How I Learn Stuff

The year 1990 was meaningful to me for two reasons. It was one decade to go before 2000, and it was the year my first marriage broke up. It seemed a good time to reinvent myself, so I began to take my education seriously.

There’s a silly part of me that wants to be the master of the universe. Another part of me wants to be wise and helpful. These two aspects of my soul came together and began rushing about, reading and exploring. They sought the Great Secrets that would unlock the treasures of life.

I studied history, philosophy, and epistemology. Well… I sort of studied… For the most part, I dabbled. But, I dabbled obsessively. Though I acquired many books, I read few of them in any depth. One of those that I did read was Operating Manual to Spaceship Earth, by Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller is the kind of thinker that inspires me: mysterious, encyclopedic, visionary, completely unconventional. In chapter 2, he offered a very strange view of history. Basically, he said that pirates (specifically those whom he called Great Pirates) ruled the world for many years. He claimed they could do so partly because they were generalists. Fuller offered no evidence for the particulars of his theory, but that’s no matter. What thrilled me was the metaphor: pirates as thinkers. How does the mobility, diversity, and technical mastery of sea travel relate to how we might educate ourselves and think about life?

That’s when I coined the term “buccaneer-scholar.” I decided that I wanted to be one. Looking back, I realized I had always been one. I could never sit quietly in a classroom and simply accept what I was told.