pierre meets a freemason.

The freemason engages Pierre in a conversation about God and talks about what it means to lead a good life. He calls Pierre selfish and wasteful of his life.

All of a sudden, I was struck by the thought, “Am I being selfish in my life?”

I can’t quite remember my conclusion, but yesterday, as if my unconscious had been affected deeply by this reflection, I found myself cooking enchiladas for a couple of new parents so they would not have to worry about making dinner.

Did my reflection on the scene actually lead to this act of generosity? Who can tell for sure?

But either way, I’d argue that considering the question posed to me by Tolstoy increased my self-knowledge, which will help me act more deliberately and in line with my values going forward.

Literature allows you to live multiple lives

In addition to prompting reflection, classic literature helps us gain wisdom in another big way.

It allows us to live out scenarios and lives we’ll never experience. In reading these stories, we step into the shoes of the characters, transcend our single perspective, and, I believe, become wiser for it.

As C.S. Lewis wrote:

“In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself…I see with a thousand eyes but it is still I who see.”

My holy half hour, classic literature study guidelines

Every morning, I spend 30 minutes reading a classic work of literature. Sometimes, if I have the extra time, I’ll read for 45 minutes or an hour.

The general aims of this session are as follows:

• Sit at the feet of a great author.

• Absorb their wisdom.

• Bathe in a hot spring of awe for their artistic achievement.

• Engage in heavy annotation.

• Notice details.

• Afterwards, use the work to prompt reflection on your own life.

I’m beginning to follow up my reading with a walk to chew on the story and then, once it’s digested, start to transition my mind into work mode.

Phase 2: After Dinner: 1 Hour of Evening MSRP Studies

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But you rarely do it.

I know the frustration.

Just yesterday, I was sitting on my couch, tuckered out from a writing session, scrolling mindlessly through YouTube shorts.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw War and Peace sitting on the coffee table. At that moment, I desperately wanted myself to pick it up.

And yet, I kept on scrolling.

I just couldn’t tear myself away from the YouTube shorts feed to do it.

In other words, I wanted to want to read it. I knew from past reading sessions that reading it would be enriching and intellectually stimulating. I wanted to live up to my identity as a reader, and yet I just couldn’t choose the book.

How do we fix that?

How do we make the gravitational pull of books on our psyche stronger than that of our phones or other mediums of fast-paced, dopamine-pumping entertainment? How do we increase the rate at which we choose reading as an activity in our spare time?

There are many good solutions to this problem, from deleting social media apps to reading more in line with your curiosity.

But today, I want to focus on one powerful technique that has increased the likelihood I choose reading over other activities.

It’s called creative intellectual projects.

If you implement them, at least occasionally, into your self-education, you’ll be amazed at how often you feel the urge to read.

Moreover, it’ll deepen the reading experience and help you retain more of what you read.

Before I get into the technique and its benefits for your reading life, we need to understand why it’s so hard to choose reading hard books as an activity in the first place.

Our pragmatic nature and how it affects our reading habits

All humans, to some extent, are pragmatic creatures.

We are drawn to activities that will have a high fitness payoff. We feel the urge to take actions that are low-risk, easy, and likely to result in some concrete, desirable outcome.

Pragmatism is a survival strategy rooted in our evolutionary biology and amplified by the modern world’s obsession with efficient use of time.

The practical, future-based evaluation of activities is a tendency most of us cannot avoid. It’s part of us, whether we like it or not. So we might as well use it to our advantage.

Why do I bring this all up?

Because that pragmatic way of thinking is exactly what makes it hard to justify choosing a book.

Compared to other activities, like mowing the lawn or posting something clever on social media, where the result is right there in front of you, and your sense of progress is high, the positive impact of 30 minutes studying philosophy or classic literature is much more difficult to spot.

The invisible effects of book-reading

Let’s compare what happens after a weight-lifting session to what happens after a 45-minute reading session with a challenging book.

During a weight-lifting session, gym-goers get to add weight to the bar. And afterwards, they can admire their muscle pump in the mirror.

The added weight and the pump are signs that their strenuous action (going to the gym and lifting) is impacting their big goals (gaining muscle and strength). The payoff of the effort is clear.

And that’s highly motivating. It makes the gym-goer feel the urge to hit the gym again tomorrow.

Now let’s compare the effects of reading hard books.

In most cases, unless you are being tested or part of a book club, the positive results of a 45-minute session with Plato or Virginia Woolf are much more challenging to discern.

You cannot remove your scalp and inspect your brain for increased gray matter in the region associated with whatever subject you just read about.

You cannot really tell if you are now smarter or progressing on big goals like deeper expertise, improved critical thinking, or better understanding of the world and yourself.

You may feel calmer. Perhaps a bit more thoughtful.

But these benefits are mild and often hard to notice and appreciate, especially if, right after shutting the book, you must immediately return to he hustle of daily life, attend a work meeting, or plunge back into social media.

This problem of “invisible results” is especially common for autodidacts

Self-learners don’t have the opportunity to raise their hand in class to show off what they learned last night during their bout with Hemingway or Freud.

Therefore, in self-education, it can be difficult to stick to a reading habit precisely because we cannot sense the fruits of our labor.

And this inability to see the results generates doubt about whether reading Freud is actually getting us closer to our goals of becoming sharper and better educated.

Even advanced autodidacts and readers sometimes have these flare-ups of doubt.

I know I still wonder:

• Am I actually learning the material?

• Is it making me smarter?

• Is reading this book helping me achieve my intellectual and creative goals?

In sum, the results of reading are often completely hidden from sight.

And therefore, the pragmatic part of our brain doesn’t let us read, despite how misguided it is in its cost/benefit analysis.

It’s misguided because it’s missing data.

We need to give our brains evidence that the hard work of grappling with a text is leading to meaningful results, like learning, understanding, and intellectual transformation.

Then, in theory, our mind will decide to read hard books at a higher rate. The pull of books will be stronger.

So how do we do that?

How do we make the results of our reading clear and obvious?

Use creative intellectual projects to make the results of your reading clear as day

Writers, teachers, creators, and students have an advantage when it comes to motivating themselves to read.

If they want to perform well in their craft and produce good work, they need to hit the books.

If a teacher wants to effectively engage and educate students in their upcoming lecture on War and Peace, they have to study and learn War and Peace.

For those in intellectual professions, reading books is often a necessity, not an option.

Moreover, they are working in an environment where they can see the rewards of their reading. The teacher, talking about War and Peace with a student, can actually hear how lucidly they speak on the subject, not to mention see the student’s reaction.

Herein lies the key to making yourself want to read more:

Attach your reading to exciting, creative intellectual projects. A project is one of the best ways to increase a book’s gravitational pull on your psyche.

You don’t have to be a professional teacher or a writer to teach and write. You don’t have to make a living from your intellectual work to justify integrating occasional creative intellectual projects into your life.

A project that forces you to read, think, and create is an enriching and fulfilling challenge that everyone should take part in.

A creative intellectual project could be any of the following:

• Writing Substack essays about every classic novel you read

• Creating a YouTube channel about political philosophy

• Joining a book club and engaging in live discussions

• Journaling about the ideas you come across in your reading

• Building a product using the knowledge you’ve acquired in your reading

• DIY courses where you have to write a final essay

• Teaching students, either in person or online

Any project that will make the results of your reading tangible so that your pragmatic brain is convinced the effort is paying off—so that it can see how much you’re learning and growing intellectually.

If you can attach the project to some larger personal or career goal, like helping your community, solving a problem in your life, or becoming an author, the book that helps you accomplish the project will become even more enticing. Because now, that book isn’t just helping you finish a high-quality project—it’s helping you change your life.

