Problem

Finding the job you love is the most important problem you have to address early in life. When you’re 20 your health is great, you’re surrounded by friends and you don’t have to think about family. So what to worry about? You have to worry about finding the job you love.

I kind of understood that when I was 19 — I had one year left in university and I realized I had no clue whatsoever of what to do with my life. Maybe a mild idea of something related to startups and technology, but no more.

When that realization hit I became quite worried and had to do something about it. Luckily, by that time I frequently read Paul Graham, and so his essay “How to Do What You Love” became my starting point. The main idea I got out of it was that you have to make guesses of what skills you could enjoy doing (and be good at) and then test those as fast as possible. As in my last year of university I could do an internship this was a perfect way to start testing my hypothesis!

I wanted to try something in startups and crypto, and I was happy to do any job as long as those two suffice. With perseverance and a bit of luck I got into Onramper as a Business Developer Intern. I had no idea what “Business Developer” meant, on the first day I found out that it meant sales and I had no problem with that.

7 month went by, my internship ended, Onramper got acquired and I had a few findings about “doing sales at crypto startup” hypothesis:

• Startups are great.

• Crypto is the future, yet it still lacks a vivid use case, besides storage of value, for layman adoption. I didn’t feel like I was contributing to solving some big, important problem.

• Sales is a crucial skill and I am happy to have learned it. Nonetheless, dedicating my life to it doesn’t feel right. I love the craftsmen mentality of building and spending hours of focused work pondering on some problem, I rarely did so with sales.

At Onramper I also got a glimpse of how different jobs look like, and what is the hidden hierarchy within an organization. At least in a software business programmers are valued by far the highest, and their work capacity is usually the limiting factor. Wanting to be useful and realizing the importance of long focused work for my fulfillment I became interested in testing coding as a craft!

And here comes the problem. As a Ukrainian, who’s about to finish bachelor in Netherlands, to stay I’d have to either work or study. But one, I don’t have the coding skill to get hired. And two, I don’t have the time or money to start a new technical bachelor. It would also be an awfully long feedback loop! What if two years into it I find out coding is not my thing? Formal education is certainly not the cheapest way to test stuff!

I have 6 must-haves: I need to learn coding quickly, cheaply, good enough to get a job in a top organization, continue living in NL and sustain myself financially. How?

Solution

“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is necessary.” — Elon Musk

The solution is simple — I’ll just learn it myself! I’ll stay in the university as a fourth year of a business bachelor while not taking any of the courses, paying just a small tuition for staying in the Netherlands and using the library. All in all, this is a great deal.

For education I’ll use any online resources I can get my hands on. My main inspiration is Scott Young who learned MIT CS bachelor in one year through online materials. I will take the best courses from the best universities in the world. Like CS50 from Harvard, or AI from Stanford. Since its online I will also finish it faster than any ‘actual’ students from these universities. But why limit oneself to university courses? Does this medium has a monopoly on useful knowledge? It doesn’t. So I’ll use any helpful resources. Course, book, podcast, paper, video … you name it! Anything. All of this will be either for free, or fraction of a bachelor cost.

The more you think about it, the more surprising it is how much better online self-education is as an option. I guess this is how pure knowledge creation and insights look like — things are just better and there are no fairytale catch or “faustian bargain”.

When and What?

I will start my Self-Education Year on February 5th 2024, and finish on February 5th 2025. The goal is to get sufficiently good at coding to get hired into some top organization. I won’t predict which role exactly, for I’ll learn so much in the upcoming months that making predictions now seems pointless. [8]

How?

I’ll try to work backwards from projects/ problems I want to solve and then look at what I need to learn to get it done. There’s some limit to that approach as my final goal is to get employable skills, so my exploration will be guided by this end goal.

I will break down the year into the 12 week cycles. [2] Afterwards, I will take one week to document the progress, reflect and publish the results. I will do that four times, which is exactly 52 weeks, or one year.

