I started my journey working construction and reading philosophy. I spent time reading Aristotle, Confucius, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Kant, Nietzsche, etc. Even to this day, I feel like my thinking has been influenced by them considerably, but as for actual progress in my life, I feel like they have had a detrimental effect. During my late teens and early twenties when I was mostly into reading philosophical works, I fell in a deep depression that has improved a lot over time, but was really hard to deal with when I was younger. I started having difficulty connecting with people and eventually lost all of my school friends and moved to California.

When I was in California, I kept reading. By this time, I was reading religious texts, history, psychology, works of fiction, and anything that I thought would have a positive influence on my thinking. Life was moving fast and I thought that things were finally getting better. But, I couldn't land a decent job. I thought that the copious amount that I was reading was going to translate into an opportunity, because somebody would notice that I was eager to add value to their organization. But, it never happened. So, I decided to upskill. I started web development and learning programming skills.

It didn't really make sense to me at first, but I learned the basics. Then, I got in a car accident. I, eventually, got paid out $45,000 from the insurance claim and kept working on my skills. I took courses on Coursera and Udemy on graphic design software, CAD, GIS, and project management. I moved back to where I was originally from and landed a job at a Civil Engineering firm.

I was having post-traumatic stress disorder and the beginnings of psychosis. So, after working there for 6 months, I was fired. I moved to Nevada afterwards and kept learning. While in Nevada, I built a web app that took me 3 months and tried to get a remote job. Didn't get any. I made over 30 posters in Adobe and Inkscape and started to experience extreme forms of psychosis. I was diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder and given medications. After spending time in Nevada, I decided to try moving to Las Vegas and getting a job there. I ended up becoming homeless and traveled to Los Angeles, where I was homeless. I traveled back to Las Vegas and after some time, my cousin flew me back to where I was from to live with my uncle.

Since moving back, I've worked on writing, graphic design, 3D modeling, programming, and learning new things like SEO and Business Analysis. I wrote one novella, two short stories, made over 10 animations in Blender, and created a few websites. I keep trying to learn new things and I face mediocrity in them, while struggling to find work for them. Online courses and resources from the Internet only teach an aspect of the things that I have wanted to learn about and I reach an intermediate level before I taper off and can't improve any further. Without a mentor, a network of peers, and an environment to apply and learn new things, improving past a certain point has been something that I have had difficulty with. So, that's what I'm working on now. But, just reading and taking online courses haven't improved my mentality and skills where I feel comfortable taking something to the market and working in a job. In some ways, it has been counter-productive for me and has led to me struggling more than I would have if I had just gone to college. But, that has been my experience so far.

TLDR: Reading, learning skills from the Internet, and applying them to projects only help to a certain point. And, without a mentor, a network of peers, and an environment to apply them in and learn new skills, it has been extremely difficult to advance past the intermediate stage to be able to bring something to market or land a job.

I did this as a genuine experiment not a productivity flex.

Bought a simple time tracking app, logged every learning related activity for three months, tried to be honest about what counted and what did not. Podcasts while commuting counted if I was actually listening. Did not count if it was background noise. Reading counted if I finished the page remembering what was on it. Did not count if I had to reread the same paragraph four times because my attention was somewhere else.

The total hours were fine. More than I expected actually.

The categories were the problem.

Broke everything down into three buckets at the end. Learning that produced a change in how I understood something. Learning that produced a feeling of having learned something. Learning that produced neither and was essentially just time spent near information.

Bucket one was about fifteen percent of the total.

Bucket three was bigger than I want to admit publicly.

The most uncomfortable finding was where bucket three was concentrated. Not the passive podcast commutes I had already written off mentally. The high effort deliberate sessions. The ones where I had sat down with intention and a good source and worked through it carefully and felt productive throughout and retained almost nothing a week later because the effort had gone into processing the words and not into actually engaging with the ideas.

Effort and engagement are apparently not the same thing and I had been using effort as a proxy for learning for years without checking whether the proxy was accurate.

This might sound silly, but after getting to a place where I was hardly reading at all, I really struggled to read anything. I used to love reading but after burnout from work and life stress it just fell to the wayside. I got to a place where I was spending most of me free time on video games and scrolling on my phone.

I really wanted to get back into reading, but honestly, couldn't figure out how. After years of a friend urging me to read One Piece, I finally started it. Just a little at first, honestly, I didn't even enjoy One Piece that much initially.

Then I pushed my way through until I started getting invested. I went from reading for maybe 5 minutes every night before bed to 30. Before I knew it, I had created a evening reading habit because I started to love One Piece. The manga is so long that this habit went on for months before I was caught up and by the time I finished, I had a strong habit of reading for 30 minutes a night before bed.

Then I just pivoted to reading other things. Again, it was easy stuff. Fun fantasy books mostly, nothing too challenging.

Over time I built up the ability to read for extended periods of time again, to focus, and to enjoy it. Then I slowly worked my way up to more challenging books.

Now reading is a breeze again and I knock out a book a week on average, counting the occasional audio book.

The real tip here is this, don't force it. Find a way to make what you want to do fun and engaging, then ease your way into things. Even if it takes a year of easing into it.

I wrote a Substack article about my experiences with the above for anyone who is interested on my personal reflections about reading One Piece here: https://overduebooks.substack.com/p/how-one-pirate-saved-my-love-of-reading

Not talking about your job or degree. I mean some random piece of knowledge or skill that you picked up over the years and now you’re kinda surprised other people don’t know it.
Could be anything from reading people, fixing cars, remembering history, cooking, investing, languages, psychology, whatever.