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To illustrate how these projects encourage you to read, here’s an example from my own reading life

These past few days, whenever I have free time, I find myself wandering over to the 600-page James Madison biography.

It happens naturally without the exertion of much willpower. I’m like a lion drawn to the watering hole.

The reason it’s easy for me to choose reading this book over television is partly that it’s fascinating, but, in cases when I’m tired, fascination doesn’t cut it.

My creative intellectual project—an essay about his intellectual life—steps in to pull me when curiosity isn’t available and energy is low.

If I want to write an essay that performs well and inspires my audience, I have to read the book. I’ve given myself no other choice.

But creative intellectual projects don’t just motivate you to read by getting you to obsess over the potential future payoff.

Creative intellectual projects also make reading more fun

The actual act of reading also becomes extremely engrossing and energizing when you attach it to an exciting project.

You become laser-focused.

You start to see patterns that’ll help you answer questions.

You generate new ideas from your reading.

For example, with the Madison biography, I’m on the hunt for anecdotes and details I can use in my essay. And I find this experience enjoyable, and so I find myself going back to the book more than the other books I’m reading at the moment.

The finished project is the ultimate motivator

And, of course, when I finally produce the essay, I’ll have a clear indicator that my hours spent reading were well worth it.

I can see the positive results of my studies right there on the page. I can see how much I learned, how much my mind changed, how many new ideas and concepts are floating around in my brain.

This proof will, in turn, motivate me to read another book.

I’m like our ancestor who spent hours scouting the movement patterns of a rogue warthog, and then, days later, speared it and dragged it back to camp.

I’ve learned that the time-consuming, cognitively-demanding action, reading, is not only mentally stimulating and emotionally moving; it can also help me pull off challenging creative and intellectual goals.

And so, in the future, I’ll be more likely to choose reading over other activities.

Reading buddies, book clubs, and online learning communities

Engaging in conversations about the book is another way to make the results of your reading beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In addition to giving you a place to show yourself (and others) what you’ve learned, group discussions and book clubs also act as great social-pressure accountability mechanisms.

To join the conversation and not sound like a moron, you have to actually read the assigned book.

A creative intellectual project will also help you deeply learn and remember what you read

An intellectual, creative project will not only inspire you to read more often.

It will also improve your ability to retain what you’ve read.

After all, doing an intellectual creative project is a form of self-testing—one of the best learning techniques for moving information into your long-term memory.

To complete the project, whether it’s an essay or a conversation, you must recall what you have studied (active recall) and put it into your own words (summarization).

Both mental actions increase the likelihood you’ll remember what you’ve read.

Pragmatism vs reading for the love of stories, ideas, and the life of the mind

In an ideal world, at some point in your self-education journey, you will fall so deeply in love with reading hard and mind-expanding books that thoughts of future payoff will barely fall into your “how do I spend my time?” equation.

Instead, you’ll pick them up out of sheer excitement for the activity itself rather than what the activity helps you achieve.

But even then, there will come times when the difficult book doesn’t seem worth the effort.

There will be times when your curiosity is out for lunch, and that pragmatic you has taken over.

In those moments, that project you’re working on might be the thing that tips the scales in favor of the book, not to mention keep you from choosing the unhealthy, highly addictive forms of media you’re trying to avoid.

It was during the pandemic. The show had just become available on Disney Plus. My parents were holding glasses of red wine, and I was strewn across our brown leather couch, expecting to soon be bothered by too much singing and not enough dialogue. I’ve always preferred plays to mu…

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Usually, you just need to do 3 things:

1. Commit to consistently studying 1 subject for 2+ years. (reading other subjects, but focusing on this 1 discipline)

2. Put your thoughts and ideas into the world for other people to ponder, admire, and, at times, critique (critique is a good thing here).

3. Work on a public project that holds you accountable to do numbers 1 and 2—and to do them well.

While often neglected, the last two are key.

After all, the major difference between a hobbyist self-learner in a subject and a self-taught expert in that subject is that the expert uses their knowledge to create something new, informed, and valuable.

Journalists, writers, pundits, teachers, authors—they don’t just study, research, and read their subject. They also process and create.

Depending on your subject and creative inclinations, an intellectual project might be:

• Essays

• Newsletters

• Lectures

• YouTube explainer videos

• Commentary

• Analysis

• Teaching

• Coaching

• Books

• Conversations (as in leading a book club)

This “public project + focused study” formula is how you transform yourself into a person that other people associate with mastery of your subject—be it Russian literature, military history, political theory, labor economics, fitness, or mine, Autodidactism.

It’s also how you motivate yourself to do the hard work of studying. And it’s how you truly own the material through synthesizing it.

Today, with all this in mind, I want to share a 3-part protocol to become a self-taught expert—someone with highly comprehensive and authoritative knowledge in a particular area of study.

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1. Dedicate Yourself to 1 Mastery Subject

You owe it to yourself to commit to studying 1 subject for the long haul.

Depth, whether it’s in a romantic relationship or an intellectual discipline, is where you’ll find the most meaning.

It’s also in those deep waters where you’ll fashion yourself into an expert.

Here are 3 factors to consider when choosing a mastery subject, aside from authentic curiosity: (by the way, I’ve heard readers choose everything from history to cooking to oceanography!)

• Ideal Lifestyle: How do you want to spend your days? What career do you want? Pick subjects that help you reach these dreams.

• Life Mission: What problems do you want to solve in the world? What people do you want to help? What ways of life do you want to protect? Study books that will equip you to solve those issues and make the world a better place.

• Role Models: Who do you look up to? What historical and contemporary figures do you wish to emulate? What did they study? Which subjects and books were their mentors?

Once you’ve chosen a subject to master over the next few years, it’s time to connect it to a project that’ll motivate you to study and force you to transform your knowledge into creations.

For example, if you wanted to become an expert in American novels, you might start a newsletter where you publicly write about the novels you’re reading.

First, a few side notes…

Side Note 1: Consider making up your own subject. For example, Autodidactism is the subject of my newsletter. It’s the tradition and practice of self-education. Can’t major in that at any university.

Side Note 2: Keep in mind that just because you pick 1 subject to focus on doesn’t mean you can’t study others. Continue reading widely. This will broaden your horizons. Plus, you can filter all new information through your mastery subject—for example, when I read a history book, I often come away with lessons about self-education or learning I can write about on this blog. Knowledge connects in lots of strange and mysterious ways if you have a focus.

2. Start a Public Project

The main action that sets self-taught experts apart from regular autodidacts is that experts routinely synthesize the high-quality material they consume into something new, informed, and insightful.

They turn what they find in books, academic journals, or discussions with experts into creations that affect the minds of other people and add to the conversation around their subject.

And they do this without sacrificing their intellectual integrity for the sake of other aspirations, such as online clout or pleasing their audience (aka audience capture).

A public project is important for acquiring expertise for 3 key reasons:

• A project is a forcing function for deep learning. If you have to teach your subject in a YouTube video or turn a book into an article, you are going to work to deeply understand and critically think about the material you’re self-studying. And in the creation process, you will bump up against knowledge gaps and misunderstandings, which you can then patch up accordingly.

• A project is how you become known as an expert. How the hell is anyone going to think of you as an expert if you aren’t putting ideas, opinions, or advice into the world? Seeing your project is how people start to associate you with the subject.

• A project allows you to receive feedback. When you post online, people will tell you when they think you’re wrong or your evidence seems shaky. You can improve your expertise by pondering their feedback, and if it’s thoughtful and fair, incorporating it into your next video, essay, or newsletter.

When I think of self-taught experts using intellectual projects as their major mechanism for intense self-learning, I don’t have to look far.

