An Autodidact's Bible

Reclaiming Your Mind #1

This year will finally see the general release of my book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. In this book I attempt to codify everything I have thus far learned about self-education in every part of life, from physical crafts to intellectual hobbies to how to integrate knowledge into your life.

Last year was a tumultuous one—I’ve detailed some of the more harrowing episodes in my tales of brushes with death and in my recent post on learning to live without chronic pain. The people I’ve met through my long years as a writer and artist—including several of you here—proved key to helping pull me through the difficulties. It’s time for a big thank you.

Most of the people I’ve run into here on Substack are here either for politics or for intellectual stimulation—in other words, you’re either pugnacious or curious (or both).

Therefore, in advance of the publication, I have decided to serialize my book-length love letter to pugnacious curiosity. Over the next few months, Reclaiming Your Mind will appear here in its entirety here. Some of the serial will be publicly visible. Some parts will be tucked behind the paywall, as will an ongoing discussion for those reading. Whether you support this ‘stack with your cash, or merely with your time, I hope you are able to glean from this book some techniques and paradigms useful to your own quest to further your education, expand your horizons, and enrich your life.

So, without further ado, I present to you the opening pages of the volume…

---

Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible

Along Came a Spider

THERE IS A WEB unique in the universe. In its final state, it stretches out for miles in every direction, anchored here to the ground, there to a tree, there to a gargoyle on an old library, there to a star, and here to the center of a human heart.

The web was not always so grand. At the beginning, it was barely large enough to catch a meal. But, in the beginning, its mere existence was enough to make it grow.

Every piece of dust wafted by the wind, every fly that happened by, every stray fiber that stuck to its first delicate threads strengthened it, solidified it, expanded it, and made it more flexible.

Not every web grows to such a scale, nor displays itself with such grace, but this one has. The spider at its center spent a lifetime spinning threads of curiosity and anchoring them to each other and to every available surface.

Who built this web? A crooked timber from which nothing straight was made. A rude creature, small, and unremarkable—on its own, it doesn’t look like anything special…

...until you look at its web.

Its web? It is built of knowledge. The structure is built not of facts, but of the relationships between facts. The facts themselves are incidental—they are the result of inquiry, but they are not its object. The object is the structure itself, and the thread spinners are the tools of thought that make up epistemologies, experimental processes, and error checking protocols.

Every person is a spider in their own web, but their web is nested—itself a smaller section of the web that makes up the family they grew up in, which in turn is nested in the culture (or cultures) in which that family dwells, and those cultures in turn forming pieces of the sum total of human understanding, which finally stretches a thin film across the vast depths of time and space itself.

You are the spider spinning the work of art that is your life, and especially the life of your mind. It is a functional artwork—it has to support your weight and the weight of the decisions and challenges you will face throughout your life. It must be robust—even antifragile—to give you the strength, meaning, depth, and flexibility you need to face down a cruel, capricious universe with grace, dignity, and ballsy enthusiasm.

This book is your engineering manual, your aesthetics guide, and your foundational design elements library. It is a toolkit to help you spin strong threads, to connect them in useful, constructive ways, and to enjoying the results of your labors by helping the gains in each area touch and enhance all others.

So let me start…

...by spinning a yarn for you.

By Way of Introduction...

I WAS WHAT PARENTS of my era called a “difficult child.” Had I been born a generation later, I’d surely have been drugged to death, strapped down, and forced to undergo re-education to dampen my disagreeable and mischievous tendencies. Oh, I knew how to play nice, and I was curious as all hell, but I was the kind of student teachers dread: an engaged one.

Don’t let them tell you differently. It is a rare and valuable teacher who will tolerate a student that is actually interested in the subject matter.

Sounds fishy, right?

Well, put yourself in their position:

You’re making only a moderately acceptable wage to provide childcare and “education” for a group of 20-40 unruly minors. You have a set amount of curricula you need to get through every day, and your job security and/or performance pay might depend upon the children’s ability to efficiently regurgitate what you’ve told them. You want them—no, you need them—to shut up and listen, take notes, and follow instructions. The last thing you want is a child that’s interested in really learning what you have to teach. They speak up too often, they interrupt your lessons with questions, they slow down the pace of instruction, they make logical leaps that take them all over the place and touch on points of curricula that are weeks or months or years out in the future, they confuse their classmates, and they generally screw up your neatly programmed content delivery schedule.

I was that kid, and like most “that kids” I entered school with straight-As and, within a couple years, was struggling to maintain a B average. My report cards tended to have notes like “has trouble following instructions” and “does not live up to potential” inscribed upon them.

My afternoons I spent raising hell with my three brothers and a dozen other neighborhood kids. My evenings I spent lost in the fantasy worlds I found between book covers and discovering the obsessions that would eventually animate my adult life. My weekends and vacations I spent sneaking in and out of classes at the private college where my father was paid a below-living wage to teach history, theology, and a number of other archaic subjects whose names I could barely pronounce.

