On the Inception of the Project
The documentation of a life of near obsessive continual learning, the ongoing addiction of realization, the Polymath Project.
When I graduated from college I hit a wall.
For sixteen years I had been in school, from first grade to the end of my undergrad, focusing on my education as my main responsibility in life. I had every educational avenue open to me and I took it for granted. I studied Philosophy and Literature for four years feeling truly at home for the first time with the work I was doing, but as soon as I felt like I was hitting my stride, it was over. I felt like I was floating out in space.
Now, I'm four years out of college and I'm finally starting to pick up the pieces and understand how to recreate that environment of learning and growing. Slowly over that time I've changed little things about the way I take in information, how I organize it, and what I have to show for it. It wasn't until my learning became completely unstructured that I found a way to build it exactly how I wanted it.
The biggest question that kept me from moving forward was a simple one that had always been answered for me: what should I be learning now?
The question of what you learn next has always been fully decided by a myriad of people quite far removed from you. It starts with a team of people creating the education standards for your state, then down to the district where you went to school in their choice of curriculum, then to your principals and teachers, then finally what you receive is the byproduct of all of those individuals and their expertise on the different topics you're required to know. Even once you get to college all you have to pick is a topic and the department heads take care of the rest. Reading lists, essential questions, projects and products; all of it outside of your control.
Once you leave education, at whichever level you choose, all of that structure completely falls away.
For a time I thought of simply continuing my education at another institution at the masters or doctorate level, but at that point in my life, the financial burden would have been all but detrimental. When having to answer this question on my own I looked at the root of why we go to school in the first place. What it is that we need to know to make us well rounded and whole. This is where I stumbled on the term polymath.
Instantly this term caught my attention. What would it mean to be a modern day polymath? What are the subjects I would have to pursue to maintain a well rounded education and to even bring it further? To me, it models loosely the same structure as public school education but with variations and evolutions I picked up along the way, but the first thing I did, was make a reading list.
This reading list grew some legs and became the basis for mini "courses" I made for myself, soon becoming full curriculums and syllabi that I was developing to help guide myself forward. All of this culminates into what you're reading now. The documentation of a near obsessive life of continual learning, the need to keeping breaking through and understanding, the ongoing addiction of realization, the Polymath Project.
It is my absolute pleasure to be writing this and to be sharing this with the world. I hope that this helps spark some interest into your own journey of learning.
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