Many writers on Substack write brilliantly about history, art, literature, education, fitness, film, or the social sciences and lack traditional credentials. Instead, they simply wrote, studied, researched, got feedback, and wrote some more—over and over again until they were known as a go-to person in their subject.

Examples of real-life, public intellectual projects

Here are examples of public projects that have no doubt helped the person behind them become an expert in their subject:

• Academy of Ideas: creates YouTube video essays that promote social freedom and empower the individual. To create their essays, they must study great thinkers from philosophy, psychology, and other subjects of interest.

• A Reading Life: writes about her reading life and the books she reads—over the last year, she’s become one of my favorite experts on literary fiction.

• Micro-Philosophy: is obsessed with the idea of creating a personal philosophy of life, and he studies the subject obsessively and creates essays and educational products to help others do it.

• Ultralearning: Scott Young established himself as an expert in the science of learning by writing a well-researched and insightful book on the subject.

• Knowledge Lust: I’m obsessed with self-directed learning, and this newsletter gives me a free pass to study the subject and write about it from multiple angles. Without the newsletter, I wouldn’t be an expert in the subject of self-education, no matter how much I read about it, practiced it, or reflected on it.

3. Create a Mastery Subject Reading Plan

When the self-educated writer Louis L’Amour identified the American West as a subject he wanted to focus on in his writing, he made it a priority in his reading life (which at the time was extremely broad and unsystematic).

He committed to “reading approximately thirty books a year on the West in many aspects”, and went on to become one of the greatest Western writers of all time, respected for his deep understanding of what it was like to be a pioneer on the frontier of the American West.

In graduate study in the humanities and social sciences, students do something similar. They compile and work through massive reading lists—often containing 100-200 works in their field that they need to know to attain expert status.

It’s called the comprehensive exam reading list:

A long list of books, often hundreds, that graduate students are expected to understand in order to pass their comp exams and earn recognition as newly minted experts in their specific discipline.

The autodidact equivalent I came up with is the Mastery Subject Reading Plan (MSRP):

A pathway to expertise in your mastery subjects, paved in books (and lots of them). It helps you achieve a specific intellectual goal: Develop deep, usable expertise in one specific subject you’ve identified as high-priority.

3 Benefits of Building and Working Through an MSRP

The rewards of creating and doing this targeted reading plan are too many to count, but here are the 3 biggest ones I’ve experienced:

• More contextual/background knowledge of your subject, which improves your ability to get more insight out of each book or podcast you consume. As reading comprehension researcher Steph Harvey writes: “Think of it as a tapestry of understanding: the more threads of knowledge a student has, the easier it is for them to weave new information into this tapestry.”

• Familiarity with the greatest that has been thought and written about your subject. You can use the works of your predecessors in many ways—as inspiration, as creative material, as a standard by which to measure your creations.

• You attain more material from which to draw original connections. Background knowledge will find its way into your work. This happens consciously or unconsciously. If you’re collecting reading notes, you can build a storehouse of anecdotes, concepts, and facts you can connect in interesting, novel ways to produce more original ideas of your own.

By the way, if you’d like to learn how to build an MSRP, check out this step-by-step guide for finding relevant books, organizing your list, identifying your MSRP categories, and more.

Pro Tip: If you can find other smart and open people with whom to discuss your reading, you will increase your expertise growth rate. It will also make the process more enjoyable. Consider getting a reading buddy or joining a book club/learning community focused on your subject.

Own your expertise

When somebody asks you if you’re an expert in your subject, and you truly believe you are, say “yes.”

Don’t try to hide behind something like “Oh, I’m just interested in this stuff.”

If you are studying the subject and producing content on the subject, you have already staked your claim as an expert.

The people online consuming your material aren’t taking it with a grain of salt. They don’t know that you only think of yourself as “just interested.” They think of you as an expert.

So own it!

Whether you’re a teacher, a writer, an independent researcher, or all three, embrace your role as an expert. This acceptance of responsibility will force you to take more care in what you produce. You’ll study more deeply. You’ll aim for the truth. You’ll feel an ethical responsibility to reach for a high standard.

And soon, you’ll stop feeling like a fraud. And when someone comes to you looking for your take on an issue or your advice to solve a problem in your area of expertise, you won’t feel so timid.

Instead, you’ll feel honored and ready to clarify, opine, or advise.

• John Stuart Mill: Philosopher, political economist, politician, and civil servant.

• Benjamin Franklin: Writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher and political philosopher.

• Peter Mathiessen: Novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen te…

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I would read a single book on the topic and do my best to read it in an engaged and critical manner.

While this method was sufficient for topics that were of passing interest to me, it didn’t cut it for subjects I wanted to be conversant in.

W…

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Today, I wanted to share the 12 books that have most impacted my philosophy of self-education and resulted in the greatest leaps forward in my intellectual (and creative) life.

Check them out to become a more effective learner and to cultivate a more fulfilling life of the mind.

Ultralearning by Scott Young

I owe a tremendous debt to Scott Young.

He was the first online writer I encountered who was writing about self-directed learning, and he’s part of the reason I began obsessing over this topic.

In his first book, Ultralearning, he shares his system for rapidly learning new skills, which includes nine principles, from metalearning and retrieval practice to regular feedback and experimentation.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to quickly acquire skills, whether that’s a language, a craft, or a physical pursuit like surfing or tango.

The Well Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer

In The Well Educated Mind, classical educator and historian Susan Wise Bauer covers how to give yourself a classical education.

Her approach to self-study centers on an ancient learning technique known as the Trivium, in which students learn a subject (or read a book) in a 3-step process:

1. Grammar (input): Memorization of the building blocks of the subject (or book), including its key facts, ideas, and arguments.

2. Logic (processing): Analyzing and understanding how the building blocks fit together; involves asking questions, drawing connections, and weighing evidence.

3. Rhetoric (output): Expressing oneself in writing or speech; using language to share one's opinion on or knowledge of the material in a clear, precise, and persuasive manner.

Bauer shows you how to apply the trivium to five genres commonly taught in a classical curriculum, including autobiography, novels, poetry, history/politics, and drama. She also provides lists of 20 or so classic books for each genre, recommending you read them in chronological order so as to witness their development.

This book opened my eyes to the notion that different types of books require different reading approaches. It also convinced me of the advantages of closely studying the great books of the Western tradition.

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How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok

In How to Think Like Shakespeare, Scott Newstok helps you do exactly what the title promises.

Newstok revisits the rhetorically-oriented Renaissance approach to education that formed Shakespeare’s mind, revealing intellectual habits we can use to shape ourselves into effective students, thinkers, writers, and creatives.

These habits include imitating great writers, stocking our minds with knowledge, engaging in conversation with those who challenge and sharpen our thinking, and many others.

Newstok’s book is not just a practical one. It also does a good job of critiquing modern education, which, according to him, has shied away from many of the teaching methods that cultivated many of history’s most creative, persuasive, and insightful minds.

The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges

Written by a French Dominican Friar in 1920, The Intellectual Life is written like a message from God that was channeled through a truth-loving scholar with a talent for language.

The tone is majestic and compassionate, yet authoritative. Regardless of one’s religious affiliations, it’s hard to finish this book without feeling that to study is to engage in a holy act.

The Intellectual Life advises scholars, but also autodidacts and lifelong learners, on how to organize their time, take good notes, and study effectively.

It lays out, in short, “the spirit, conditions, and methods” of an intellectual life, and shows you how to use reading and study to become an original thinker, regardless of your profession.

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler

It’d be silly to create a list of books about learning and leave out the classic How to Read a Book.

Adler—who, through his Great Books of the Western World series, did so much to democratize classical education to the public—uses this book to cover the process and techniques to intelligently and critically read a book.

