All Good All Free / Learning for Nothing

An enormous amount of teaching is simply given away

Instruction at a genuinely high level is now freely published, and the difficulty has moved elsewhere.

For most of history the scarce resource in learning was the teacher. Access to a person who knew the thing was expensive, geographically limited and rationed. That constraint has substantially dissolved for a very wide range of subjects. Full lecture series, recorded demonstrations, written explanations, worked examples, entire curricula and practitioners talking through their craft in detail are published at no cost, in volume, continuously. Whether the subject is a language, a craft, an instrument, a body of maths, a trade technique or a field of history, the odds that competent free instruction exists are now very high indeed.

The consequence is that the old excuse has expired and been replaced by a harder problem. When access was the bottleneck, the plan was to get access. Now that access is essentially free, the bottleneck is attention and persistence, and those cannot be downloaded. Saving a course is not studying. Watching a demonstration produces a pleasant sensation of competence that survives exactly until you try the thing yourself. The gap between consuming instruction and practising a skill is the entire subject, and no quantity of free material closes it on your behalf.

What works is boring and reliable. Choose one thing. Choose one source and stay with it long enough to get past the awkward part, rather than sampling six and restarting forever. Do the exercises, badly, at the time. Set a small fixed slot rather than waiting for a large clear afternoon that will not arrive. Accept a period of being obviously bad at it. Find one other person to be accountable to if you can, because that single social thread does more for persistence than any amount of enthusiasm. The material is free. The hours are not, and the hours are the actual price.