How to Build Your Personal Curriculum

How (and why) to build a personal curriculum, my favorite resources for learning new things, and a Notion template to help you keep track of it all.

This is part five of the Well-Designed Life series, a framework for creating & inhabiting your dream life. Think of this as a field guide for self-discovery, style excavation, and living with intentionality, creativity, and joy.

My all-time favorite class that I took in college was REL 303: Goddesses, a course that studied the religious canon through the lens of feminism and gender. It had absolutely nothing to do with my journalism degree. I honestly don’t even remember if it satisfied a general ed requirement. All I remember was that it made me think about things in a completely new and exciting way.

Our term project was to select a goddess and construct a research paper organized around some central thesis or research question. I transferred into this class during the second week, so all the classic goddesses were spoken for. The only one left that sounded vaguely interesting was labeled, simply, The Fairy Queen.

Instead of phoning it in, I spent a good chunk of time in the library looking through dusty tomes of Celtic folklore, mythology, Shakespeare, and more. It was difficult at first to find things that were relevant, but I was so into the topic that I was more than happy to keep digging through archives.

I say all of this to say that this was one of the first times I realized that learning and research could be, well, fun. I LOVED writing that paper. And apparently it showed, because my professor even suggested I consider publication, something I still wish I would have done.

That’s why when this concept of creating a personal curriculum went viral last year, it really piqued my interest. I love learning about stuff, but it often falls apart without a structure to keep it all cohesive.

This post is for paid subscribers only. Want to join the club? Upgrade here.

In this issue…

• What a personal curriculum is and is not.

• Step by step how to build your own, with a Notion template to keep it all in one spot.

• Ideas for retaining information and actually remembering what you read and learned.

• My favorite resources for learning new things.