Building the Education I Should Have Built Years Ago
My name is Michal Kalinowski. I live in London, and in my late 40’s I am deliberately rebuilding my education.
Not because I lacked one in the conventional sense.
I attended school, passed examinations and earned qualifications. I was good at learning what was required of me. I could memorise the material, reproduce it when tested and obtain the result.
Then I forgot most of it.
Years later, when I began reading seriously as an adult, I noticed the same pattern. I would finish a book, feel that I had understood it and move on. A few months later, I could remember the general subject but struggled to reconstruct the argument, explain the important ideas or use them naturally in conversation.
The books were passing through me without substantially changing me.
That realisation became the starting point for this project.
Information is not education
We have access to more information than any previous generation.
Books, lectures, podcasts, courses and expert commentary are available almost instantly. Yet it is possible to consume serious material for years without building a coherent body of knowledge.
Consumption produces familiarity. When we encounter an idea again, it feels recognisable, and we mistake that recognition for understanding.
But genuine understanding requires more.
Can you retrieve the idea without looking it up? Can you explain it in your own words? Can you connect it to something else you know? Can you recognise it operating in ordinary life? Can you use it to think through a new problem?
If not, the information may have entered your attention without becoming part of your mind.
I wanted to change that.
The deeper question
At first, I thought this was simply a problem of memory and method.
I needed better notes, retrieval practice, regular review and a way to connect ideas across different books and courses.
Those methods matter. But beneath the question of how to learn lies a more difficult one:
What are you learning for?
A person can become extremely efficient at travelling in no particular direction.
Many of us accumulate disconnected interests. We read whatever catches our attention, save articles we never revisit and begin courses we do not complete. The individual pieces may be worthwhile, but they never form an education because nothing organises them.
A meaningful education needs a central question—or at least a direction.
What are you genuinely trying to understand?
What has drawn your attention repeatedly throughout your life?
What bothers you that other people appear able to ignore?
What kind of person are you trying to become?
What would you regret never seriously pursuing?
I do not believe that a questionnaire or a stranger can reveal someone’s calling with certainty. But I do think we can examine the evidence of our own lives, form a provisional answer and test it through study and action.
What I am studying
My own direction currently runs through psychology, philosophy, behavioural science and self-mastery.
I am studying thinkers including Aristotle, Carl Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Haidt, Robert Sapolsky, Jordan Peterson and others.
The objective is not to collect impressive names or simply repeat their conclusions. Nor is it to agree with any thinker about everything.
I want to understand their ideas well enough to:
Explain them without hiding behind quotations
Compare thinkers who disagree
Recognise their ideas operating in ordinary life
Test their claims against evidence and experience
Develop conclusions that are genuinely my own
Use knowledge to improve judgement and behaviour
Speak about difficult subjects with confidence and precision
This requires a different approach to learning.
I read more slowly. I retrieve important ideas from memory. I write about them, explain them aloud and connect them to things I have studied previously. I pay attention to the places where my explanation collapses, because those places reveal the difference between familiarity and understanding.
The aim is not to finish the greatest possible number of books.
It is to become a person for whom the important ones have become part of his thinking.
What you will find here
This blog documents that process.
I write about the most useful ideas I encounter in psychology, philosophy and behavioural science, but this is not intended to be another collection of book summaries.
I am interested in what happens after the summary.
Does the idea survive serious examination? How does it connect with other thinkers? Where can we see it in real life? What does it change about the way we understand ourselves or other people? Can it help us make a better decision or behave differently?
You will find:
Detailed explorations of books and lectures
Connections between psychology, philosophy and everyday life
Practical applications of difficult ideas
Methods for remembering and articulating what you learn
Reflections on meaning, direction and human potential
Honest reports from my own attempt to build a serious adult education
I am not writing as an academic or as someone who has completed the journey.
I am writing as the first participant in the project.
The system is being built through use. My assumptions are being tested against books, lectures, conversation and experience. When my understanding changes, the writing will show that change.
Who this is for
This work is for people who sense that they are capable of more but feel intellectually scattered or undirected.
It is for people who read but remember too little.
For people who have consumed years of books, podcasts and videos without developing a coherent body of knowledge.
For people who want to become more articulate—not merely to sound impressive, but because clear speech grows from clear thought.
It is especially for adults who worry that they started too late.
I do not think we started too late.
We may simply have reached the point at which we are finally able to choose our education for ourselves.
Where this may lead
Over time, I want to develop a practical way of helping other adults undertake their own version of this process.
The idea is simple, even if delivering it well will not be: help someone identify a serious question worth organising their education around, build a personal curriculum and integrate that knowledge until it changes what they can think, say and do.
That may eventually become a guided programme, a small learning community or a personalised system. For now, I am doing the necessary work first: studying, testing the method, publishing the results and learning what genuinely helps.
This blog is the public record of that work.
If you want to stop drifting through information and begin building your education deliberately, you are in the right place.
Find a direction worth pursuing.
Learn deeply enough for the knowledge to become part of you.
Then use it to become more of the person you are capable of being.
