About The Self-Taught Scholar

Traditional education has a strange relationship with actual learning. We spend years in classrooms, accumulate credentials, and often walk away feeling like we missed something essential. The promise is that structured curriculum and expert instruction will produce capable, knowledgeable people. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn't.

The real issue isn't that universities are useless—they're not. It's that they've become the only legitimate path to education, and they're expensive, slow, and increasingly disconnected from what people actually need to know.

Meanwhile, real learning keeps happening elsewhere. A single book can restructure how you see the world. A weekend project can teach more than a semester of theory. Conversations with practitioners reveal what textbooks hide. The most valuable education often happens outside the classroom—yet we keep pretending otherwise.

Liberal arts education—the kind that teaches you to think across disciplines, to see patterns that connect ideas, to write and reason clearly—is genuinely valuable. But it's been gatekept by institutions that charge six figures and take four years to deliver it. That seems like a problem worth solving.

The Self-Taught Scholar is my attempt to build what I wish had existed: a cross-disciplinary curriculum organized around transferable principles rather than credentials.

The structure is simple. Four schools of knowledge—Pattern & Play, Story & Expression, Society & Self, and Making—represent the domains that matter most for understanding the world and doing meaningful work. These aren't arbitrary categories; they're the pillars that support almost everything worth learning.

Content is organized into Atoms and Scrolls. Atoms are bite-sized concepts—foundational ideas you can learn in minutes but build on for years. Scrolls are curated learning paths that combine atoms into coherent journeys. Think of atoms as Lego bricks and scrolls as the instruction manuals that show you what to build.

The philosophy behind this comes from Scott Adams: being excellent at one thing is hard and risky, but being good at several complementary things is achievable and often more valuable. A programmer who writes well has an edge. A writer who understands psychology creates more compelling work. The combinations matter more than the individual skills.

This isn't about replacing universities. It's about providing an alternative path for people who want to learn without going into debt, who want cross-disciplinary thinking without arbitrary prerequisites, who want to build capability rather than collect credentials.

I went through the traditional path—business and math as an undergrad, data science in grad school. The credentials look fine on paper. But looking back, the most important things I learned came from outside the curriculum.

A single book like "Zero to One" reshaped how I think about building things. It took maybe eight hours to read. Entire courses didn't have that impact. That gap between time invested and insight gained has always bothered me. Why does so much formal education produce so little actual understanding?

Jordan Peterson once said something that stuck with me: focus on the things that bother you and try to make them better. Education bothers me. Not because learning is hard—it should be—but because we've built systems that make it harder than necessary, more expensive than it needs to be, and less effective than it could be.

So this is my attempt to fix what I can. I'm not naive about it—one person can't redesign education. But I can build something useful, test what works, and iterate. Maybe it helps a few people learn more effectively. Maybe it becomes something bigger. Either way, it's better than just complaining about the problem.

I'm building this in public, which means you're seeing it in progress. The Library of Atoms is growing—foundational concepts across the four schools, organized for easy reference and spaced repetition. The first Scroll is in development, a structured learning path that will combine atoms into a coherent curriculum.

The blog is where I work through ideas about learning, education, and cross-disciplinary thinking. Essays will go deeper on foundational topics—the kind of evergreen pieces you can return to. Everything is connected; reading one thing should make you curious about another.

This approach is deliberately iterative. I'd rather ship something useful and improve it based on feedback than spend years building in isolation. If an atom is confusing, I'll rewrite it. If a scroll doesn't work, I'll restructure it. The goal is to create something that actually helps people learn, not to prove that my initial design was correct.

Right now, I'm focused on building the foundation. Growing the Library with essential atoms across all four schools. Developing the first Scroll—a structured learning path that demonstrates what this approach can offer. Writing regularly about the ideas that underpin all of this.

If this resonates with you, there are a few ways to get involved. Subscribe to follow along as the platform develops. Read the blog to see if this perspective on learning matches yours. And if you have thoughts, feedback, or questions, reach out. Building in public means building with the community that forms around the work.

This is version 0.1. It will get better. Thanks for being here early.