While writing online, I’ve always felt like there’s been something off. A weird feeling of misalignment that I couldn’t quite articulate.
But then after writing last week’s essay, I realized what this is: I haven’t been taking my curiosity serious enough.
While I have been stretching myself and writing what I want to write about, the problem is that I haven’t had any high-level reading or research objectives to go balls deep on.
When I was thinking back to when I felt most alive in my life, it was when I was in class. When I was in high school and college, obsessively studying anything. Calculus. Biology. Chemistry. Philosophy. Spanish. I always loved the first day of school, excited to see that sexy little syllabus that would tell me what I was going to learn in the coming months.
Even if I knew I was going to forget everything on the first day after the final, I still wanted to learn because the pursuit of knowledge was riveting. Office hours was one of my favorite events of the week. I loved asking ridiculously specific and nuanced questions, like, why do populations, not individuals, evolve?
It took me a while to realize that learning is play for me. That watching Youtube lectures while eating dinner is delicious. As Bill Gates once wrote, “Learning is one of my favorite ways to relax.”
So while I’m still curious, the biggest challenge of being out of college is not breadth but depth. I do miss the rigor of a syllabus and strict learning schedule.1
Defining My Interests
Something I’ve learned after diving into David Perell’s writing is that the Internet rewards depth and writing for obsessive people. In his essay, “Audience-First Products,” he wrote about something I wish I knew earlier:
“Focus on resonance instead of scale. Most online metrics focus on how many people you reach, not the depth of relationships you build with them.
Ignore them, and make the Internet small instead. Define your interests. Then write about them. When you find a group that resonates with your writing and you want to connect with them, write for their interests.
As you do, you’ll make it easy for others obsessed with that interest to find you. When you write in-depth about an off-the-beaten-path subject, you’ll attract people at the outer edges of the personality curve. Use it to shrink the world, and surround yourself with like-minded people.”
For the past two months, I’ve done some intense information fasting. Besides my vice of binging Marc Rebillet on Youtube, I consumed no podcasts, audiobooks, or TV.
This gave me some much-needed breathing room for long-lost questions to pop up. Things that the Twitter engagement trap trampled on:
How is technology and TV changing human consciousness and the human experience?
Why are Beethoven’s Piano Concertos so beautiful? What makes Beethoven’s music so special?
What are the basic principles of physics, biology, and music theory, and how can I use them as unique mental models for life?
Homer’s epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey were around before people could write (things down). Whatever was said must be wise and essential to understanding the human experience. What did these books say?
What is cholesterol and ApoB? Why, again, is there no such thing as “good or bad” cholesterol, according to Peter Attia? What’s the biology behind this?
What does it mean to be psychologically healthy?
What did Carl Jung write about?2
I think about these things from time to time, but I haven’t given myself permission to explore them.
Some of this was because I didn’t know which topic to start with. Some of this was because I’m strangely scared to commit to learning something in depth. And some of this was also because there was still a script from school that said that I can’t learn about what I want.
Of course, I also wondered: who the hell listens to Beethoven’s Piano Concertos? But then I realized that people like me do exist. Like last week, I came across a college kid’s Twitter account. He used to be a classical pianist and now writes online. You know what the highlight of his orchestra career was? Performing Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto.3
If I trust that there are other obsessive polymaths like me out there, I just have to go for it and trust myself in finding answers to my own questions. As the architect Howard Roark sternly says in The Fountainhead, “Those who want me will come to me.”
So, how can I better go balls deep on my deepest interests?
Old and Obscure
I think the best approach is creating a learning curriculum for myself.
I’ll commit to learning a chunk of material. It’ll be something similar to a college class. But instead of “Intro to Philosophy,” it’ll be a specific topic, problem, or question I want to explore.
Then, I’ll carefully curate a cluster of books and supplemental Youtube lectures that I think will help me with my studies. Following David Perell’s reading heuristics, I’ll steer myself towards obscure and older books so I have unique ideas to write about:
“I try not to look for the best books. Instead, I hunt for forgotten old books and under-valued new ones. Crucially, this heuristic guides me towards ideas that nobody is talking about.”
I’ll also look for higher barriers of entry to further give myself an information advantage:
“Read books that intimidate you. Have a bias for books that would push most people away. These books are either too long, too difficult, or too counter-intuitive, but they will likely contain information that will give you an edge and spew out interesting, unexpected ideas.”
