0053 - Put Your Self-Study on Steroids: The Interview Learning System (with Shane Radliff)

It’s amazing to live in an age where all knowledge is at our fingerprints! You don’t have to transcribe ancient texts at candlelight in a monastery or do questionable menial tasks for a guru anymore to gain access to some knowledge. I had a two-hour round trip commute to the university - I quit midway when I figured out I could learn more than what a whole day in higher education had to offer by simply reading a business book in the same time.

That said though, self-study has its fair share of challenges. Some of the reasons we’re not all already Internet-fed renaissance man geniuses are as follows:

It can get lonely…

Reading books, listening to podcasts, taking online courses - neither of these is a particularly social endeavour. Other than the most extreme introvert, most of us can benefit a lot from the synergy of group learning.

...As well as hard to demonstrate

While degrees are dime a dozen these days, they still prove that some level of effort was put into their achievement and that something similar can be expected in an employment situation. “Trust me, here’s a list of books that I’ve read” is not an easy sell (it did work for a few people, however).

It lacks guidance

For a beginner, staring any complex field of study in the eyes for the first time is a very scary experience. Where do you begin? What’s good material and what is rubbish? What a good level to aim towards? These are often questions that are hard to answer without the aid of someone already knowledgeable in the field.

The speed of learning is unpredictable

Take any course, and you have a very clear finish date. You’re going to go and show up x days of the week for y hours, and you’re going to go through z material - because you “have” to. I’ve been consciously focusing on my own productivity, routines, procedures, goal-setting, and motivation for 2 years now, and still, it feels like the stars must align just the right way sometimes for things to be finished in their planned time.

It’s too easy to abandon

There’s a lot of inertia when embarking on getting a degree or a specialization: once you’re on that raft, you’re probably going to float down all the way, detours or not. Quitting university is hell for a number of reasons. Quitting self-study often costs nothing and involves just you. Wake up, delete a folder, boot a game or Facebook and you’re out. From 21 to 23, I’ve picked up and dropped at least five different lines of study.

Now that these flaws are spelled out, we can probably come up with a number of solutions for each individual problem. But how about fixing all of them in one go?

The Study of Direct Action

My friend Shane Radliff had an ambitious goal, and self-study just didn’t seem to cut it. He was aiming to create a comprehensive database of direct action - alternatives to politics, ways to create personal freedom without asking for permission, or being dependent on the choices of large groups of people.

The problem? There are at least 25 different approaches, and many of them are not particularly well-documented. He couldn’t just sign up for the course, or buy the encyclopedia of actionable freedom.

Collecting all of thi