Lessons from "semester zero"

Dear {name},

In the last week of October, I set out on my own interpretation / adoption of the personal curriculum project. Because it's me we're talking about, I started out ambitious and structured. I had an ontology for semester, track, subject, topic, course; I had a "repeatable" flow for creating my reading plans; I had a reflection space to think about my why for each and every aspect, and about realistic obstacles to my success.

The semester, which I nicknamed "Semester Zero," was supposed to end late this December, but I've pretty much abandoned the structure of it. By that I mean I'm still "studying" the topics of interest, but in normal ADHD style over academic.

Instead of side-eyeing the unfinished project with shame, though, I'm returning to the original core objective of the semester zero, which is "to assess if this project is something I can sustainably do, and to what extent. I want to be able to plot the advantages, disadvantages, holes and opportunities of the project."

Okay, let's unpack.

On structured expectations

When planning my "semester," there was one research topic I had a clearer vision of compared to the rest. Let's call it the "polymathy" course. I had one other research topic on visual communications, and one practical or lab topic on static site generators. I had a desired output for both of these, but I pretty much left the middle or the "how" very loosey-goosey and figure-it-out-as-I-go.

In the end this only spoke about my interest level for each course. It wasn't correlated to how "successful" I would later be in sticking to each course.

In the first few days and weeks, I religiously read and annotated the academic papers I had downloaded and scheduled for the polymathy course. By the middle I had grown bored or uninspired by the whole thing (especially because the essay I started writing seemed to be about creativity itself and very little about polymathy) and I began to dabble in the other two courses. Admittedly, that was more of as a way to say I still did something than true interest.

By the last few weeks, notably mid-December, I was spending much more time on the third course, since it was more about doing than learning. And I'm enjoying it a lot more. So by now, at the premature end of Semester Zero, I have:

• a first draft of an essay on the meaning of creativity,
• a first draft microsite generated using Eleventy, and
• a few experimental files on Affinity, which were tangentially related to the visual communication course and not at all the promised output

And I've come up with the following key takeaways on what happened:

1. My physical and mental health are much bigger factors in my day or my week than I was okay admitting. It's pretty much between me, my journal, and my therapist, but I do need to practice not seeing my poor health as an "excuses."
2. That said, I can pursue two things at the same time, on a good week. On a bad week, it's zero to one.
3. My "novelty" meter realistically depletes after a month.
4. For this experimental semester, I wasn't successful in producing an output. However, I still think that the output-oriented approach is the way for me, so I will persist there.
5. If I'm being true to the why of this project (which I'll get to in the last section), I must allow myself to follow my interest, even if it takes me off-curriculum. I must work with this possibility, maybe even take advantage of it, instead of resisting it.

On ontology and definitions

I know I definitely overcomplicated it with my track/subject/topic ontology mapping, but I would still like to retain certain ideas. Specifically, I want to keep the practice of tracks and courses.

This is lovingly inspired by my undergraduate degree in Communications. As a Comm student, our (non-core) course catalog ever semester was divided into four tracks: Journalism, Advertising & Public Relations, Media Studies, and Production. You could pick an Intro to Journalism course, a News Writing Journalism course, a Feature Writing course. In Ad & PR track, you'd sign up for Advertising Principles, Intro to Public Relations, Intro to Copywriting, and so on.

This is something that makes sense to me to this day, and I think it maps correctly to the nonlinear-but-slightly-hierarchical way I think about my topics.

So think of tracks as loosely defined areas of interest to me, which I will explore over time with some semblance of progression through the topic. A track would be broader than my course topics but narrower than subjects. Say for the subject of "technology," I might have a "web development" track, and I might have a basic web design course, a basic HTML/CSS/Javascript course, and later on some more advanced topics when I'm ready for it.

But instead of a track having a defined or intended course catalog, I'll be filling up my track curriculum only as I go. It can always be a guide for others interested in my same track, sort of like how early maps were drafted by explorers while they were actually on the land or territory they were mapping.

To illustrate, the courses I "took" this semester would map to their respective tracks this way:

• polymathy maps to reflections on creativity, humanities and humanism
• principles of visual communications maps to visual art & design
• SSGs maps to indie web

I haven't decided yet on most of these, but you get the picture.

