Choose Your Own Curriculum
The second key to being awesome
How to Be Awesome, continued…
In keeping with this month’s inner growth theme of “How to Be Awesome”, I’m writing a primer for anarchists on, well…how to be awesome. Last week I started off the series with the first key: Being a Work in Progress.
This is the second segment in the How to Be Awesome series.
Key #2 : Create your own curriculum in the school of life.
If we think of life as a school, then each experience we have, each person we interact with, each endeavor we pursue can be seen as an educational course.
You don’t get to choose all of your own courses—many of them are chosen for you. Call it automatic enrollment. This is especially true of the early coursework we take during our formative years. Up to a certain age, it is impossible to opt out of the classes life puts us in.
But as we develop, we gain more control and autonomy over our studies. Now, when the school of life automatically enrolls us in a class, we can treat it as an introductory seminar and decide whether or not we want to dive deeper into the course material.
Sometimes, “This Experience Seminar” is utter crap, and all it teaches us is that we don’t want to go any further with this line of inquiry.
Sometimes we may elect to take “This Experience 101,” but we find that it’s not for us, and we can then decline to continue on in that subject.
Other times, “This Experience 101” sparks something in us and we choose to go on and pursue a “This Experience Doctorate.”
Sometimes, after completing our doctorate, we still find that it was not for us, after all. But if we use that information to inform us in choosing our next course of study, then the time has not been wasted.
This applies to everything: professions, relationships, ideologies, habits, passions, lifestyles, absolutely everything.
You might have signed up for a study of romantic relationship and gotten several years in before you reviewed the curriculum and discovered that your classes were all in toxic relationships. Oops! You still want to complete your course of study, but now that you’ve gotten a few of the wrong classes under your belt, it’s time to select better ones. That means meeting new people—new teachers in your educational career—but it mostly means improving yourself so that you can be the kind of person who is able to sustain a healthy relationship.
Or you might wake up in your 40s and realize that you have obtained a doctorate in bullshit jobs that you don’t enjoy. If you allow yourself to digest this knowledge and seek course correction, you might recall an introductory seminar you took when you were younger. Maybe it was in basket weaving or mushroom hunting or rifle marksmanship or accountancy or stand-up comedy. You really loved the seminar, but you didn’t pursue further study because the world kept pressuring you to major in bullshit jobs. For the security. Well, now’s the time to enroll in another class. Even if, for the moment, it’s only in your spare time. Show the school of life your intention and it will deliver the opportunities you need to change track.
The main thing to keep in mind as students in the school of life is that if we don’t choose our own curriculum, one will be chosen for us. By not choosing, we are choosing. If you let society, family, or even your own apathy dictate your curriculum, you’re going to be enrolled in a lot of crap seminars that turn into crap doctorates. So create your own curriculum, and if you find it unsatisfactory, don’t be afraid to change your major.
Let’s discuss.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
In your life school education, what “doctorates” have you attained? Do you love them? Or do you wish you’d chosen a different major?
What classes have you been “automatically enrolled” in? Do you wish you hadn’t been, or did they turn out to be good for your overall education?
Have you ever let external deciders plot your educational course for you? How did that go?
When have you decided to “change majors”, and how did you manage it?
Thank you for reading!
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I don't necessarily think I attained any doctorates... I certainly did not choose a major.
I have lived my life in survival mode for what seems like centuries, and because of that, the school of life has taught me a little about a lot of things, a lot about a few things, and nothing about some things. Age has given me the wisdom to know and admit when I don't know.
Automatically enrolled in some pretty shitty classes, but I could not imagine what I would have become without it?
A friend once reminded me that money spent on endeavors earnestly pursued is tuition. That was helpful when I felt regret about an effort that didn’t pan out as I had hoped.