While I advise every autodidact to read this guide, I would like to issue a warning: what Mortimer suggests doing is “a perfect dance”. Do not hold yourself accountable to perfectly execute his system on every book you read, or you may find yourself suffering from reading perfectionism, as I did after reading this book.

Use the reading techniques that best align with your goals. Challenge yourself to understand the hard books without jumping to Google or AI for immediate answers. But be graceful with yourself. And save the full process for those books you most deeply wish to understand.

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Four Thousand Weeks is a book about time management, not learning.

But Burkeman’s wisdom about our unhelpful relationship with time is extremely eye-opening and necessary to hear, especially if you’re an autodidact who’s always anxious about how you have no time to study all the subjects and books you wish to study (as I regularly have been).

The book starts off by shaking you to your core with the uncomfortable fact that, if you live to be 80 years old, you will have lived a mere 4,000 weeks.

Through the rest of the book, he shows you how this isn’t really the cause of our dissatisfaction, busyness, and stress—the problem is the notion that, with the right productivity methods and levels of self-discipline, we can cram in everything we want to do with our lives.

If you’re a multipassionate who has ever tried to create a 12-week self-education plan or narrow your reading plan to a few reading ideas, I’m sure you can see how his message relates to self-education… We take on too much because we’re curious, then end up stressed and burnt out. Worst of all, we make little progress on meaningful projects, all because we couldn’t handle the horror of prioritizing (which means saying no). The cure is to come to terms with our limitations and to get more intentional.

Burkeman says much that is wise. He convinced me to focus on 1-2 subjects over the next few years, and 1-2 self-education projects per quarter, while leaving the rest of my time open for free reading, not to mention working, spending time with my family and friends, doing chores, and, of course, just milling about. Check out the book, and I’m sure you’ll have similar realizations.

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Why Read?

Why Read? is a book about the value of literary study, both in and out of academia.

Professor of Literature Mark Edmundson answers such questions as:

• How does studying literature shape our philosophy of life?

• What is literary discipleship, and why does it matter?

• What is the point of interpreting works of literature, and what is the measure of a good interpretation? (a hint: it’s not accuracy that matters—learn the full answer in my article “The Practical Benefit of Literary Interpretation”)

Anyone who wants to self-study classic literature but isn’t totally convinced on the value yet, this book is for you. And if you already love literature, this will help articulate many of the feelings you have about the value of literary study that you have yet to put into words.

Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour

Education of a Wandering Man is a unique type of autobiography.

It focuses almost exclusively on the reading life of its author, the self-taught novelist Louis L’Amour. During his self-education in the 1930s, as a young lad wandering the American West, Louis read about 100 books per year, many of which were classics of philosophy and literature.

Here’s just some of his reading list from 1930 (he lists these in the back of the book):

I was so moved by this autobiography that I wrote an article on the self-education of Louis L’Amour, where I present his most compelling insights on learning, reading, and living an intellectual life.

While Education of a Wandering Man may not be the most practical book on this list, it’s certainly one of the most inspirational. Louis’ love for books and learning is infectious. After finishing his story, you’ll feel an urge to explore the realms of knowledge, just as he did.

Range by David Epstein

Range makes the case that high-performers typically aren’t the narrow learners we thought them to be. Instead, it is the generalists who triumph.

By studying and practicing across multiple disciplines, generalists:

• Become well-rounded and capable of standing out.

• Pick up skills or knowledge in one domain they couldn’t in their focus domain (like a tennis player learning footwork from dance, or a chemist solving a problem with an experiment in biology.

• Finding connections between different subjects (so as to become polymaths).

• Sampling different fields to find the right talent and interest fit, rather than picking the first one you do.

This book was exactly what a younger me needed to hear. I had so many interests and hated the idea of picking and sticking to just one. Epstein’s book was the validation I desired that reading widely and practicing multiple types of writing was a smart move.

I was glad to know that the highest-achievers, though eventually prioritizing a few areas of expertise, still benefited from developing intellectual range throughout their careers.

Martin Eden by Jack London

What does it take for an uneducated sailor to transform himself into a successful writer?

This is the question answered in Jack London’s coming-of-age story about an autodidact, Martin Eden, who uses self-education to rise in society.

No book has left a greater mark on my relationship with reading than this one. It’s all the more impactful when you consider that many of the anecdotes about Martin studying are taken from Jack London’s life, for he too was a self-taught writer, and this is one of his most autobiographical works.

While the story’s ending is rather shocking, the rest of the book will light a fire under your butt to hit the books, while also giving you plenty of thrills at Martin’s regular intellectual undressings of the know-it-all bourgeois snobs who doubt him.

If you like Good Will Hunting’s “How bout them apples?” scene, you’ll like this underdog story.

Make it Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger II, and Mark MacDaniel

Make it Stick is the most scientific book on the list.

It uses scientific research to debunk study habits that don’t work (like mindlessly re-reading your notes), and replaces them with methods that do, like spaced retrieval practice and self-testing.

But it’s not all science. There are stories too, which the authors use to illustrate the principles of effective learning. If you want to get better at retaining what you read, this is the book for you.

How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrensthis

In the words of its author, Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes will “present you with the tools of note-taking that turned the son of a brewer into one of the most productive and revered social scientists of the 20th century.

The man he’s referring to is Niklas Luhmann, who happens to be quite the astounding autodidact, if you wish to look him up.

The system he’s talking about is the Zettelkasten (or slip-box) method of note-taking. I had heard a lot about this technique from non-fiction writers like Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, and Billy Oppenheimer, who wrote a good article about it.

I even tried to implement it and failed miserably. But now that I’ve read this book, I actually understand how to implement it into my reading and writing workflow. Well, to be fair, I think I understand it. I haven’t really changed my note-taking system yet. But I will likely use it when I get around to researching a book.

Anyone who wants to do better research, studying, or writing can benefit from reading this one, especially if you want to be able to combine seemingly unrelated concepts into new ideas and fresh insights (looking at you, aspiring polymaths).

The Lifelong Learning Compass: How to Design a Self-Education, Gain Real Expertise, and Balance Multiple Interests by Sam Rinko

Apologies, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to promote my upcoming ebook/ultimate guide, which I’m currently in the throes of editing.

The goal of the ebook is to teach you my system for designing and planning a self-education that helps you reach your ideal lifestyle and career goals, while still leaving plenty of room for the pure pursuit of curiosity.

The ebook will show you how to create a personal lifelong learning compass, my fundamental self-education planning and prioritization tool, which enables you to pursue multiple interests while still gaining usable expertise (so you don’t become a “master of none”)

Keep an eye out for the ebook. I’m planning to release it in the next few weeks. Obviously, when it’s for sale, I’ll tell you about it—perhaps more frequently than you’d like 🙂

Doing it alone can sometimes feel silly and hopeless, prompting thoughts like “who the hell do you think you are?”

But, if you stay the course, the intellectual results will occur — slowly, subtly, like a skilled philosopher laying out a nuanced argument.

In the spirit of helping you pursue your study of …

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My goal was to read a lot of books and essays about the topic and come away with a nuanced understanding of the reasons to self-study the humanities and teach them in schools.

I think I succeeded in this.

My targeted studies inspired 2 essays (both of which I’m proud to have written):

• The Secret to Creativity: A Well-Stocked Mind?

• What is The Purpose of a Broad, Book-Based Education? 4 Arguments, from Jefferson to Du Bois, Defending Liberal Education

Despite the overall success, I also made some mistakes I want to try to avoid next time I create a university-style course.

Today, I thought it’d be helpful to share what worked and what didn’t in my DIY course experience.

I hope that, by sharing my experience, I’ll help other autodidacts learn a thing or two about how to best design and execute their own DIY courses.

First, I’ll share my DIY course syllabus so you have some context before I get into 3 things that worked and 2 that didn’t.

