in Tarot, there are four suits: wands, cups, coins, and swords. Their respective concerns are spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual
of all the suits, swords are considered the most painful
the prowess of the mind is a double edged sword. Thinking is the highest paid skill on the planet. It is also the downfall of many who wield it. This is evident in the personal lives of Einstein and Socrates
respect the power of your mind. In self-learning, there are no guardrails. Use it efficiently, and do not let it consume you
be bloat-phobic
our society is setup for the production quantity, rather than quality, of content. We praise repetition, rather than iteration
but avoid making endless discoveries, blog posts, and observations. Go back and refine what you have. If you do not organize your thinking in such a way, you will write the same things again and again, and will never make any meaningful connections between your thoughts enough to make the jump from knowledge to wisdom
be a conduit of information, not a sponge
school places emphasis on memorization, which i think is a mistake, because it over-emphasizes the memory-aspect of your intellectual capacity
no one talks about how impressive Alan Turing was as a historian
find a way to make whatever you are learning about the most interesting thing in the world. Once you do that, you can ditch the notes and spaced repetition and all the other fancy techniques that you’d use to study for a test. Because the most interesting bits of information will stick while your mind frees up the clutter you don’t need
don’t get addicted to systems
when i was learning how to learn, i got lost in a lot in the systems: Traperkeepers, Pomodoro timers, Timeblocked calendars, Kanban boards, Zettelkasten notes, and useful tools like Obsidian and GitHub. Experimenting with these tools is an important stage of development, but it’s important not to become to overly focused on using the systems themselves and let the right way to use them emerge naturally
systems should serve your learning. Not the other way around