What’s the one thing you could probably give a 10-minute TED talk on with zero prep?

Hoping learning something new (which I love to do) will connect me back to myself more.

I have a lot of interests such that I kind of get decision paralysis on which to focus on, so I’m hoping wisdom of the crowd can help me find some good first steps.

Hobbies I tried and liked:
- philosophy - took a night class at a local uni and enjoyed it
- an analog video art workshop
- intro to DJing

Ones I’m considering:
- a short story book club at my local library
- a mixology course
- woodshop class — would love to make my own furniture
- more DJ classes, more video graphics classes
- graphic design class

Any other recommendations or activities on the list you think I should start with?

Hoping for 2 hobbies:
1) one that can easily be easily self directed home
2) a hobby / class out of the house to make sure I be myself in the real world and maybe make some friends

I’ve been thinking about how much of our education is built around grades, exams, certificates, and eventually getting a job.

But some of the most valuable things we learn have nothing to do with any of that.

Maybe it was learning how to cook properly.
Maybe you learned a new language just because you liked how it sounded.
Maybe you finally understood personal finance.
Maybe you learned to play an instrument at 35.
Or maybe you simply learned how to be comfortable being a beginner again.

I think there’s something different about learning when there’s no exam at the end. You can be curious instead of trying to be “good” at something.

Lately, I’ve been trying to approach learning more like exploration: pick something interesting, spend a little time on it consistently, and accept that being bad at it is part of the process.

What’s one thing you learned purely because you wanted to, not because school, work, or anyone else required you to?

Creator: Pranav Rajkumar Kalhapure.

A while back I got bored of taking notes the "normal" way — copying whatever the teacher wrote, forgetting it a week later. So I started messing around with a different structure, mostly out of frustration, and it slowly turned into something I now use for basically everything: studying, journaling, even planning random personal decisions.

I call it Q.O.I.D. — Questions → Observations → Ideas → Done.

Here's the actual breakdown:

Q — Questions. Before I even start on a topic, I write down what I genuinely don't understand or want to know. Not "what will be on the test," but real curiosity-driven questions. This part alone changed how I sit through class — I'm listening for something instead of just absorbing noise.

O — Observations. As I go through the material (or the day, or a conversation), I jot down what I actually notice — facts, patterns, contradictions, things that surprised me. This stays separate from opinions or conclusions. Just raw noticing.

I — Ideas. Only after I've got questions and observations do I let myself form ideas. This ordering matters more than I expected — when I used to jump straight to "ideas," I was really just recycling opinions I already had. Doing it in this order forces the ideas to be downstream of actual attention.

D — Done. A short, deliberate close. What did I land on? What's the one-line takeaway? This step stops the loop from running forever in my head — it gives me permission to actually finish a thought instead of endlessly circling it.

The whole point of the loop is that it forces a kind of intellectual honesty — you can't skip to "here's what I think" without first admitting what you don't know and what you actually saw. Most note-taking or thinking systems I'd seen before either front-load conclusions or never actually close the loop. This one does both — it holds curiosity and closure in the same structure.

I didn't build this from a productivity book or YouTube video — it came out of just trying to fix my own boredom in class. I only found out afterward that it overlaps a bit with existing ideas like the OODA loop or reflective learning cycles, but the "start with questions, end with a forced decision" framing feels like my own thing.

Curious if anyone else has landed on something similar independently, or if there's a name for this kind of "curiosity-in, decision-out" loop I haven't come across yet. Also happy to share how I use it for actual daily study blocks if anyone wants specifics.

I only recently found out that peanuts aren't actually nuts — they're legumes, meaning they're more closely related to beans and lentils, and they grow underground instead of on trees.

For some reason, I spent my whole childhood confidently telling people "peanuts are nuts" like it was a scientific fact, and nobody ever corrected me 🥜🤯

I created 'Ashmere' so learning philosophy is genuinely fun and full of animations. Would love for you to try it out!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.philosophize.app

Sometimes the information was always there—we heard the advice, read the quote, or saw other people talk about it. But it didn’t really click until life gave us enough experience to understand it.

I have been putting together a list of learning resources for different subjects, mostly pulled from what people keep recommending on Reddit, quora and other places. Not something I came up with myself and not an AI-generated list either. I tried to collect what already gets recommended a lot and why.

I started with psychology, trying to find out what people recommend when they ask where to start learning it, from beginner resources to more advanced ones.

Here is the psychology page: https://knowsift.com/subjects/psychology

Genuinely not sure if this is actually useful or not. I would appreciate feedback. Thank you.

At what moment you feel your ignorance in its totality, wisdom starts to sprouting in you.

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I’ve been thinking about this lately.

Every time I learn something new, I realize how much I don’t know. I’ll spend weeks learning about a subject and finally feel like I understand it. Then I come across something more advanced and suddenly I’m back at the beginning.

At first, that used to frustrate me.

Now I’m starting to think that’s actually the point of learning.

You don't really reach a stage where you can say, “Okay, I know enough. I’m done.”

There’s always another book, another skill, another perspective, another question.

I’ve also noticed that the older I get, the less interested I am in learning things just to pass exams or collect certificates. I want to understand things that genuinely interest me and develop skills that make me think differently.

So I'm trying something simple: one meaningful thing learned every day.

It could be a page from a book, a new concept, a language, a practical skill, or even something I learned from making a mistake.

I'm curious about everyone here:

What are you learning right now, and what made you decide to learn it?

Could be about money, relationships, career, health, technology, confidence, or literally anything. For me, I think one of the biggest lessons is that consistency beats motivation. You don’t need to feel motivat