My Recent DIY Course Syllabus

Below is the syllabus—feel free to copy the structure when creating your own DIY courses:

DIY Course Title: The Purpose of Humanities Education

Organizing Question

Why is studying the humanities, and in particular reading great books, important (spiritually, psychologically, morally, culturally, societally, politically), how is it imperiled (by political ideology, tech, and capitalism), and how can we preserve this ancient educational tradition, inside and outside of formal schooling? If we fail, what are the implications?

Learning Outcomes

• Learn to do a research project using books as primary sources.

• Experiment with a new note-taking method for your non-fiction writing.

• Learn to write a strong opinion essay.

• Gain working knowledge of different views on humanities education.

• Find new ways to lead a more intellectually serious and meaningful life.

Learning Materials

Books

• Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities by Martha Nussbaum

• How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok

• Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters by Michael S. Roth

• The Great Conversation: The Substance Of A Liberal Education by Robert Hutchins

• The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose

• The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis

Articles

• What is Liberal Education by Leo Strauss

• Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

• The Humanities: Then, Now, and Why by Marshall Gregory

Potential Essay Questions

• Why should you spend your time self-studying the humanities?

• Is a non-reading public more susceptible to totalitarianism? If so, why?

• Why is reading books, rather than consuming video, audio, or short-form text, so important for becoming an independent, nuanced, and creative thinker?

• What is the history of liberal education in the United States? (I ended up writing a slightly altered version of this one, focusing on the intellectual history of the debate around liberal learning)

• Why is humanities study essential to a good life / a good society?

• What threatens humanities education? How can we protect it?

3 Things That Went Well

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These guides to reading were helpful. They taught me the critical reading process — the steps you should take to effectively read a book and form a critical opinion about it.

But these types of books also had…

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I would hold my mother’s hand, and she would lead me from our home to the Pacific Palisades Elementary School a few blocks down the road, where it was safe again to look around.

On these walks to school, there were no killer clowns juggling machetes or strippers revealing themselves to unsuspecting pedestrians—nothing frightening or corrupting from which to shield my innocent eyes. There was just a bunch of debris on the sidewalk that, to a curious five-year-old, was impossible to not pick up. I was no environmentalist. I was just a young boy amazed by and addicted to collecting seemingly ordinary items. Everything glimmered and sparkled.

Today, 24 years later, there is a white, circular lunch pail in my parent’s closet. If you pry off the lid, you will get a strong whiff of mint and pine (artificial smells don’t disappear, I guess), and you will see a strange assortment of what appears to be junk: gum wrappers, bottle-caps, receipts—5-year-old Sam’s idea of a treasure chest.

I’m sure that at first my parents found this compulsive habit amusing and even a tad endearing. I’m sure they feigned interest in the rock, the bird feather, or the crushed pen (probably run over by a car) that their curious son had picked up. But as the average duration of these walks expanded from five minutes to twenty minutes, what with all my stopping, squatting, grabbing, and examining, it became a bit of a logistical problem. And so I was asked to close my eyes—a precaution I remember viewing, even as a child, as completely necessary and enjoyably silly.

This year, in an effort to recapture that childlike sense of wonder for the world, and avoid my phone, I’ve switched up my morning routine.

The silent morning walk

I have been starting my days with a silent 30-minute, 2-mile walk.

Silent means no headphones. I don’t check my phone beforehand. I had recently been checking it first-thing, scrolling for 30-minutes in bed before getting up. Enough of that. I wish to begin my day in the world, immersed in its sounds, sights, and scents.

Each morning starts the same. I force myself out of bed, put on shoes, sweats, and a coat, and walk my loop through the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood in Montclair, NJ.

On these walks, I try to observe the world around me. I try to notice the commonplace and uncover the magic hidden there. I try to feel awe for the little things that usually go unnoticed or unappreciated in the hustle and bustle of the day.

Much of what I notice is nature and wildlife. Today, I saw an orange-chested robin snap a red berry from the branch of a tree with its yellow beak. I heard muffled barks of good guard dogs erupting from a house I was passing. And I spent a lot of time staring at trees—did you know the bark of an ash tree looks like interlaced diamonds?

I even stopped for a few minutes to admire a massive sycamore tree I had walked by hundreds of times but never truly admired. It is the old sentinel of Porter Park.

On these walks, I also see humans, also a part of the natural world. Today, I saw a middle-aged man backing a white van uphill into a narrow driveway, temporarily blocking my path on the sidewalk as he readjusted his angle to avoid a stone wall. When he noticed me waiting there, he smiled at me, a slightly embarrassed, laughing smile. I smiled back at him. I walked away smiling, I felt the smile in my brain.

To me, it was as if we’d both shared a laugh about the strangeness of life—the fact that sometimes we have to back up big cars into narrow driveways at 7 AM. I’m proud to say that I did not kidnap the nice man and stuff him into a lunch pail.

Instead, I kept on walking and noticing. And when I made it back to my apartment and took off my parka, I felt more deeply connected to the world than I could’ve felt had I woken up to the sight of 10,000 likes on a recent substack essay. I felt in my bones I was a part of something mystical and grand.

“Spending time in nature enables you to sense the harmonious interaction of all the elements and forces of life, and gives you a sense of unity with all of life.” - Deepak Chopra

The Law of Pure Potentiality

There is a piece of advice I read a decade ago that deeply resonated with me but never successfully found a steady place in my daily routine, until now, during my silent morning walks.

It is the first law of Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success—The Law of Pure Potentiality.

A bit hand-wavy, but it feels deeply true to me as someone who has studied Buddhist meditation, believes in the healing and awakening power of nature, and wants to spend less time distracted by my phone and more time living in the real world.

I will leave you with Chopra’s advice:

1. I will get in touch with the field of pure potentiality by taking time each day to be silent, to just Be. I will also sit alone in silent meditation at least twice a day for approximately thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the evening. [or a silent, mindful walk!]

2. I will take time each day to commune with nature and to silently witness the intelligence within every living thing. I will sit silently and watch a sunset, or listen to the sound of the ocean or a stream, or simply smell the scent of a flower. In the ecstasy of my own silence, and by communing with nature, I will enjoy the lire throb of ages, the field of pure potentiality and unbounded creativity.

3. I will practice non-judgment. I will begin my day with the statement, Today, I shall judge nothing that occurs, and throughout the day I will remind myself not to judge.

She told me, rather nonchalantly, to just “read everything”.

Everything?

With millions of books out there, how was I supposed to pick which ones to read? The last thing I wanted was to read the wrong books and waste time. And what about literary criticism and theory?

While I perceived her answer to be mostly correct, I still wanted a more systematic approach.

So I asked her to elaborate. I perused university curricula. And I spent way too much time in the forums reviewing what literary scholars had to say on the matter of self-education in English Literature (a lot of them also say read everything).

Our conversation, that research, and my years of self-study in the subject all led to the creation of this 12-step roadmap for systematically teaching yourself English Literature.

The roadmap is designed for autodidacts who want a foundational education in literary analysis, criticism, and the great works of English Literature, without going back to school.

It will also help you become a better writer, thinker, and reader.

The steps in the roadmap are designed to be followed in order— each step builds on the last.

But it’s your education. Feel free to skip around the roadmap. Always let your curiosity guide you more than any program or book list. That’s the best way to stay motivated and ensure you’re forming your own taste and cultivating an original mind.

That said, let’s begin our journey through the stories, essays, poems, and plays that stayed with us—the stories that meant something.

Critical Note: There are a million different ways to self-study literature. I don’t by any means claim to have discovered the best path. I simply wish to share a roadmap that I wish I had when I was a newbie. I’m sure a beginner could make it far in the subject by just doing something similar to what my mom recommended: deep reading classics according to their interests. But this guide is for those who like a little more structure to their self-education.

