My partner informed me she was going back to school.
What was my initial reaction?
Jealousy. Of course then followed up by pure excitement for her.

But the jealousy surprised me!

I graduated in May of 2019, so I’ve only been out of school a year and a summer. So I should be frolicking around, relishing new found freedom, flexing my hard won skills, right?

It’s not so simple.

In school one has access to a network of individuals there to be stretched, teachers and mentors providing guidance and feedback, and assignments requiring you to generate work. An intense building, practice rooms, and a daily commute helped protect the ritual ethic of work. A few paces outside the music building: a library.

What I missed from school was the growth curve. A feeling a being stretched and assimilating vast swaths of information. A place to go, physically and otherwise, to do the work of learning. The wealth of information available at any moment.

What I didn’t miss from school was the socialization, the stress, the pressure, the artificial deadlines, the excess, and the multiplicity (taking 5 classes at a time).

It struck me that I could take myself back to school, too.

But rather than enslaving myself to a bloated collegiate system, I could design my own compact program. It would be rooted in all the tenets of learning I’ve come to understand as essential.

• healthy environment
• robust containers
• deliberate practice
• review
• proactivity vs. reactivity (or creativity over consumption)
• one pointedness
• subtraction
• undulation
• harnessing the unconscious mind

I could study what I deemed to be the most important subjects. I could focus myself on just one topic at a time. I designed a template of study, which, when completed, would demonstrate my own processing, synthesizing, and practicing of the subject I learned. I planned no more than four courses ahead, allowing the serendipity of learning to guide my path. I began to cultivate habits and rituals to slip me into optimal learning states without needing ‘go’ anywhere at all.

I’m in my second month of learning and absolutely loving it. It feels like my full-time job, which in some ways it is.

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I started the year with a radical idea.

I’d discovered the benefits of a low information diet as early back as freshman year of college. Tim Ferriss and The Minimalists had my attention. They advocated taking a close look at the volume and quality of the information consumed daily.

News?
Social Media?
Blog posts, medium, LinkedIn articles?
Youtube videos?
Advertisements?
Email memos?
Coursework?
Books?

All of the above splinter our attention. Rather than a single beam of focus on the most important topic of our choosing, we have a scattered, piece-meal view of the world.

Moreover the stream of information coming in is handed to us, not chosen.

Open up the paper, editors tell you what to think.
Click on the instagram app, your feed dictates your experience.
Watch one YouTube video, the recommended bar prompts your next watch.
Log into email, every one else’s agenda stares at you with urgent or extra-urgent blue dots.

When you let the world decide what you pay attention to, the world will stretch you further than your attention could ever accommodate. An explanation for our fatigue and ineffectiveness.

And it’s true.

When I had the discipline in the past few years to tune out news, social media, random email checking, and blog surfing, I felt better. Settled. Quiet. Optimistic. Motivated.

In 2020 I took this to the extreme. If this is my foundational year of full-time teaching, then I ought to devote as much energy to teaching as possible. I adopted Joshua Waitzkin’s philosophy of “creating empty space as a way of life for the creative process.”

The radical idea? Go Information Free. Live in solitude (without the influence of any other human ideas).

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