How to learn anything on your own
12 principles for building a mind that doesn't need anyone to tell it what to think
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The following letter is part of our “Distilling Books” collection, in which we extract the most revealing ideas from literature.
🏷️ Categories: Learning, Mental models.
In 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression, an eccentric man named James T. Mangan wrote a book with a perhaps overly ambitious title: You Can Do Anything!
And Mangan took it seriously.
Twelve years later, he would go on to claim ownership of outer space in its entirety and found his own country: Celestia.
He took what was laid out in his book about being able to do anything seriously... History remembers him as a strange character. Honestly, it’s not hard to understand why. Among the extravagant ideas in his book hides a treasure that no one knows: a practical guide on how to acquire knowledge.
Mangan gathered 12 ways to learn and think for oneself.
The more you read them, the more you realize the guy maybe wasn’t as crazy as he seemed... Some of his ideas could change the way you seek answers, feed your curiosity, and above all, think for yourself. I’ll tell you in advance, ChatGPT is not your best friend for everything.
These are his 12 keys.
Let’s get to it.
1. Practice
The best way to learn is to practice what was learned.
Everything else is information that passed through your head like water through a colander, leaving barely a trace of moisture, something quite different from understanding. You can read 10 books about lifting weights and still be unable to lift anything if you don’t train. You can watch 100 videos about finances and still be stuck if you don’t invest.
If you look around you, you’ll see that most people are at the “I know that” level.
Something quite different is the “I can do this” level.
If you want to learn and truly make the most of the time invested, take action.
Most of us give up on the first or second attempt. But whoever truly wants to learn, whoever truly desires to know, will persevere until they achieve it. Practice! — James T. Mangan, You Can Do Anything!
2. Ask
We were all born asking questions without shame. That’s what children are like. “Why?” “How?” “What’s that?” Any three-year-old bombards the world with curiosity. Then school arrives, or tired parents, or classmates who mock the one who “didn’t understand,” and you shut down.
We learn to pretend we already know, and that’s the worst mistake.
The wisest people are willing, even eager, to share it with whoever asks. Asking doesn’t make you less. Almost everyone who doesn’t ask does so only to pretend they know, I saw it with my own eyes during my university years.
Your ego will finish you off if you believe ignorance is a reason for shame.
Always ask to get to the bottom of the matter.
3. Know yourself
This is one of the most underrated ideas.
Much of what you need, you already carry within you, only you’ve never put it into words because you’ve never forced yourself to do so. You have already lived through as many conversations, challenges, failures, and decisions as it takes to have a buried gold mine that you ignore. There’s raw material in you, it needs polishing, but you have a lot to say.
To transform all this into knowledge you must write it down.
Knowledge is only knowledge when it takes shape, when it can be expressed in words or reduced to a principle; and now it’s your turn to get to work on your own gold mine, to refine the raw ore. — James T. Mangan, You Can Do Anything!
What topics do your friends or family come to you for advice about?
What things do you know how to do that you take for granted, but others don’t master?
What could you talk about for hours without getting bored or running out of ideas?
What do you do frequently and naturally, that others tell you “is difficult”?
What have you lived through, overcome, or learned from personal experience that you could teach someone who is just starting out?
What is “normal” for you may be, for others, a guide, inspiration, or solution to a real problem they’ve been searching for for a long time. You just need to start recognizing the value of what you already know.
4. Circle the question
People tend to operate in system 1, that is, they decide instantly and by impulse.
The elevated mind walks around the idea before expressing its opinion.
When you examine something new, whether it’s a philosophy book, a business plan, or criticism of your work, your first instinct is to look at it from the angle that already confirms what you think. It’s more comfortable, but it condemns you to seeing only one side of everything you examine, while the object has infinite sides if you move around it.
Circling the question means being willing to investigate alternative perspectives.
Don’t ignore the broader dimension of your work. Don’t be afraid of hurting yourself if you have to change a preconceived opinion. Have a free, open, and unprejudiced mind! — James T. Mangan, You Can Do Anything!
Always seek alternative options and information contrary to your beliefs.
Ask yourself: “What data could prove me wrong?” You’ll have a complete view and avoid confirmation bias. As Charlie Munger said: “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
5. Experiment
Try something you don’t know will work and observe what happens.
There’s no need to try crazy things. Think about making small modifications to your current environment and routines. Launch that project you had in mind. Try that podcast. Start writing on Substack without a clear plan.
There is implicit knowledge in practice that theory will never reach.
You’ve known this since you were 5 years old. It’s the reason why just reading about how to ride a bike doesn’t let you ride it. You need to learn everything related to movement and the balance sensations perceived while pedaling. As my father used to say: “there are things that are easy to learn and impossible to teach.”
You need to experiment for yourself.
6. Teach
If you want to know if you really understand something, try explaining it to another person without using the jargon you memorized. This is the basis of the Feynman technique.
Teaching will help you discover the exact moment when your knowledge has gaps and stops being pure clarity. Teaching forces you to anticipate questions, you’ll need to express yourself clearly, be logical, and know how to delimit concepts. In the process of trying to transfer what you know, you’ll end up mastering the learning.