1. Learn Your Literary Devices

Literary devices are techniques writers use to communicate meanings that go beyond what the words say on the page.

A metaphor may be deployed to create a feeling of disgust in the reader, an allusion to borrow power from another great work, and a symbol to convey double meaning.

It would do you well to review the most important literary devices, as they’ll be mentioned regularly in lectures and articles, and used frequently by the authors.

Being able to spot them will also make your reading of the great works of English Literature more enjoyable and your own writing about literature more impressive.

Pro Tip: Grabbing a good English dictionary is another great way to prepare for your readings. I know that when I’m reading a book, I’d like to avoid opening up my phone to look up a word; even just a text message from a friend can send me down a rabbit hole.

2. Watch Crash Course English Literature

In many of my self-education roadmaps, Crash Course earns an early spot in the steps. My fondness for the series owes mostly to the teacher’s ability to introduce academic subjects in an entertaining yet intellectual way.

Crash Course English Literature offers 45 videos, many of them analyzing and interpreting well-known novels, plays, and poems.

So it’s a simple way for the beginning autodidact in English to familiarize themself with some of the greatest works.

As is the case for any video series in English Literature, the lectures will hit harder and be more interesting if you have already read the work the teacher is discussing.

However, you can still enjoy these videos without knowing the plots of the stories beforehand. Consider them a good primer before you tackle them yourself.

3. Take 3-4 Introductory English Literature Online Courses

As an autodidact, it can help to test English Literature by taking some introductory online courses. This gives you a chance to determine if this is a subject you truly wish to study for the long haul.

You’ll have the benefit of a professor reading the books alongside you and providing you with their interpretations, hence displaying to you astute literary analysis in action.

Most courses work by assigning you classics to read. During the lecture portions, the teacher will point out things the uninitiated reader may miss on their first read.

For example, in Yale’s free “The American Novel Since 1945” course, the professor opened my eyes to the fact that the protagonist’s name, Haze Motes, has a biblical significance.

Below, I’ve listed some of the introductory courses I’ve found most helpful in trying to break into English Literature. The list spans three of the main literary forms: novels, plays, and poetry.

Taking all six courses would approximate what many English Literature majors do in their first two years at the University, excluding perhaps a course in English composition and gen ed courses like ECON 101.

Introduction to American Literature 1: Beginnings to Civil War

Professor Patel’s course, which he calls “bootcamp for English majors,” is one of the best courses I’ve found to learn about literature as a beginner.

The professor, who calls himself the drill sergeant, is enthusiastic and expects a lot from his students.

I highly recommend this if you want to learn about American literary tradition, American culture, interpretive techniques for reading, and a few core classics.

The American Novel Since 1945 (Online Yale Course)

The American Novel Since 1945 is a free Yale course found on Open Yale Courses (OYC). Its 26 lectures are recordings of live classes, so it feels almost like you’re actually at University. This course was one of my first impressions of academic English Literature. I loved it.

Throughout the course, you’ll read 14 of the greatest American novels written after 1945, tracing the major thematic and technical developments of the literary form during that period.

Among other books, you’ll get to study these heavy hitters:

• Black Boy by Richard Wright (eye-opening and beautifully written)

• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (my father’s favorite book)

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (deeply disturbing and poetic)

• The Human Stain by Philip Roth (one of my favorite novels of all time)

My favorites were The Human Stain (really prescient of cancel culture) and Black Boy. I liked starting with this course because its works were more current and as a result easier to connect with and enjoy than works from medieval England.

I was able to use novels that engaged me to build my literary chops up to a level that enabled me to understand and appreciate older, more difficult works when the time came to read those.

Sign up for Audible’s 30-day free trial to get a free audiobook.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner (Online Yale Course)

Another Yale free course is Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, which offers you the chance to study the major works of three of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.

Drawing on her knowledge of US history and modernism, Professor Wai Chee Dimock examines the interconnections between these three writers and their works.

Working your way through classics like The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury and watching their corresponding lectures will improve not only your ability to interpret literature, but also your understanding of US history around the turn of the 20th century.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet (HarvardX)

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is another free, self-paced course, this time created by Harvard and hosted on edX.

Reading Hamlet with Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt is an excellent way to get acquainted with the Bard and what many call his greatest tragedy, for which there are numerous interpretations, as you’ll learn in the course.

The course involves video lectures, a reading of Hamlet, and conversations with experts.

Here are some things you’ll learn:

If you’re into tracking how many books you read per year, it may strike you as counterproductive to focus an entire course on one work, let alone one character in that work.

If so, I beg you to throw that 21st-century notion of efficiency away. Many great writers of old read very few books by today’s standards. Thoreau re-read Homer’s works numerous times, always finding something new.

Just look at what he had to say in his chapter “Reading” from the book Walden:

“Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

Some works deserve a near obsessive amount of attention, for they have influenced so many other great works of literature, and have so many life lessons, meanings, and writing techniques to offer the careful reader. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is surely one of them. Dig deep into it, and you’ll be rewarded.

Modern & Contemporary Poetry (UPenn via Coursera)

Modern & Contemporary Poetry is a free, self-paced course created by UPenn and hosted on Coursera.

It’s an introductory level poetry course that takes around 93 hours to complete and is focused on US poetry, especially the experimental types.

By taking this course, you’ll learn how to analytically read poems that you may have thought difficult beforehand. You’ll also expose yourself to famous poems by writers like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and John Ashbery, thereby filling your mind with creative material.

One of the best parts about this course is how you can attend weekly interactive webcasts where you can discuss the poems with other students and TAs. This feature addresses one of the major gaps in self-education in literature: the ability to discuss literature in real-time with other intelligent readers.

Old English Literature: Language as History (The Great Courses)

Old English Literature is a self-paced online course hosted by The Great Courses, a website that The Wall Street Journal called “A serious force in American Education”.

This course will give you an understanding and appreciation of the foundations of English literary conventions and language, plus some cool knowledge about English medieval history.

By analyzing classic texts like Beowulf and discussing the origins and nature of the English language, Professor Renee Trilling takes you back in time to learn about the beginnings of the English literary tradition.

“Studying Old English language and literature is at once challenging, fun, and an utter revelation. It’s as close to time travel as you can get.”

-Renée R. Trilling, PhD

Exploring the language alongside the literary works it produces will reveal how the stories and words express the values and customs of the early English people, a people whose culture would soon spread across the globe.

If you take all five of these courses, give yourself a pat on the back and go grab a beer at a pub or something English like that. You deserve it.

With freelance writing and studying to do, it took me about two months to finish just that first course. So congrats. Now let’s focus on building up your powers of literary interpretation and analysis.

4. Grab a Copy of How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Noticing my recent uptick in novel consumption, my friend gifted me this handy book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor. It serves as a sort of crash course in literary analysis.

By walking you through common symbols (vampires, weather, illness, etc) and sources of intertextuality (Shakespeare and the Bible), Professor Thomas Foster teaches you how to find the deeper meanings within literary works.

For example, one chapter is about vampires, where Foster discusses how vampires in literature often represent not just a scary character, but also a man trying to steal the innocence of a younger woman.

Definitely grab a copy of this book and either read through the whole thing or use it as a reference guide when you read great works.

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5. Get Acquainted with Literary Theory & Criticism

University students often take a course in literary theory and criticism. Although the two disciplines are closely related, they do differ.

Literary criticism is the act of interpreting, appreciating, and evaluating a work of literature. It’s highly practical. In many of the online courses you’ll take, the lecturer is sharing their literary criticism as they discuss the work.