Time
As I commit to depth, time constraints will be critical. Some expeditions will take months. Some will be like a pit-stop at a drive-thru. I’m still not sure how to space it out, so this is an ongoing experiment. The sweet spot seems like 1-3 months per project.
Right now, thanks to Thoreau, I’ve committed to slowly studying The Odyssey. I’m going back to the very wisdom that inspired Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.
While I understand that the liberal arts aren’t meant to be read with a clock, I’m imposing one on myself for now. I need it. So for Homer, I suspect it’s safe to spend about 2-3 weeks slowly reading The Odyssey.4
Then I’ll spend August studying it and writing about it. I don’t think it’s wise to write about the entire epic in one essay, so instead I’ll probably choose the most exciting themes and ideas. We’ll see.
However long each learning expedition takes, I want to spend this time doing three things:
Reading, researching, and contemplating the raw materials. Have conversations with ChatGPT to accelerate my learning. Use Youtube to find supplemental lectures. Find someone to interview on a podcast and chat about the ideas further.
Figure out the idea for myself. Teach people what I’m learning by writing essays to clarify and cement my own thinking. Here I’ll remind myself of a rule I learned from a mentor: “Short stuff gets more views. Long stuff gets real views.”
Share highlights of my essay with the world on my email list and Twitter.
As for this Substack, I’ll still be shipping something every week. There’s always something for me to write about. Then when I’m in the writing phase of the project, I’ll write about it.
How Will This Make Money?
I’m still not sure how this will make money.
But by going deep with this curiosity curriculum, I’m eventually going to stumble into a specific problem that me and my readers will share and that I can solve.5
David Perell wrote more about how this works:
“Define your own intersection of ideas by writing about topics nobody else is writing about and putting a name to your perspective. When you write about a specific topic, you’ll find you and your audience share common challenges that double as areas of entrepreneurial opportunity and topics to write about. As you write this way, you will define your unique lens on the world, share it passionately, and attract both casual friends and professional collaborators.”
What Society Wants…
The curiosity curriculum is simple. First, I have to trust my own taste for ideas—no matter how silly or specific they seem.6 Then I’ll scope out the project, get obsessed, figure out the idea for myself, and share what I’m learning online.
Then, I’ll repeat this for a few years or decades.
By doing this, I’m uncovering a unique domain of knowledge that leads me to one of my main objectives of my 20s: figuring out who I can uniquely serve by using the scale of the Internet. It’s probably gonna take me at least 5 years of hard work.
But I believe this is a powerful, meaningful, and future-proof pursuit that will unlock opportunities that I can’t even predict right now. As Naval Ravikant said:
“Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.”
So does this mean that writing about Beethoven, Brave New World, and biology will get me to where I want to go? Maybe. Probably. At best, this cauldron of educational chili will lead me to where I’m meant to go.
Notes
So why not go back then? Because I want to do it my own way. Because college doesn't cater to my curiosity nor really help me become a better online writer. I only want to read and research deeply about topics I'm most interested in. The vision is that by taking my curiosity seriously, I'm going to eventually find a problem and solve it using the zero-cost scale of the internet. The product may also just be writing books.
All of these questions deal with timeless things that don't really change in the arts and sciences. There's the unchanging human condition, and then there's the laws of physical nature. I'm interested in it all and am fascinated to see how I can connect all these weird ideas in the written word.
On Sunday, I met an online friend in Austin. I learned that he also happens to listen to Beethoven and classical music. We’re gonna go see the concertos together in October. My audience is out there, and so is yours.
When I say that I'll be spending 2-3 weeks reading, I'm really saying that I'm making a daily commitment to reading for at least 2-3 hours every day. Along with writing, reading, and watching supplemental lectures, I'll be spending anywhere from 30-40 hours a week on this (including weekends).
As I'm writing this, my initial plan was to also read The Iliad. But I just read most of it, and it's pretty boring. I don't think I've seen enough life and death to appreciate the story beyond the depth of its gory. So another critical piece of this curiosity curriculum is just being honest and flexible with myself when I'm bored. This isn't school, and time is scarce.
I suspect that the most aligned business vehicle for me will be writing books. Books may be my only product. I've also thought about paid newsletters, coaching, and retreats, and I'm excited to see how it unfolds now that I'm more religiously following my Curiosity.
I came up with those strangely specific questions you read above after reading a heuristic from Paul Graham:
“So try asking yourself: if you were going to take a break from ‘serious’ work to work on something just because it would be really interesting, what would you do? The answer is probably more important than it seems.”