Designing Your Own Learning Curriculum

Because being a Learn It All works better yields better results than Know it all😄

As an experiment, I went ahead and asked my friends this question,

So, hypothetically, if you were to hire me for a role, what role do you think I would fit in?

I got a bunch of answers. The usual answers which I got were like this,

Something creative, in tech / design probably. I think it’ll fit your hippie outlook.

PM/Growth most likely

Head of Curiosity

But, when I look back in my life, I didn’t study tech/design anywhere.

I studied Economics in college but ended up dropping out in the final year because it was boring😅 and I was deeply fascinated by technology.

This fascination somewhat came to life when the founder of a company where I was an Intern at, recommended me to read up Zero To One by Peter Thiel.

Those days, I didn’t have the money to buy the book so I went on to the Big Brother Google, searched and downloaded a torrent file of the ePub version of the book, and downloaded it is instantly. And I spent the next 7 days reading and re-reading that book on my 4.7 Inch Xiaomi Redmi 2 I had bought for my previous internship stipend.

That was perhaps the first time I got introduced to real Silicon Valley and damn, I was fascinated with the people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams(He is still one of my favorite people out of everyone here due to how he came up), Jack Dorsey, etc etc.

Then, as the first step, I went of paulgraham.com. That led me to Y-Combinator’s How to Start a Startup videos, and there I saw a bunch of videos which made me scratch my head, seeing all these people talking about crazy growth numbers, a million users in a week and etc etc. It felt like these guys were cut from an entirely different cloth.

And well me, I was just a 18 year kid from India.

But, then, I sort of decided to take things in my hand and try to push myself through. And I work at Prism Labs, a Y-Combinator backed startup now.

The question is, how did I end up coming here? I didn’t take up a course of something like that which directed me to come here!

These are not steps exactly, not even a framework but just my way of picking up and learning things on the way.

1. YouTube Videos
2. Podcasts
3. Blogs
4. Twitter
5. Apprenticeships[Most Important]

Prior to this, here’s a quote which you will find super relevant by the end of the day.

In conclusion, the easiest way to achieve success in a field is to copy the reading and learning habits to top 0.01% people in that field.

Okay?

Now, moving on, we will be taking things one by one from the above list here:-

YouTube

Well, I think YouTube as a method of learning is very underrated. There was a book, which I came across few years, which basically asked me to search on YouTube about the topic and I would always something to learn.

You can learn a good amount of Ruby out of such videos in 4 hours.

Along with this, platforms like Udacity and Udemy are also good choices if they work for you. They didn’t really work much for me.

Mind you, along with these videos on YouTube you also find a ton of great advice like this.

My opinion is that you can learn a bunch of stuff about a topic just by searching about it on YouTube.

Podcasts

The first podcast which I ever listened to in my life was in 2017 😆, it was Startup by Gimlet Media.

StartUp Podcast

In the podcast, the Host Alex Blumberg talks about how he started Gimlet Media, how he took the leap, found a cofounder, raised money and other moments of his journey. I was personally very happy to see them getting acquired by Spotify previously this year.

So, yeah, after this, I got introduced to a bunch of podcasts such as The Knowledge Podcast by Farnam Street (Shane Parrish) and The Tim Ferriss Show, Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, Freakonomics, How I Build This(Reddit episode is my favorite) etc etc.

Very recently, I have become a fan of 20 Minute VC, Venture Stories by Village Global, a16z Podcast, YC Podcast and North Star hosted by David Perell.

Blogs

I also frequent blogs a lot, very recently I have started visiting personal websites of people I like.

Here’s a list of folks whose personal websites I frequently visit:-

1. Patrick Collison(https://patrickcollison.com)
2. Harshita Arora (https://harshitaarora.com/)
3. Daniel Gross (https://dcgross.com)
4. David Perell (https://perell.com)
5. Naval Ravikant (http://startupboy.com)
6. Alexey Guzey (https://guzey.com)
7. Paul Graham (http://paulgraham.com/)
8. Sam Altman (http://blog.samaltman.com/)

Prior to this, I used to spend my time learning on Medium, Reddit, HN, Quora, and Pocket. These were the most frequently used apps on my phone for quite a while.

Twitter

On Twitter, I don’t tweet much although I plan on doing so.

The way I use it these days is that I spend a ton of time going through the likes my favorite people on the Internet.

Here are some of those people:-

I would add GRITCULT and David Perell to the list here.

Naval Ravikant on Twitter is and will be my evergreen favorite.

Want follow recommendations? Josh Wolfe has some amazing lists.

I am a TRUE Twitter shill

Apprenticeships

The most important thing out of all the steps here is this: Apprenticeships.

All the things mentioned will translate to nothing if you don’t do complete this step. This is the real world test for you to come and play with things that you haven’t even seen before.

You can become a good operator only by working under a good operator and emulating them. You can become a good marketer only by working under a good marketer. [Well, if you are looking to be a CEO, go take up a Chief of Staff role somewhere 😄]

I hope all this will help you in your career and figure out a self learning structure of your own 😄

BTW, If you think this article has added some value in your life, please leave some claps 👏👏

Also, follow me on Twitter!

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