# Personal curriculum How do you decide what/when to learn, and from whom? Lately I've been thinking a lot about how to structure my learning. Where do you start? How do you decide what to learn? In which order? Who are the people to learn from? As you're learning, how do you soak in the information and make sure to retain it? Is that the goal or are you just looking for nuggets? Do you take notes? Is there a sliding scale of usefulness here? Lots of questions, and it appears these can be the difference between a life of wasting time cramming random information into your brain and a journey of becoming a learned individual. There's probably not one "right" answer - but at the current juncture I've been a fan of letting my curiosity take me where it wants to go. There reason is I'll be much more *apt* to actually learn the thing I'm interested in and curious about. Or at least more so than trying to force a boring subject. There is a caveat to the above idea, which is to shorten the timeframe from becoming curious about something and learning about it (time will most likely decay the curiosity) and then to make sure to take a big bite out of the learning target. For example, I find myself much happier when I read a few articles, look up some definitions, watch a couple of videos, listen to an audiobook and then discuss the topic with someone as opposed to just doing a quick online search, seeing a snippet, and moving on. In other words, I want to get a real grasp of the idea more than a teensy nothing. Where I've in the past had a propensity to struggle is sticking with the topics for extended periods of time. I tend to pick up the gist of things pretty quickly, so the repetition needed to become a master of a subject becomes a challenge, especially if my curiosity moves on to something else. How I've been handling this phenomena recently - and my modus operandum moving forward - is to create a file or folder in my learning machine (I use Obsidian.md to store my personal knowledge vault) and start compiling information about the topic. As I add in new topics, I'm also building out the structure of the vault. For example, I got interested in intelligence agencies and spy stuff recently, so I expanded my library to be able to handle information of that type, branching into countries, history, the agencies themselves, etc. This way, wherever the curiosity leads me, I'll be building permanent infrastructure and compound my learning as well as scratch the itch. By doing it this way, I can not only go as far as I want into any particular subject at any time and create a benefit for myself, but I can also pick back up wherever I left off if my interest leads me back to that topic more than once. This time, however, I can refresh and push my knowledge forward. That being said, my next challenge is to figure out how to balance what I think I should learn to push forward my career and craft (communication skills) with the randomness of my natural curiosity. Sometimes they overlap, and then great! When they don't I'm thinking as I write this out the best way would be to carve up my day into directed and undirected learning. Allowing the chaos of unstructured and random learning has been rewarding, so I want to allow time for that. Yet I greatly value the ability to move forward in my craft. This seems like a suitable construct. If useful, I'll report back in a later post how it's been working out. Until then, hopefully you've been able to take something useful from this stream of consciousness. PS Let me know how you do it! I'm so curious how you structure your learning journey.