In light of the above, you might suspect a fundamental mis-match between how my mind works and the way the school system is set up. You would be correct in that suspicion. You might suspect further that it caused a great deal of difficulty and trauma. In this suspicion, too, you would be correct. I took my first steps towards life as an autodidact because of this mismatch. In the subjects for which I had a natural affinity, I found it impossible to abide by the sluggish pace and pedantic structure imposed by my teachers. In the subjects where I had difficulty, I had difficulties because my mind would not engage with the subjects as presented—why, for example, did subtraction and division not follow similar rules, where addition and multiplication did?

Worse, still, I seized upon heuristics and maxims and attempted to apply them everywhere to see whether or not they really were valid (and, if they were, how far they applied). More than one innocent teacher, Sunday school facilitator, and mentor would find themselves on the pointy end of a critical thinking tool they’d just handed me, and feel flummoxed by the betrayal.

I am not alone in all this. Those with high intelligence, those on the autism spectrum (lots of overlap with the high intelligence brigade), the musically gifted, the over-empathetic, the coldly empathetic, and anyone with too much energy to sit still for six hours straight at eight years of age frequently find themselves washing dangerously between Scylla and Charybdis: Do I conform and squash everything that I am? Or do I rebel and risk everything I have?

It didn’t help matters that, in addition to being incapable of conformity, I grew up in a household that frequently did not know where the next meal was coming from. Poverty and non-conformity are not a winning combination for social success in grade school. Talking like a weirdo is nowhere near as bad as dressing like a thrift store refugee and eating like you’ve taken a holy vow of macrobiotic misery. Put all three together? Well...that would be a whole different book.

But, in spite of the frequent disincentivization (and my best efforts) I could not force my curiosity into a box, so I did the next best thing: I indulged it. Haltingly, sometimes destructively, often rashly and stupidly, I learned how to teach myself the things I wanted and needed to learn. I learned how to haunt the faculty lounge at my father’s college, and hustled pool in the student union so I could listen to the undergrads argue about things I found interesting. I devoured any book that could hold my attention, I developed a knack for acquiring mentors, and, predictably, I fell for one intellectual and religious fad after another.

I did continue with my formal education, after a fashion. I dropped out of high school to attend community college because high school got on my nerves. At the age of sixteen, I was working minimum wage jobs full time in order to pay for the gas and insurance and maintenance on my car so that I could make it to classes where I spent the rest of my meager paycheck on books and note-taking supplies and rather prodigious amounts of coffee, which kept me awake during the after-class bull sessions at the Denny’s near the school.

But I wasn’t very good at hewing to the program. I still hadn’t gotten it through my thick head that schooling is about credentials, rather than about education. I took the classes that interested me and learned about bureaucracy (and the impotent rage it can induce) when I tried to sign up for classes that were reserved for those on a “degree track.”

Having nothing better to do at this impasse, I moved on to a four year school where I had a one year scholarship offer. Knowing that I would not be able to afford a second year, I loaded up on the classes I most desired, gorging myself on Keats and Yeats and Poe and Byron and everything else I could get my hands on.

I continued in my college career for a full decade, trying desperately to earn a degree that would certify me as a fit member of society, but finances thwarted me again and again. When, on the verge of concurrently earning my BA and MA, one of my schools lost their accreditation, I called it quits. I was out of money, out of options, and I had soured on the two careers I’d worked to qualify for (teaching and clinical psychology).

But I didn’t stop learning. Or reading. Or experimenting.

In the midst of all my educational misadventures, I had also developed a taste for writing (an addiction, really. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone, despite the daily podcast I have hosted for the last several years on the subject).

Now, many years on, I’ve written thirty books, dozens upon dozens of short stories, articles, and essays, owned four companies (and even made a profit on a couple of them), taught courses in classrooms and at professional conferences alike, mentored a number of successful young engineers and entrepreneurs, produced a number of podcasts and albums, and successfully maintained a close relationship with my arch nemesis-cum-spouse for over a quarter of a century.

So, that’s me, in a nutshell. I learned to teach myself things because I was incapable of learning in the traditional fashion. That disability on my part, and the pain it brought with it, has opened the world to me in ways I could never have imagined.

My intellectual and physical travels have taken me through Silicon Valley, the film industry, the publishing industry, the recording industry, various ends of academia, the occasional particle accelerator, brought me into contact with steampunks, cyberpunks, hackers, burners, venture capitalists, con artists, hookers, cult leaders (and their victims), drug dealers, slaves (yes, literally), spies, diplomats, cops, and through at least four major worldview shifts that have knocked my political and religious convictions for six.

And what have I learned from all this?

I have learned, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I know far less than I ever imagined possible. Hopefully, by the end of this book, you will come to enjoy a similar level of ignorance—and the light of possibility it shines upon even the darkest corners of the world.

In the next installment, we will explore the obstacles to self-education in: Learning How to Learn.