The final output will be a collection of products and essays documenting the journey. I will learn from the best universities like: MIT, Cambridge, Stanford etc. From each I will take the best courses and create a study program that is tailored to my needs. In theory, this means I’ll receive a better education that even students of these institutions, but I know it’s a stretch. I won’t limit myself by courses, I will extensively use books, papers, podcasts etc. [3]

Self-education has many unknowns, to limit its amount I will follow a similar schedule as I had before:

The essence of the schedule are the big blocks of uninterrupted focus. I will work in bouts of 90 minutes with 10-15 minute breaks. [4] On a great week I should get 45-50 hours of high-quality work, my goal is to never go below 40 hours (there might be some outliers, like family trips). [5]

I will live in Tilburg, just as I am right now. Besides relatively low prices, I have my friends and some stability that I could rely upon.

Risks

Challenges fail. Keith Rabois recommends listing 2-3 key risks before starting a project and focus on addressing them. [6] I can think of a few things:

• Money. Without frugality, one is rarely free. I have some savings and some family support, but these are finite. With good finance management I can give myself needed time. Getting my ****monthly expenses below 1000€ ****would be sufficient for me to live off my savings. ****Moving to a cheaper room (which I am currently in the middle of), is an important cut. Besides spending less, I’ll try make some money, but I avoid a commitment of more than one day a week (otherwise the focus is insufficient). The products I’ll make can be a source of income.

• Morale. I expect many psychological roadblocks. [7] My main tools to control morale are: friends, therapy, meditation, and sport. I will continue my eating habits: no sugar and intermittent fasting. Finally, I will pay attention to my sleep, hopefully rarely resting below 8 hours.

• Irrelevancy. I might study irrelevant knowledge. Being product driven is a good counterforce, I will also study some online courses (either bootcamps or MIT., Stanford online education). As a newcomer, I don’t have a good overview of the field and I can’t create a comprehensive syllabus for the next 12 month.

To read more about my detailed plan for the upcoming future go to "Reasoning and Plan to Learn Fundamentals of Knowledge" essay.

Postscript

I publish to connect with great people. Consider reaching out: mark@markkagach.com

Without support of my friends and family I wouldn’t have freedom of thought, let alone, courage to share it. My deepest gratitude goes to them.

Thanks to Andrei, Amirali, Udesh, Elias, Barak, Kevin and Alex for reading drafts of this.

Notes

[1] Rick Rubin says that we start from the epiphany that we know nothing. We are then free to experiment, create hypotheses and see what reality shows us. I believe scientist mindset is crucial not only in navigating once career, but life in general. We might think that we would like living in the big city, but once tried we realize that quiet cozy nature of towns is closer to us. Same applies with relationships, day schedules, routines, foods and etc.

This mindset also makes you try many different things, get a good feel for the world, and this is crucial so you could find what you love.

[2] My argumentation is based on “Huberman Goals Toolkit”, and “The 12 Week Year” book.

[3] My gap year is similar to Scott Young’s MIT Challenge. Nonetheless, I won’t follow university established syllabus because it leads to the shortcoming that many students face — they are not ready for the job market. The product/ project approach is a better proxy, and it doesn’t limit me to study those courses if needed.

[4] Besides my own experience, Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” essay was the reason behind my current schedule. https://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

[5] One might say: “48 hours doesn’t sound a lot!”. Well, it is because I measure the focused working time, no breaks or lunches are included; under relaxed framework this is 60-70 hour work week.

[6] Keith Rabois Almanack: List 2-3 main risks or challenges of your startup, find a directly responsible individual (DRI) for solving and delivering each challenge.

https://mogolshan.notion.site/Lessons-from-Keith-Rabois-2b867858346448998d23f51beee3470a

[7] Marc Andreessen says that startups are a psychological venture. One must take those risks and address them directly.

[8] But why don’t you have a plan for all 52 weeks in advance?

My taste in projects and knowledge I’ll need is likely to change, thus I prefer strategy of staying upwind (https://paulgraham.com/hs.html), hence I don’t establish course syllabus or product map for the next year. I would also like to have concrete plan to avoid uncertainty, yet, I’d rather operate in some ambiguity and get to the destination, than climb up the wrong mountain with great sense of confidence.