Literary theory, on the other hand, represents the different literary lenses through which you can view a work of literature. It’s therefore theoretical. It provides approaches you can use to get meaning out of literature and do literary criticism.

For example, a literary critic using Marxist literary theory to analyze 1984 will come up with different interpretations of the book than someone operating under formalism, a school of criticism which treats works as separate from their social and historical context.

For the dedicated autodidact of English Literature, it’s a good idea to get a basic grasp of these two disciplines. This enhances your reading experience and enables you to think and write more effectively about literature.

Here are some ways to study the fundamentals literary theory and criticism:

• Take Yale’s Introduction to Literary Theory: This free online course surveys the main trends in literary theory over the last hundred years. It tackles questions like what is literature, what is its purpose, and how does it relate to the reader?

• Read Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction: If short on time grab this book from the Oxford series of very short introductions.

• Review An Introduction to Literature, Theory, and Criticism: This beginner-level textbook will get you thinking about the biggest questions in literary theory and criticism.

• Peruse Essays of Literary Criticism on Your Favorite Work: You can often find books, articles, or essays of literary criticism on certain works. For example, I found this LOTR criticism book Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays.

If you’re really interested in these topics, then Benjamin McEvoy, a brilliant literary essayist and Oxford graduate in English Literature, recommends the books listed below for learning about literary criticism and theory like you would at Oxford:

I highly recommend checking out his YouTube channel or joining his book club Hardcore Literature as well. They’re excellent resources for the self-educator in English Literature.

6. Study an Annotated Copy of a Classic Work

At this point, consider reading an annotated copy of a great work, perhaps your favorite novel, so that you can see literary analysis in action as you go through the book.

In writing alongside the text, the annotator points out things like historical references, narrative techniques, underlying meanings, and other subtleties you may have missed when reading it on your own.

For example, here’s an annotated copy of Pride and Prejudice, which shows the original text on the left page and the annotations on the right one:

Annotations such as these are meant to enhance your understanding and appreciation of the work. Some copies also give you questions that will help you think more deeply about the text.

In her Medium Article, Author Amy Teegan (MA English) argues that reading annotated works is one of the best ways to learn to read and think about literature like an academic:

“Studying the annotations closely will not only teach you about that particular book, but it will also teach you what to look for in other books. What kinds of common symbolism literary critics recognize. What kinds of word play is notable and what kind of historical context these writers are operating in.”

To get an annotated copy, simply google “annotated copy of {work’s title}.” If it’s a well-known work, you’ll likely find one.

As you read, take your time and think critically about the annotations. Do you agree? What evidence is there to support the claim? And if you don’t, what annotation would you make instead?

Are you a beginner in the classics? Learn how I transformed from non-reader to avid reader of the classics in my article out my guide How to Start Reading the Classics (10 Steps for Beginners).

7. Form the Habit of Writing Book Reviews or Critical Essays

Now that you have a good basic education in English Literature, consider starting a blog or YouTube channel where you write book reviews or critical essays and publish them publicly on the internet.

This serves as an accountability mechanism, which is often missing in self-education programs. The simple knowledge that someone will see your work, even if it’s just friends and family, forces you to take studying the work more seriously.

As you read, you’re more likely to do the following active reading habits:

• Take Better Notes: You’ll write your own reflections on the prose or scene because those thoughts will be valuable when you write your review.

• Ask More Questions: You’ll mark down questions to investigate later for your piece, such as “why did this author choose this odd scene as their climax?”

• Read More Closely: You’ll inspect everything with a detective’s eye, searching to find something unique to share in your essay.

Then, when you go to write the review, you’ll have to revisit the notes and underlines you made when reading. This act of returning to and synthesizing notes helps you lock the information into your brain. You’re less likely to have that moment of frustration that occurs when someone asks what the book was about and you blank.

Writing reviews also forces you to think more deeply about the book in order to create a final piece that expresses an informed and sophisticated opinion.

As you write and rewrite, questions will arise like “Is that argument supportable?” and “How does that symbol I underlined enhance the scene?”

Plus, to answer these questions, you might have to explore what other writers and scholars have said about the piece of literature in their essays or reviews, which in turn enhances your own understanding of the work.

As an added benefit of publishing online, you may even be able to monetize your YouTube channel or blog down the line through ads or affiliate marketing, where you can get a commission cut if someone buys the book in your review. Perhaps you’ll get so good that you can make a career out of being a literary critic.

Here’s a cool video about how to get book reviews published in literary journals (although it’s for new books):

In sum, publishing online about the books you read forces you to be a deeper reader and a better writer, and may open up professional pathways in literature.

8. Pick One Literary Giant & Read Everything They’ve Written

Now that you have a basic understanding of literary analysis and have gained some exposure to the great works of English literature, it may be a good idea to do what Oxford English Lit students call the Special Author Module.

This is where you pick one author and read everything they’ve written. Doing this allows you to get a deep understanding of one of your favorite authors. You become an expert in them, especially if you’re reading critical essays about the writer’s works as well. This expertise can be a real boon to your confidence.

Also, by reading an author’s entire body of work, you come to see an overarching message that the writer is trying to communicate—their overall philosophy of life—and note how they developed as a writer, especially if you read them chronologically. You can see where they improved and how their ideas changed over time.

As for which author to pick, it’s best to pick an author you enjoy who is also influential in English Literature. In his video on how to get an Oxford English Education for Free, Benjamin McEvoy states that he did Joseph Conrad for his special author program.

Here were the other options for special authors when he was at Oxford:

Like any list of great authors, this one is missing some big names, so if you have someone else in mind, like Fitzgerald or Zadie Smith, go right ahead.

9. Familiarize Yourself with Some of Shakespeare’s Works

Shakespeare introduced 1,700 new words into the English language, and many of the clichés we use today in everyday conversation find their origin in his works. “Dead as a doornail” is from Henry IV.

And many later writers drew source material from Shakespeare, whether they meant to for effect, or whether they did so unknowingly.

Just look at all the common phrases we may say without citing their true creator:

Because he influenced language and later writers, familiarizing yourself with Shakespeare will enable you to spot references and nods to the great bard as you read later works, hence adding depth of meaning to the works.

Now, if you’re anything like I was, you’re a bit daunted by the task of reading Shakespeare. His writing is complex, poetic, and old.

To allay your concerns, check out this guide by Oxford on how to read Shakespeare for pleasure.

Here are five of the most accessible plays for beginners:

• Romeo and Juliet

• Hamlet

• Much Ado About Nothing

• Macbeth

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Many film adaptations of these plays are available online. Of course, if it’s possible, attending live plays is the best way to experience Shakespeare, and in doing so, you also support local theater groups.

Pro Tip: Consider reading the King James Bible as well. The Bible had a tremendous amount of influence on the poets, novelists, and playwrights of the English literary tradition.

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10. Read Through the Great Works of English Literature

Step 10 is the longest and most challenging step in the journey towards acquiring a deep and wide foundation in English Literature. It’s where you become well-read in English literature.

It’s time to put your critical thinking powers and reading skills to the test and listen to that advice English teachers love to give to the new student: “read everything!”.

Of course, by everything, they mean the great works of English literature, the canonical works. But this advice spawns two questions: What are the greatest works, and in what order should I read them?

Different scholars have different answers to the question.

A retired Phd who’s fed up with structure from their days in academia might tell you to just follow your curiosity or to find a reputable list online of the greatest novels ever written and read those in no specific order.

Others, like Jason Slavin (M.A. in English Lit), might recommend a more systematic, chronological approach. The key, however, is to read as much as you can, and to fashion a reading program that will keep you motivated.

Because every self-learner is different, I’ve listed a few reading strategies for the beginner in English Lit:

• Chronological Approach: Grab the Norton Anthology of English Literature and read through it from start to finish.

