What Are YOUR Life Lessons?

And how does one learn how to learn

When I was young, I had a healthy disdain for the education system and an unhealthy regard for my own ability. I thought that the system could teach me little that would be useful to me later in life. I was right. I thought I was smart enough to figure things out on my own. Yes and no.

One of my favourite quotes, misattributed to John Lennon but actually by a man named John Saunders, goes thus:

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

Everything important that I have learnt in my life, I learnt because life happened to me. Sometimes shit happened and I was paying attention. Sometimes I was not paying attention when shit happened, and figured it out later. Sometimes I was lucky enough to come across a book or person at the right time. I spent most of my life drifting, purposeless if we define purpose as something beyond daydreaming.

All of what I learnt was piecemeal: one lesson at a time, disjointed from a larger framework that could help me make sense of it all. Over time, I did gather those frameworks, and made an effort to fill the fundamental gaps in my knowledge. But it took time, and time is the scarcest commodity.

I would sometimes think, Shit, how I wish I knew all that I know now when I was 20. Some of these learnings would have been wasted on me — some lessons can only be taught to you by life. But there are other things I could have learnt in a week that took me years to figure out.

Introducing Life Lessons

It’s taken me years to put together this course as well. From at least 15 years ago, I’ve been thinking about the essential life lessons we must all learn to make the most of this world. The education system fulfills many functions—sorting, socialization, credentialism etc—but not the one that matters: learning how to live.

But what could that vague term, Life Lessons, even mean? My first intellectual challenge was to figure that out. At one point, I started having these conversations with my friend Ajay Shah. This was years before my writing course, my podcast or the YouTube show Ajay and I do. “We should put together a course sometime and teach it,” I suggested. “If I was offered such a course, I’d sign up for it in a flash.”

The need felt even more urgent over the last couple of years. We are barraged by information every day, scrolling and swiping from sensation to sensation, trapped in different kinds of vicious cycles, with scarcely the time or energy to step back and make sense of it. AI will soon make many of our skills redundant: what should we learn to remain relevant? And also, the original question: what do we need to know to live a good life?

Well, Ajay and I are taking a stab at it now. Please check out our Life Lessons page: the first cohort starts in November. There will be 15 webinars spread over five Saturdays. There will be an exclusive community that grows with every cohort. There will be one in-person get-together every year. Everyone in the first cohort gets to sign up for a special introductory price of US$1500, and gets to be part of a future cohort for free.

We launched 10 days ago and already have 38 sign-ups. We were planning to cap the first cohort at 40 participants, and I didn’t expect it to sell out so fast. We’ll close registration in a couple of days, so hurry if you are interested! Also, check out the curriculum, and share your views in the comments. Please let me know what else you’d have liked to see in there. What are the essential skills everyone should have? And, perhaps most importantly, what are the biggest life lessons you have learnt?

The course is a work in progress. So are we.

Learning How to Learn

The most important skill today, in my view, is learning how to learn. I pride myself on being able to do this well — I can take a new subject, enter a rabbit hole, figure out first principles, and build my framework from there. But even as I use these words, I know it’s a bit vague. What are the steps in the process? Is there is a system one can follow? Are there habits one needs to build? How do we build those habits? What are the tools we need to learn how to learn?

I’ve never seen a systematic articulation of this — but I’m going to try and build one for the course. Your thoughts are welcome in the comments.

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Illlustrations by Simahina.

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