How to earn a DIY Ph.D.?

You can become a very good, well-regarded writer by earning a “Do-It-Yourself Ph.D.”:

Look for a Nexus of Interest, the most interesting topic to you that is also interesting to others.
Write a million words to deliberately improve from where you are to become the world’s foremost expert on that topic.

Ikigai concept

The first part is straightforward. Most life advice converges on some form of Ikigai, which is the idea that you should do the intersection of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for:

However, this is unattainable if you don’t yet know any of these. Writing is the way to get there. So, we can make two simplifying assumptions:

Love what you do well

Instead of the hackneyed advice of “do what you love,” we assume that you will learn to love what you do well. This is the more realistic truth, and it better explains why people unironically love and are great at all sorts of things, from tax code optimization to designing high availability systems for multibillion-dollar corporations.

Get paid for what the world needs

Whatever the world needs, you can be paid for it. As Naval Ravikant has often noted: “The internet has massively broadened the possible space of ...