The Birth of the Autodidact Project
The creation of a challenging self-paced curriculum. How it affected life and work. The birth of an online community.
Nearly a year ago, on January 20th, 2019 — I made a decision that may turn out to be the most consequential of my career.
In March 2017, a notable Southern California health system hosted a technology competition (known as a hackathon) aimed at developing new ideas and bringing the most promising student-driven inventions into their flagship hospital.
Our team won the competition and worked with Senior Directors and their CIO to conceptualize a new product. In December 2017, a young technology startup was born. However, about a year into this project — after considerable progress in some areas, the project was on the verge of collapsing.
Our design for the new product was underwhelming. The software powering the system was also poor. Admittedly, the team prototype we presented was embarrassing. Something had to change. I was not willing to let this project die.
“Why don’t you consider building the software and designing it yourself?”
A conversation with one of my best friends, Harsh Sikka — a strong software engineer with a track record of shipping impressive products shaped my decision. He noted that I had a track record of starting entrepreneurial projects and in several instances, I was limited by the time availability, skillset or sustained interest of software engineers and designers I needed to recruit. This is a huge issue. This limiting factor was a recurring theme that may also haunt me in the future.
Why not consider self-learning software engineering intensely for several months and become proficient enough to build this product and all the future products of my career?
After spending a day to think deeply about my situation and career goals, I was all in. I made a meticulous learning plan, study calendar and got to work.
What happened?
I began free online classes such as freeCodeCamp’s Web Development courses and finished much of it before moving on to other tutorials, textbooks and online classes. I watched many YouTube videos of how people transitioned into a career in software engineering.
I started 2 portfolio projects and began self-studying Data Science intensely. After finishing studying several textbooks I began acing technical job interviews.
About 6 months later (June 2019), I became a proficient enough software engineer to get hired by a local hospital’s IT department. The details of this job hunt, hospital project and my study plan will be covered in much greater detail in future articles.
My original hospital project also achieved major milestones:
- I redesigned the software to make it much more attractive
- Built the mobile application, a therapeutic iPad app
- Initiated the product’s clinical trial as a Principal Investigator (PI)
- Got a budget approved by the original hospital and more
I also earned a promotion at work, earned my startup considerable momentum and drastically boosted my confidence to succeed in any professional endeavor.
I believe adopting this approach is the closest thing we have to harvesting superpowers. It enables us to intentionally develop any skills we need to solve any problem that is meaningful to us.
This personalized, self-paced learning plan offered me enormous satisfaction, new skills and a love for mastering complex topics in many disciplines. As I started my new job in hospital IT, I bumped up my reading plan to completing 1 book or online class a week.
As I started my new job, I formalized this approach into the code name: “The Autodidact Project” as a personal plan for learning advanced engineering and business concepts to succeed in a company with such impressive and more experienced coworkers (usually double my age). As I shared my learning roadmap with my bosses and friends, many became interested in creating their own. And now here we are!
What is an Autodidact?
An autodidact is a self-learner. An autodidact may be young or old, with any level of formal education or job experience.
An Autodidact Project can be completed without a high school degree, with a doctorate degree or anything in between. It can be completed in homes, schools, libraries, workplaces or online. Most importantly, an Autodidact Project is personalized to your specific personal and professional goals, interests and passions.
Whether you are a high school student, young professional, senior manager, entrepreneur, celebrity, billionaire or anyone else — this may be very relevant to your situation. Whether it’s to augment your training in an existing role, undergo a career change, build a new breakthrough project or something else — these same principles can guide your journey.
What is My Personal Learning Plan?
The goals of my personal Autodidact Project are as follows:
- Initially — develop enough software engineering knowledge to build my initial product idea by myself.
- Now — design a self-paced executive MS-MBA degree to enable lifelong success in healthcare information technology as a future hospital CEO / CIO or technology vendor CEO based on my unique professional goals.
The key categories of my personal learning plan are:
- Mobile Application Development
- Data Warehouse Design / ETL
- Data Science
- Clinical Trial Management
- Biomedical Informatics
- Health Policy and Management
- Advanced Computing Electives
- Advanced Business Electives
So far, I have succeeded in my goal of finishing at least one book or online class a week. Occasionally, I complete 2 to 3 a week. My long-term goal is to continue this personal Autodidact Project over the next 40+ years and read thousands of formative books to power enjoyment and sustained career success. There are multiple phases to my personal learning plan and I adapt them to meet my work and startup’s needs.
For me, this is a curated list of 10–40 books or online classes in each of these above categories. These include books, textbooks, certificates, workshops, MOOCS, encyclopedias, online Master’s degrees and everything in between.
Many of the world’s most accomplished people are voracious learners. We should consider adopting a similar purpose of acquiring knowledge.
What is the Autodidact Project?
The Autodidact Project is an online community that fosters a love of self-learning. It includes this blog which will cover my learning process and those of many others.
We plan on spreading tips, learning plans, career stories and much more content. We see this evolving into a YouTube channel, online research group and 1000s of book reviews of our collective Autodidact Project.
We hope to foster a collective journey to encourage the creation of your own self-learning plans. We also intend to invite you to post on this blog, social media and other venues to share your journey with what hopefully will be a community of like-minded peers. We hope you join us.
I believe a successful Autodidact Project should include the following:
- Personalized to your specific interests and subject areas. No 2 Autodidact Projects are alike.
- Have clear milestones, ideally with a learning cadence. For example, I plan on reading 2 books a month — starting with reading on public speaking or some other topic. I plan on reading these specific 6 books in this order, as documented in a study calendar.
- Are strategically targeted to specific skills you want to acquire. I want to gain a job in this field or want to learn how to successfully complete this project.
- Have some sort of note-taking or knowledge curation aspect. Ideally some sort of paper or electronic notes, for easy self-reference as needed.
- Is social — perhaps involving coworkers, fellow students, friends or family members.
- Should be fun and immensely interesting for you!
Why Now?
In the Information Age, knowledge is democratized and broadly accessible. With a few keystrokes, you can easily search vast amounts of content and find material that interests you.
Online classes, college notes and lecture podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, workshops and so much more exist for every topic imaginable. Local libraries are also free and will also always available. Specialized search engines and databases also aid in knowledge retrieval.
Learning can be affordable. Continuing formal education through colleges and universities is not a necessity for every student and working professional. Why not instead read 20 books on a given topic of interest?
No matter your walk of life, I hope you use this opportunity to create a learning mindset that delights you and provides you with the training to achieve all the personal and professional goals you set.
What’s Next?
I hope this article was helpful to you and you consider forming your own Autodidact Plan. Consider making this a part of your new decade resolutions. If aspects of this was interesting to you, please let us know in the comments and let’s form an ongoing conversation. The goal is to make this community as participatory as possible.
I will continue sharing articles of what I am reading, building and curating learning guides on an assortment of topics. For now, we will consolidate these articles on our Twitter account @AutodidactProj — as we build a more permanent web presence in the future.
I invite my fellow curator, Harsh Sikka (the best friend who inspired me in the above story) and many more of you to also join us in sharing with the community.
Looking forward to chatting!