• Lite Chronological Approach: Use Susan Wise Bauer’s Novel reading list from her book The Well Educated Mind, reading one genre chronologically before starting the next genre. It’s worth noting that some are outside of the English tradition, like Dostoevsky.

• Oxford Approach: Read the works in the order in which Oxford English Literature students read them.

• Curiosity-Dominant Approach: Design your own reading list based on other reputable book lists and your interests, and then read within the confines of that list, but in no particular order.

I’ll go over each of these reading strategies in-depth to help you decide which is right for your goals and learning style.

The Chronological Reading Approach

In this strategy, you start in the Middle Ages and work your way through the ages to the present day. By doing so, you’re able to trace the thematic and technical development of English Literature.

This is what Jason Slavin recommends in his response to self-learning English Lit:

You also get the benefit of reading contemporaries alongside each other. You spot parallels in their narrative techniques and see references they make about one another, both of which provide useful material for literary essays and book reviews.

You’ll find a lot of people on Quora recommending the same approach. Many of them also tell you to get a copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which is a staple in English classes around the world.

This 3,192-page tome is a collection of the greatest works of English Literature and spans from Beowulf to the 21st century.

It includes many of the most renowned essays, poems, plays, novels, and short fiction in the English language and arranges them by author in chronological order according to when they were born. Each time period (Middle Ages, Romantic Period, etc.) and author get their own introductions.

According to Slavin, if you read through this entire backbreaking book and followed his procedure of creating a booklet of synopses for each time period, section, and major work, you’d be well-suited for a Phd program in English Lit.

The Lite Chronological Approach (And For One Literary Genre at a Time)

Feeling that I, an economics major, missed out on some liberal arts benefits in my college education, I read The Well Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had.

In the Book, Susan Wise Bauer, English Instructor and Author, teaches you how to intelligently read five of the major literary genres: history, novels, autobiography, poems, and drama, each of which requires a distinct reading approach.

She also provides reading lists for each of the literary genres, which are in chronological order. If you took this approach, you could work through 31 of the most influential novels of all time, then tackle the poems, then the dramas, and then the autobiographies.

I should note that not all of the works are written by native English-speaking authors, so if you want a strictly English Literature education, perhaps go with the Norton Anthology approach.

But, as a self-educator, you have freedom. And reading a few writers from outside of English-speaking countries will broaden your perspective and lend you a bit of worldliness, and perhaps some wanderlust. Plus, the best works of Tolstoy, Flaubert, and others are well translated into English.

The Oxford Approach

Oxford’s English department has a reputation for assigning a brutal amount of reading to its undergraduate students, as if they’re testing their dedication to the English Language.

In his video on how to get an English Lit Oxford Education, Benjamin McEvoy states that they nearly beat the love of literature out of him for good — he didn’t read a book for an entire year after graduating.

That said, as an autodidact, you get to determine your own time frame for your studies. There are only self-imposed deadlines for readings. So there’s no need to torture yourself, unless you’d like to.

If you want to study English with the curriculum of an Oxford student, check out his video and follow his reading plan:

As a preview, you’ll be reading the greatest English-language writers from the following eras:

• Modern: 1984, Heart of Darkness, Brave New World, etc.

• Old English: Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Riddles, etc.

• Middle English: The Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc.

• Renaissance: Utopia, Doctor Faustus, Essays of Sir Francis Bacon, etc.

• Restoration: Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels

• Romantic: Poems by Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shelley – Pride & Prejudice

He also recommends some books on the English language and literary theory.

This is a great option for someone who often feels doubt about their method of self-directed learning and wants to follow a plan designed by a prestigious institution, so they have confidence and stick with their self-directed studies.

The Curiosity-Dominant Approach

If you work best with as few rules as possible, consider using what I’ll call the curiosity-dominant approach, where you create a list of the greatest works you want to read, and then read them in no particular order, letting your curiosity pick what you read next.

That way, if you were planning to read Great Expectations next, but you see a video about Thomas Hardy that gets you excited about his work, you have the freedom to alter your course.

There’s enough structure to keep you from feeling like you’re not making any progress, something I’ve felt before as an autodidact when just reading without a program, but not too much structure that you feel oppressed and ultimately discouraged from the venture because you can’t read what you want to read at the moment.

If you’re going to use this approach, consider going through multiple lists like the greatest plays ever written or The Guardian’s 100 Best Novels Written in English, and selecting about 50-100 of your own to read. Try to get a nice mix of genres, but mostly pick from the ones you enjoy most.

This will be your reading program for at least a year (unless it’s all short stories and poems), and after finishing the list, you’ll have transformed into quite the literary butterfly.

11. Supplement Your Readings with Other Online Resources

As you’re reading the great works, consider using other resources to enhance your understanding of each work, to gain insight into the historical and cultural context in which it was produced, or simply to learn something new in the world of literature.

Sometimes this means listening to a YouTube video or reading an article interpreting an especially confusing novel that you just slammed down onto the floor in a fit of fury.

Other times it involves reading numerous literary essays to fuel your own critical thinking about one of your favorite works. It might mean watching a writer give a lecture or partake in an interview.

Typically, the more a work thrills or confuses you the more you’ll want to consult outside sources about that work and the author who wrote it.

Below are some resources to use to help you get more out of your self-directed readings and learn more about English Literature:

• CliffNotes & SparkNotes: These websites provide helpful plot summaries and interpretations of famous works of literature.

• Literary Podcasts: Many literary podcasts feature intelligent readers discussing great works of English literature. A few to check out are the On the Road with Penguin Classics Podcast and The Great Books Podcast.

• Online Courses: There are plenty of online courses that can give you a scholarly perspective on the work you’re reading or help you learn about some topic ostensibly disconnected from your current read, like this Udemy course on Edgar Allen Poe.

• YouTube Channels: Check out what booktubers have to say about the work you’re reading.

Reading a lot of literature written hundreds of years ago is rewarding but can at times be pretty tiresome, so it’s nice to have some other learning devices to fall back on when you want to be a bit more passive in your studies, like after a long day’s work.

Hearing what other people have to say about a novel or poem will also inform your own opinion and broaden your perspective.

I write more about the benefits of secondary literature in my article One Piece of Bad Advice Preventing You From Enjoying the Classics.

12. Follow Your Curiosity

As you get deeper into your studies, let curiosity be your main guide.

With a foundation in English Literature, you can start to focus on more specific topics that capture your interest.

Perhaps that means taking a course on The Life and Works of Jane Austen. Maybe it means creating your own 12-week self-education plan in a few literary topics you want to learn more about.

Whatever pulls at your attention should get heavy consideration as you go about your studies.

Following your curiosity is the best way to stay motivated as a self-taught scholar.

So, You Read a Lot of English Literature — Now What?

As you increase your exposure to great works, improve your critical thinking skills, and heighten your sensitivity to language, you’ll no doubt find yourself becoming more masterful in the art of expression.

You might also start to think about pursuing new career paths where you can use and cultivate these literary talents.

For example, you might find yourself desirous of attending a graduate program in English, or self-educating yourself in another subject.

Or perhaps you’ll want to become a writer. Maybe you’ll feel the urge to become an editor or agent who helps bring new great stories and poems into this world.

Whether or not this self-education in Literature has drawn you to a new career, you’ll have developed communication skills and worldly knowledge that will help you succeed in your current profession and live a deeper, richer, and more literary life.

Additional resources for self-studying literature:

• Three Forgotten Benefits of Reading Great Literature (New eyes, new mouth, new world)

• How to Self-Study Literature with a Habit-Based Approach (for people who want to learn literature using a system of small daily, weekly, and monthly habits)

• The Practical Benefit of Literary Interpretation (How the search for meaning in literary works changes you for the better)