“I spent three days a week for ten years educating myself in the public library, finding mirrors for myself in hundreds of books. At the end of ten years, I was completely educated. I had read every goddamn book in the library, and I’d written a thousand stories.” -Ray Bradbury
The library is the oldest and best way to educate oneself.
Unfortunately, we tend to ignore libraries today because we imagine that everything we need is online.
While that may be true in a narrow sense, it ignores two important things:
- Good libraries, like good bookstores, offer stumble-upon potential. By wandering aimlessly through the halls of a library, flipping through random books, you will discover topics that you never would have googled on your own.
- Libraries have librarians, the unsung heroes of autodidactism. Librarians are curators of information: it’s their job to help you go further down whatever intellectual rabbit hole you’re exploring by suggesting good books, related subjects, and things you might have missed. If you’ve never employed a librarian in your quest to learn something, then you’re missing out.
For this adventure, your mission is to go to your local library and have a librarian help you learn something new.
Choose a subject that you want to learn more about, go to the librarian, and ask for recommendations. This can be something you’ve been studying for a while, or something brand new. Or you can just ask them to recommend the most fascinating book that’s come out recently.
Take a selfie with the librarian and one book that they helped you find and add it to your portfolio (as its own page or blog post).
Examples:
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Got that selfie?