How to Become a Self-Taught Expert (Just do these 3 things)

I wish someone had told me this sooner

You don’t need a college degree to become an expert in most subjects.

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.

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: 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: Petya K. Grady 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: Paul Musso, PhD 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.