Reclaiming Your Mind: How To Teach Yourself Anything With J. Daniel Sawyer

How can you teach yourself anything, even when it challenges the way you see the world? And how can you organise what you learn so it turns into books your readers will find? J. Daniel Sawyer shares his self-education toolkit after decades as a largely self-taught author.

In the intro, Spotify for Authors has expanded AI-assisted creation of audiobooks [Spotify]; Who is Narrating the Future? [Publishing Perspectives; 9 ways AI will disrupt authors and publishing from 2019]; Author Voice, Creativity, and Building a Career as an Intuitive Author-Entrepreneur [How Women Write]; A fallow season [Systems and Soul]; How to Write, Publish, and Market Short Stories – Joanna Penn.

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J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.

Show Notes

• What is an autodidact, and why school doesn't teach you how to learn
• How to triage information in a world of way too much
• How to recognise fear in your body and turn it into excitement for learning
• Sandboxing dangerous ideas so you can learn without threatening your worldview
• How to organise research and check quotes when writing nonfiction
• Why you should never publish a book dead

You can find Dan at JDSawyer.net, and The Autodidact's Bible is out now on Kickstarter.

Transcript of the interview with J. Daniel Sawyer

Jo: J. Daniel Sawyer is the author of over 30 books across science fiction, fantasy, crime, short stories, and nonfiction, as well as being a podcaster and filmmaker. His latest book is Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact's Bible.

So welcome back to the show, Dan.

Dan: Hello, Joanna. It's great to be back.

Jo: Yes, indeed. You were only on the show a few months ago, which is rare I have somebody twice in the same year, so that is quite exciting. We talked about voice mastery last time, very different to the topic of today. But because we did talk a bit more about your background last time, we're going to jump straight into the book.

So what is an autodidact, and why write a book on it?

Dan: Well, an autodidact is someone who teaches themselves things rather than taking a course. It's not incompatible with being taught by others, of course, but there's a set of skills for being able to pick up new information, new disciplines, new hobbies, whatnot, that's really useful to have.

I wrote the book because I was mentoring a friend's kid through high school. They weren't teaching her anything, and she was having a hell of a time figuring out how to get an education in a school that was just not interested in providing one.

The process of the conversations over the course of a year forced me to surface all of the tools that I had developed, starting as a child, that allow me to pick up all of those disciplines you were talking about before, plus blacksmithing and academics and other stuff like that.

While I have had access to a lot of amazing teachers in my life, I'm largely self-taught, and have become the world expert on a couple of topics as a result.

I realised that the tools that you need to teach yourself and the tools that you get in school no longer overlap very much, at least in the US.

The old style of classical education, and then the middling style of early school education, both gave you those tools so that when you left school, you were able to continue through the world growing. Nobody does that anymore, so I realised I needed to write a book about all this stuff while it was fresh in my mind, so I did.

Jo: I love that. I don't know if it always was like that for some people, too.

We all know now more about neurodivergence.

Back in the day, when you and I went to school, that wasn't really talked about. It was like if you couldn't learn stuff in the way that it was thrust at you, then you were just dumb, maybe.

Dan: Well, what you and I got in school was the very late end of the German model.

The German model of education is what arose in the industrial era, and its job is to create good, obedient workers, not necessarily to create independent citizens who can think for themselves and who can move through a world that's changing and learn things.

That kind of education came from an older tradition, but it wasn't well suited to pulling people out of the hinterlands and putting them in the factories in a way that they could understand what they were supposed to be doing.

So the Germans developed a regimented system that was built around memorisation exclusively, rather than processing. Memorisation and repetition.

Whereas a more classical approach would have you do memorisation as part of repetition, processing, evaluation, and creativity. So when you go to school, you get some of the toolkit you need, but not all of it.

Jo: Yes, and then I think some people were just so bashed over the head with stuff that they didn't enjoy the process of learning, and maybe just moved away from it now.

I want to come back on something you said there, that it didn't enable the independence, the thinking for yourself.

We're living in this really weird time now where we're almost in a splintered world where you can find information on anything you want, but a lot of people are finding information, say, on TikTok or in AI-generated books with no rigorous fact-checking.

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