# The fast track to erudition

There's usually no shortcut to being highly educated.

- It takes a decent amount of time reading hard books.
- It also requires lots of time pondering over those ideas.
- As a general rule, being highly educated is similar to [fame](power-influence.md) or [wealth](money-3_budget.md): it has no correlation with [living well](people-goodlife.md)

However, two people can be equally intelligent, with one of them more educated than the other.

- The clearest demonstration of this intelligence comes in the variety of possible domains an individual can encounter.

With that said, it's entirely possible to waste time on [useless content](information.md).

- We live in an era where we have *too much* information.

This, therefore, is my attempt to capture the best of all possible domains.

- This is a purely academic approach, which is trying to capture valuable things while leaving your brain the freedom to *not* read everything ever made.
- There's obviously no accounting for taste, but that'would be a question about "[art](art-recommended.md)".

## Books

While it has [religious](religion.md) implications, [the Bible](theology-bible.md) is the most well-linked book in existence.

- Even if you're an atheist, the repetition of themes across 2,000 years across 66 texts is indisputably impressive.
- Since over half of the world uses it or references it, it has tremendous [political implications](politics-conservativeliberal.md).
  - Most other [religions](religion.md) that *don't* use the Bible are often acting in response to it (e.g., Islam).
- Also, if it is even remotely true to be what it says (the spoken words of God), it's the only thing that *isn't* merely humanity sharing stuff with humanity.

Engineering and design

- Donald Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" gives a clear primer on all things [UI and UX](engineering-design.md).

Philosophy

- Ancient
  - Almost everything by Socrates is a good start into philosophy.
  - Aristotle's "Metaphysics"
- Modern
  - Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy"
  - Wikipedia summaries of modern philosophers, since random fans of the philosophy do a better job summarizing any sufficiently usable ideas than the philosophers themselves.

## Things to avoid like the plague

Some stuff is utterly *not* worth anyone's time.

- It won't stop the brave, foolish, and masochostic from reading it, but this is here to say I warned you.

Philosophy

- Postmodern philosophers in general
  - Many of them are difficult to understand with a severely limited scope of usefulness.
  - In particular, almost anything by Friedrich Nietzsche, who demonstrated that following his philosophy will lead to an early death in an insane asylum.
- Most academic commentary on philosophers: if it was hard to understand, it's entirely possible it wasn't worth reading.