The Most Violent Path to Self-Education

Jul 13, 2026

Before the article begins…

Conquer just became a Substack Bestseller. Thank you all for making this possible.

I’ve been writing here for a little over a year. My goal from the start was to give this five years before quitting. I now understand that to become truly elite at something, ten focused years is the minimum.

This is only the beginning. As this grows, I myself grow and perfect my craft to be able to keep raising the value of what you get here.

Now onto that article.

Learning might very well be the meaning of life.

If you think about it, it shows up at every level:

At the individual person’s level: you evolve through life by learning. You learn to walk, to speak, to read, to write, you watch how grown ups act and learn to be a decent person, to think critically, to make friends. Life is constant learning and expansion of the self. This is self-education.
At the level of life itself: the form of life that learns the fastest is the one that adapts the fastest to its environment and thrives. Natural selection is the same learning curve, just running over generations instead of years, with genes doing the remembering, and every update paid for in death.
What made humans so broken is that we stopped waiting for it. We didn’t wait for our species to grow claws or a pointy thing through thousands of generations, we picked up the rock and threw it at the animal, we sharpened the stick and stabbed with it. We moved learning out of the genome and into the brain, and became the deadliest life force in the world.

So at both levels the pattern is the same: learning is what makes life thrive, and speed of learning is what separates the winners.

Self-education is how you put your foot in that process and try to maximize it. It’s a lifelong thing, a constant.

The sooner you turn your mind into a machine that extracts lessons out of everything, even the mundane, the faster you’ll get where you want to go.

Because some people get wiser every year, but most repeat the same year forty times and call it experience.

I’ve been trying to understand what separates the two, and as with most solutions, it’s simpler than we make it: the answer is feedback loops.

You do something in the world, the world responds, and you adjust next time according to it. That’s the entire thing.

It sounds so simple and obvious that it feels stupid to write it down. But when you look at the most effective people in history, this loop running at high speed is what you find underneath everything else.

Napoleon read the world like a book

When I look at someone like Napoleon, he is obviously a genius. But read his biography with this lens and you’ll see something more useful than genius: he accumulated lessons at a faster rate than almost anyone alive.

When he’s a young officer engaged in the campaign against Sardinia which fails, he leaves very frustrated from all of it because of the command and bad equipment. He extracts the lesson in one shot and keeps it for the rest of his life: on every campaign afterward, he obsesses over logistics.

He witnesses royal guards get massacred by a rebellious mob in Paris. He watches how it happens, what hesitation costs. Years later, when he’s the one responsible for defending the government against a mob, he doesn’t hesitate: he fires grapeshot on it and avoids a bloodshed with limited casualties. That single decision makes him a general and prevents any mob uprising in Paris for several decades.

One observation, one permanent update. Over and over, for decades.

You can see the same thing in Elon Musk’s early career. He learns about recruitment at his first companies, that a small team of highly capable people will beat big teams of average people every time, and he applies it everywhere after.

He learns what going public costs a founder in his early companies, and SpaceX stays private for 20+ years, making him a trillionaire. Lessons extracted early, followed for life.

This is what highly effective people are underneath: skills stacked on top of each other.

Install a skill by focusing on it violently, then put it on maintenance, then install the next one. But that raises a question: where do the right skills come from? How did Napoleon know logistics deserved a lifetime of obsession? Nobody handed him the list. The world told him, through feedback, and usually through pain. The loop is what fills the stack.

The mechanism: the world hit them, they paid attention to where it hurt, and they adjusted. Fail fast, adjust, win.

In my own online writing quest, it comes through putting some writing into the world, then seeing the reaction: what does well or doesn’t, what people contact me about, what I can see work for others. Increasing my volume of writing accelerates the feedback I receive.

In the beginning I used to write 3 articles a week, they were of poor quality, but they allowed me to get that feedback which was extremely valuable for improving myself. If I had perfected one article to publish it weekly I would have got where I am currently much slower.

Why everyone isn’t doing this

If the loop is that simple, everyone would already be running it. They’re not, and the reason is that it hurts.

Exposing yourself to feedback means risking a decision or an action that can fail. Your article flops, your pitch gets rejected, your business loses money, and everyone can see it. The loop only runs if you keep putting yourself in positions where the world can hit you. Most people organize their entire lives around never being in that position. No real attempts, no real feedback, no real learning. They stay safe and they stay the same, and forty years later they’re the guy repeating the same year.