In my digital garden, track notes will be functionally similar to maps of content, also known as evergreen notes, also known as content pillars. I'll also come back to this later when I talk about my Why.

Last takeaway for ontology: I want to retire the use of semesters in the capacity I originally meant it. I wanted a normal semester to last a quarter of a year, a full twelve weeks, and to contain multiple pursuits. I'm admittedly disappointed about having to compromise, but I do need to meet myself where I am now that my health is not what it used to be.

Knowing that I reasonably start losing steam at the turn of month, I think I can go back to monthly pursuits the way I used to set and track my goals. Each new calendar month, I will review my slate of interests, decide which ones to continue or carry over (if any) and what new topics to start (if any). The good thing about the monthly approach is that autodidactism won't be a compartmentalized thing I do, but an integrative-to-life practice.

Which brings me to:

On why

A commentor in the r/polymathy subreddit said that polymathy, to them, felt like a homecoming. It was a reconnection with the self, rather than a thing they one day woke up and decided to become.

I agree with this description.

In the past ten years, we saw the rise of the term "multipotentialite" and the niche community it drew. These came pretty close to the thing that I saw in myself. But I know now that they missed the integrated and interdisciplinary aspect that needed to come with it.

Yes, I wanted to pursue many things and be good at many things. But I also specifically wanted these many things to play nice with each other, such that if I removed one I wouldn't be quite the same in the other. The way I get technology because I get language, and I get language because I get psychology. This map-making, nonlinear meaning-making calling was something I only started recognizing with personal knowledge management.

My journey with PKM started around 2022, I think. I was looking for a solution for my fiction projects, and instead came upon the PKM and independent researchers community behind Obsidian. All this time I never did call it a project. It was just a thing that was a part of my life now. I wrote about Why I take notes, knowledge for knowledge's sake, and the Renaissance period, which links back to my interest in polymathy and humanism today.

I think that when I read about personal curriculums and felt the novel excitement of making it a "project," I ended up turning this into something it didn't need to be. For some reason, I started from scratch, took an academic institution kind of approach and forgot that my Obsidian vault's Knowledge folder already had nearly 300 notes on various topics.

Independent research as a hobby was something I was already doing, in spirit, with admittedly a lot less structure and in a slightly different font. But I was doing it, and I also felt a lot less shame whenever I took long breaks away from it.

Anyway, the thing I'm trying to say lives somewhere on the bridge between things I've already written.

On "the Museian"

"Museian" is not a real English word. I made it up from taking the word muse (to reflect, ponder, meditate. One of the nine Muses of classical mythology, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, protectors of the arts. Ultimately from root men "to think."), the musicality of museum (library, study; from Greek mouseion "place of study, library or museum, school of art or poetry," originally "a temple or shrine of the Muses"), in the denominal adjective suffix -ian ( — one from, one of, related to, belonging to, originating from) of Atenean, Venusian, antiquarian, and making something new, in true polymathic nature.

Before I was any of the things I am today — technologist, artist, manager, patron — I was a writer. I knew words before I knew thought or reason, although thankfully reason followed soon after. As I wrote more, I sought out more things to write about. And as I thought and learned more, I sought to be a better writer. And so on, until I could not separate the two.

Language and ideas have always been how I made sense of the world, and how I made myself useful to others. Whatever empathy or insight I have to offer came almost secondary to the eloquence I'm able to express it in.

I think, learn, reason and articulate because that's how I make sense of the world, and that's how I'm best of service to others. It's my nature, potential, will and perhaps my responsibility to pursue knowledge and growth, both for my sake and for the sake of my neighbor.

Museian. One from, of, or belonging to, the muses or to the faculty of musing. Not the act, or its effect, or its outcome, but the abstract human mechanism of pondering, thinking, remembering. Whatever that is, that is what I am of and what I am from.

"The Museian" is the name I gave to the project, currently in the process of being dismantled and remade into something else. It has an Instagram page and very little else to its name. But it has a name, an idea, some semblance of a "why", and hopefully a direction. But let's keep some surprises for the next letter.

Thank you for receiving another once-in-a-blue-moon latter from me. Join me in hoping there will be more.

Lovingly,
Apple

P.S. This letter comes to you in the middle of an experimental phase, so this email is sent entirely in HTML. There may be some breakage, hopefully none, and some things may be uglier than intended. But this is all part of the journey and the point.