This is one of the reasons why writing has skyrocketed my learning.
If you want to master the art of learning through this technique, read this.
7. Read
Reading is the timeless way of transmitting knowledge.
Perhaps one of the best, but only if done proactively. Passive reading fills you with others’ opinions disguised as your own knowledge, so you must always question what you read, turn to alternative sources that support or question what you read, and not take anything for granted without going deeper yourself.
If you need to read to acquire knowledge, read critically. Don’t believe anything until you understand it, until it’s clearly proven. — James T. Mangan, You Can Do Anything!
Deep reading is quite an art, if you want to master this learning technique, in this article I cover all the keys to getting 100% out of every book read: How to read a book (for real).
8. Write
One of the most forgotten techniques in the present.
Writing is thinking on paper. When you write to explain something, you’re explaining it to yourself first. How many times have you written something just so you wouldn’t forget it, and then discovered you never needed to check the note because you’d already learned it by heart in the act of writing it? It happened to me dozens of times.
It’s similar to the process of teaching, but this time you teach yourself.
If you have difficulty expressing ideas clearly, if you struggle to develop a concept, or if you see that your paragraphs lack order, you already have the answer: those are the aspects you don’t yet master and about which you must learn more. For this reason, please, write every day, even if it’s just a diary, it will change your life.
Until you articulate your ideas cleanly on paper, you haven’t mastered it.
9. Listen
You have two ears and only one mouth. Use them in that proportion.
When someone speaks, give them the chance to finish before your mind starts preparing your response. Hemingway already said this: when someone speaks, listen carefully and stop thinking about what to say.
Pay maximum attention when conversing and you’ll find infinite value in every chat.
99% don’t stay quiet, that’s why they can’t hear the value in the rest. Don’t be one of those.
10. Observe
There are only two types of experience: yours and everyone else’s.
Yours is slow, costly, and often painful. Everyone else’s is available for free, all the time, right in front of your eyes, without you having to suffer any of their mistakes. All you have to do is keep your eyes open, something nobody does because they’re looking down at their phone.
The landscape is interesting, revealing, full of novelties and meaning.
Observe the person who won to understand the mechanism behind their success.
Observe the person who lost to recognize the flaws in their attempt.
The whole world is a free classroom for whoever pays attention.
11. Define
That’s right, like dictionaries.
A good definition includes everything the thing is, and excludes everything it is not. If you’re able to recognize a chair when you see it, describe it in maximum detail so that no one can doubt how to identify a chair by your definition, you’re doing well.
If they doubt your definition upon seeing a sofa, table, or stool, you failed.
This example is everyday, but apply this concept to your most elevated and technical knowledge. Imagine that, studying finance, would you be able to make a detailed glossary of all the key concepts someone should know and define each of them with high precision?
That’s the crux of the matter.
Learning through the process of writing is broader.
Defining helps you compartmentalize your mind better.
Give names to your ideas, order them into a scheme, give them hierarchy.
I’m sorry to say that, until you can define a chair or a door (or any other everyday object), you don’t actually know what they are. You can recognize and describe them, but you cannot determine their nature. Your knowledge is inexact. — James T. Mangan, You Can Do Anything!
12. Reason
It’s the only thing that distinguishes you from a machine.
Animals have knowledge. They react, learn by conditioning, repeat patterns that worked for them before, but they cannot reason. The more you reason, the more you move away from living on autopilot, reacting to stimuli like any other biological organism programmed by instinct.
The good news is, you don’t need years of formal study.
You need to compare the points of an idea, notice the similarities, do basic statistics to see which ideas repeat and which are anomalies. Perceive differences and detect what lies behind those anomalies. Seek the theoretical framework of all those scattered ideas you saw. Elaborate your theory and conclude with data.
This is reasoning.
It is, without exaggeration, the highest form of knowledge that exists, because all the other forms on this list only give you raw material.
Nobody is going to build your mind for you
If you put together these 12 ways of learning and gaining knowledge, you’ll notice something the traditional education system never offers you: the knowledge needed to be able to learn everything on your own. None of this requires a classroom, certificates, or permissions. The mobile phone is the greatest university in history, open 24/7 and from anywhere in the world.
Do you see the people around you taking advantage of this enormous potential?
Exactly. They use the phone to scroll, not to educate themselves.
All it requires is having a small spark of motivation, wanting to go beyond the minimum the education system imposes on you. The potential is enormous and can, literally, change your life forever.
Stay curious, the potential of the 21st century is infinite.
— Álvaro
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:
Why is intelligence declining? The Flynn Effect and the drop in IQ
A notebook to reclaim your mind: The tool to escape the scroll
P.S. I also offer 1:1 consulting to help you grow on Substack.
If you’re just starting out and don’t know how it works, or if you’ve been at it for a while but are stuck, this will help you. I’ll help you find your direction, position yourself as a leader in your niche, and build a system tailored to your needs for sustainable growth.
My credentials? Over 100,000 global readers in 2 years, 100% organic growth, with 300,000 monthly visits. All from scratch, writing all by myself in my spare time.
If you’re interested, email me at: jardinmental@proton.me
References
Mangan, J. (1936) You Can Do Anything!