Structured Learning

Source: Youtube - Vaughn Gene

Structure

1. In general, the only difference between someone who is self-taught and someone who has gone to school or university is just structure and actually applying what is in that structure.

2. With that being said, the overall idea here is that,

   when you are learning something, build out a course for ourselves and kind of pretend that you are in school, or pretend that you are involved in some curriculum.

   This is the secret to maximizing online material, and not getting caught up with all the shiny objects or random videos that kind of come up in the process.

Creating Your Own Course

1. I would highly recommend using Google Docs or Notion or whatever.

2. You can even draw it on a sheet of paper for now, but label some categories marked something like beginner phase, intermediate phase, and advanced phase.

3. You also want a thing called references.

4. And so every time you find a video, you want to take the name of the video or the link with it and put it into one of these categories.

5. If you have a book, you can put the name of the book into one of those categories, or an article or whatever.

6. The main point here is

   whatever you find, startsto place it into categories, and this is you building out this course.

7. As a bonus tip,

   if you’re able to find an actual curriculum from a college or university or something on the internet, try to go off of that.

8. This is actually how I learned software engineering for the business that I run now.

9. I’m self-taught, but all I did is, I looked up different curriculums from Harvard and these other universities, and whatever they listed, I just found videos based on those topics and I would start to study it just like that. So you can do what I did.

10. This also works well for music.

    1. You can look up like a Berklee curriculum or some other college of music and see what you want to learn in order.

11. This isn’t a mandatory step, it’s just helpful if you’re really lost.

    1. But if you have more of an idea, just go with what you feel.

12. That being said,

    as you make this course, don’t pile up too many videos (or articles, or other types of resources) initially. Try to get some to give you a confident start and then get started.

13. Get a couple beginner videos, maybe something intermediate and maybe something advanced.

    1. That way you kind of have something to look forward to.
    2. But once you have that, go ahead and get started on the beginner videos.