The Definitive Guide to Learning Anything

Learning and potatoes have two things in common:

They’re nutritious, and they come in many forms.

A few years ago I was asked to help a kid who was struggling in school. She was bright, creative, and utterly un-served by the education she was getting. I spent five or six months sitting down with her almost every night to talk about learning and thinking, and over the course of the project, I wound up organizing everything I’ve ever learned about how learning, knowledge, and thinking works.

So I put it into a book:

I’ve written about these ideas, I’ve talked about them on podcasts, and now, the book is meeting the world in its final form.

For the next few weeks, Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible is Kickstarting. This is the book that philosopher Jordan Hall (deepcode on Substack) calls:

“the kind of tool a serious learner in the 21st century should keep close at hand.”

Data scientist Holly MathNerd reviewed it yesterday. You can read that review here.

Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn podcast loved the book. You can listen to our conversation about it here.

I appeared on the Opium Tales podcast to talk about it as well.

In one way or another, I’ve been working on this book my entire life. As I’ve revised and edited it over the past couple years, I’ve come to believe that the long road to publication has been worth it: it puts the debut right now, at a time when sense-making and self-possession are in short supply and more necessary than ever. Getting this into your hands means the world to me.

From epistemology to memorization, from information triage to creativity, from iteration to systems analysis, from bullshit detection to mythopoetics and ethics, this book covers everything you need to know to teach yourself anything.

Funding now:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/awpbooks/reclaiming-your-mind-an-autodidacts-bible

Update: We just met our funding goal, so tomorrow we’re rolling out stretch goals—audiobooks, workbooks, and more.