The Manual #10

How I learned to love learning

How I learned to love learning

As far as I can remember, I hated school. I hated everything about it. The rigid structure. The unhelpful teachers. The bullies. The stuff I was being taught. It didn’t help that I was the only brown kid in class so I always felt like an outlier. I remember vividly many times where kids used to say mean stuff to my face in front of the whole class and the teacher wouldn't say it was wrong, even though I was clearly uncomfortable. All of this meant learning was connected to bad experiences, all the way up until I was 16.

Then at 17 I went to a college very far away from my old school and more diverse. There were people of all types in my classes. I didn’t feel like the odd kid in class anymore. I started to enjoy going to school. At the time I was taking an accounting and business course — pretty boring but actually became helpful when I started building my own business.

Whilst at college I had a lot more free time as I was only going in for classes a few hours a day. Sometimes I’d even have days off. With all of this free time I started exploring things I was interested in.

I was always interested in tech, the web, design and everything else that came with it. This is when I started learning more about web design specifically. There wasn’t one course or one website where I learned everything, it was more experimenting and learning as I go.

It was at this moment I realised I loved learning. I was learning at home in my own controlled environment. I was learning topics I was very interested in. I was learning by doing. It’s a huge shame this didn’t happen earlier.

I think as humans we’re always keen to learn, it’s finding topics we’re interested in that can take time. It’s why I love the internet so much. You can find information about anything you have an interest in. It can be as broad or as deep as you’d like. You can pretty much become an expert in anything just by using Google. It blows my mind how we have access to an unfathomable amount of knowledge all of the time, compared to how it was 20-30 years ago.

I learned to love learning because I can now choose what I want to learn, and I have access to it whenever I want.

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Best Investments I've Ever Made

My second YouTube channel has been doing very well, I’ve been blown away by the response. I recently uploaded a video covering my best investments.

TLDW:

• Building an audience — Great way to share interests, information and sell products.

• Buying my own house — It makes sense to buy your own house if you’re someone who doesn’t move around often.

• Stocks and shares — Pretty much self-explanatory. Better than putting your cash into savings.

• Crypto — Risky investments but I think it’s a good idea to put 1% of your net worth into it.

• ulxstore.com — My own Shopify business, generating over $1m over the last 12 months.

• Investing in myself — Constantly learning, spending 40-50% a week just taking in content and learning about topics I'm currently interested in. Also investing in your physical and mental health.

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Best Camera I’ve Ever Bought

I’m asked often what camera do I use for my videos, I’ve shared a review of that camera on my main channel. It’s an awesome camera and does everything that I can expect out of a camera. Arguably it’s better than a cinema camera if you’re a one-man-band video creator — as shooting and editing footage is a dream.

Watch it here ->

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Link Lowdown

A collection of links to stuff I think are worth sharing.

Jason Statham’s Malibu Home — I like Jason Statham and I like architecture.

Ghost 4.0 — Ghost recently released a huge update, adding a bunch of new features and giving everything a nice polish. I’m currently using Substack for my newsletter, but I’m seriously considering moving over to Ghost.

Why Are TV Cameras Still Huge & Expensive? — A very well put together video.

Moonlight — Can’t believe I only found this recently. It’s a service that lets you stream your PC games to pretty much any device. Mindblown.

Why I’m Unreachable And You Should Be Too — Great article covering why you should be unreachable. I take a somewhat similar approach. I keep my Twitter and Instagram DMs open but I rarely read every single one and rarely reply to any messages — only to ones that I find interesting. I just don’t have time. Time is the most valuable thing to me. I want to control my own time and spend it how I want. It’s also why I do YouTube videos, have a blog and write this newsletter — it’s much easier for me to reach thousands of people at once rather than reply to one person.

101 Design Rules — Some cool tidbits but also some stuff I don’t agree with. Either way, I like to share this stuff.

Bobby — Keep track of your monthly subscriptions.

Fontshare — A great place for free fonts.