So the first requirement is pain tolerance. You have to be able to take the hit and go again.

The second requirement is sneakier: truth tolerance. You need to see the world accurately and not lie to yourself about it, and this is harder than it sounds, because lying to yourself is the default. Something fails, you feel stupid, feeling stupid is painful, so your brain immediately starts cooking up a version where you weren’t stupid. The market wasn’t ready, they didn’t get it, bad luck this time.

I’ve done this myself more times than I want to admit, and the excuse always feels reasonable in the moment (that’s what makes it dangerous, a dumb excuse you would catch, a reasonable one slides right through). But every time you accept one, you pay for the failure and get nothing back. You took the hit, you might as well collect the lesson: I did this wrong, and here is exactly how. It’s the only version of the story that’s worth anything.

I’d say truth tolerance is rarer than pain tolerance. Plenty of people can take hits. Very few can take hits and report them accurately to themselves.

The underrated step: memory

Somehow it seems nobody speaks of this. A lesson you can’t retrieve at the right moment is a lesson you never learned.

Think about how many things you’ve “learned” that changed nothing. You read the book, you nodded, you even felt the insight land, and six months later you made the exact mistake the book warned you about. The information was in you somewhere. It just didn’t show up when the situation called for it.

There’s a reason for that. The brain doesn’t store everything you feed it, it stores what got flagged as important, and a few things do the flagging: emotion, pain, stakes, deep focus. A book read comfortably on your couch carries almost none of these. Nothing was on the line, so the lesson went in shallow and washed out. A lesson the world taught you is different: you acted, you failed, it stung, maybe in front of people. That one comes pre-burned. Nobody needs a system to remember the pitch that got rejected, you couldn’t forget it if you tried.

Which flips something from earlier: pain looked like the toll you pay to get the feedback. It’s also the mechanism that makes the feedback stick. The world’s lessons arrive with the encoding included.

This is what separated Napoleon from other officers who saw the same poor logistics and the same massacred guards. They all got the same feedback from the world. He’s the one who pulled the right lesson at the right moment, years later, under pressure. The extraction is only half the work. The retrieval is the other half.

I’ve got a whole article about memory and how to maximize it. But one simple example to increase it is to write about the lessons you learn. This is a way to add focus to memory instead of pain.

Whether it’s in a journal where you document what you’re doing, or you keep a list of lessons you need to remember and re-read often (I’ve seen a few high achievers do this), or by teaching a subject to someone through writing about it, the process will help tremendously for memory.

Practical example: when I have an idea I write it down on a special dedicated daily notes space on my Obsidian calendar. Then every week I come back to read what notes I have put down for the past week, so now it means I have imprinted it on my memory twice first by writing it down then by cataloguing it somewhere where I could use it later (at which point I read it a second time).

For notes I take from reading something, I actually create an ebook out of them and re-read them frequently.

The whole game

Action solves everything.

Thinking about it, planning it, reading about it, none of that makes the world respond. The world only answers to moves. And the output of completed loops has a name too, we just use it wrong: experience. Ten years in a job can be one loop, run once, then repeated ten times. One year of real attempts can beat it.

So that’s the loop, complete: expose yourself so the world can respond, tolerate the pain of the response, tell yourself the truth about what it means, and store the lesson so it’s there when you need it.

Run this for a decade and you become the person others call talented, or lucky, or a genius. From the inside it’s none of those things. It’s just a high number of loops completed, each one slightly adjusting your aim, compounding the entire time.

Most people run maybe two or three real loops a year. Some people run two or three a week. Napoleon had a head start on all of us, that’s true, you don’t pick your raw material. But the loop count is the part you control, and held over twenty years, it’s the difference between two people who started at the same level. One of them got wiser every year. The other one repeated the same year and calls it experience.

And this, right here, is self-education in its truest, most violent form.

Books are the safe version. The loop is the world teaching you by hitting you, and the hits are precisely what make the lessons stick. It’s the rock and the stick again, at the scale of a single life: you stop waiting for time to teach you at its own pace and take the learning into your own hands.

If learning is the meaning of life, this is how you play it at full speed.

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