How to Design a Personal Curriculum You’ll Actually Stick To
What if I told you that you could learn anything you want without having to go back to school and drop thousands of dollars on a university program?
Because you can.
No matter if you want to learn about ecological disasters, astronomy, linguistics, how to tie knots, forage mushrooms, or hold a handstand, you can learn it all — all on your own. How?
By building a personal curriculum. Or in other words, a structured learning path to help you tackle any subject or skill you want to learn.
I love to learn. And over the years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours studying how to design effective personal curriculums and even more time testing those ideas through my own learning projects. Through that process, I’ve discovered what makes a curriculum both effective and sustainable — and that’s what I want to share with you today.
So in today’s article, I’ll break down the 7-steps I follow to build my own personal curriculums to learn anything I want — and actually stick with them.
Let’s get into it.
Step 1) Choose the right topic
If you’re anything like me, you have a million things you’d love to learn. The challenge isn’t coming up with ideas for what to build a curriculum around — it’s choosing just one.
I get it. This is something I struggled with when I first started teaching myself, and honestly, it’s still something I wrestle with from time to time. Fortunately, I’ve found a simple solution, inspired by a piece of advice from Henry David Thoreau:
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
What does this have to do with choosing a topic?
To me, this quote is a reminder that our time is finite, and who knows how much of it we have left? Because of this, it’s of the upmost importance that we spend our time doing the best things first. Reading the best books, or — making this relevant to personal curriculums — creating curriculums on the stuff that we’re the most obsessed with right now.
Of course, that raises another question: what if you’re not sure what you’re most interested in? To solve that, I like using a simple brain-dump exercise before creating any new personal curriculum — you can copy it directly.
The exercise is easy.
All you have to do is vomit out everything you’re interested in learning (literally everything you can think of) onto a page, and then circle the top three things that pique your interest the most in the moment, and then order those topics from most to least interested.
Here’s an example of my brain dump list of topics:
Then, once you’ve got your three topics numbered from most to least interested, here’s what you’re going to do with them:
You’re going to make your first topic your current curriculum.
You’re going to make your second topic your next curriculum.
And you’re going to make your third topic your “back burner project.”
Why set things up this way? I’ve found this simple structure helpful for three main reasons:
First, choosing the topic you’re most interested in right now as your current curriculum naturally boosts motivation. And when motivation is higher, you’re far more likely to actually stick with it and finish it.
Second, having your next curriculum already decided creates a sense of direction. It helps you stay focused on your current path without constantly getting pulled away by new ideas or “shiny object” distractions.
And third, keeping a back burner project gives you room for variety. This is something you can explore casually outside your main curriculum hours. For someone like me — who wants to learn everything and can get restless spending too long on one topic — this helps keep things fresh while still staying focused.
So when choosing your curriculum topic, pick what you want to study the most right now — or you may never get the chance to do it again.
Step 2) Narrow your curriculum scope
Once you’ve figured out the right topic to create a curriculum around, the next step is to narrow your curriculum scope.
You can’t take a learning goal like “learn history” or “learn how to code” and run with it. Those goals are too nebulous. Too vague. If you try to create a curriculum around the entirety of “history,” you will just end up hoarding resources or spending forever learning random stuff without making real progress.
This is why you need to narrow your curriculum scope. You need to figure out exactly what you want to learn. So, what do you want to be able to do or know after finishing your curriculum?
I recommend defining 3–5 specific goals you want to achieve. For example, if you wanted to start learning World History, your goals could be:
- Understand the major civilizations and empires that shaped world history
- Understand the causes and consequences of major global transformations
- Develop the ability to analyze historical perspectives and connections
You can feel free to break these goals down into sub-goals as well and make them even more specific if you know exactly what you’re interested in learning.
On the opposite end of this, it’s also helpful to define your anti-scope, or in other words, what exactly is outside the scope of your personal curriculum. Using the World History goal, your anti-scope could be:
- Deep dives into any major historical figure
- Memorizing large numbers of dates, names, and battles
- Specialization or study on any specific period or civilization
What you’ll find is that when you determine your curriculum scope, finding resources will become a whole lot easier, and measuring your progress will become a lot more obvious as you’ll know exactly where the finish line for the course actually is.
Step 3) Give your course structure
After narrowing your curriculum scope, the next step is to give your course structure. This essentially comes down to creating a syllabus for your curriculum that will cover three points:
- What the course is about
- What the learning outcomes are
- What assignments/projects you’ll complete
This step can feel overwhelming.
I’ve found the key is to simply not reinvent the wheel. Honestly, there are so many publicly posted syllabi that you can find online to copy or cherry pick from. For example, you have all the major MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that post their syllabi for hundreds of different courses online that you can view. My favorite websites to look for posted syllabi are Yale and MIT Opencourseware.
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These websites will tell you exactly what the course is about, what the expected learning outcomes are, and what assignments you must complete. Using the Intro to Psychology course from MIT as an example, I could use the posted syllabus as inspiration and break my psychology personal curriculum into these three components:
- About → This course is about the scientific study of human nature, including how the mind works, and how the brain supports the mind, with topics on emotion, learning, memory, and cognition.
- Outcomes → Be able to think critically about psychological evidence, understand the methods psychologists use to find answers to their questions, and understand the important findings and theoretical approaches in the field of psychology (you can also use the goals you created above here, or use this exercise to flesh them out more).
- Assignments → Three exams and three writing assignments (writing assignment 1: Are studies of cognitive and emotional developments in adolescents useful for setting public policy guidelines, such as juvenile access to abortion and the juvenile death penalty?)
This structure will become the map that will help guide your learning. Without it, you’ll feel lost, confused, and overwhelmed, so it’s important that you take the time to get situated in the subject you want to learn and create a proper structure for it.
Step 4) Find your learning material
Once you’ve got the structure created for your course, the next step is to find your learning material. This is the stuff you’ll use to learn and achieve the specific learning outcomes you created for your personal curriculum.
The most important thing to takeaway here is that minimalism wins. You don’t need five different online courses and ten books and three podcasts and several textbooks to sufficiently learn your topic. All you need are a handful of core resources to learn from. That’s it. I like to make it easy and start off with one resource that covers each major “category”:
- 1 Lecture series/online course/Youtube playlist
- 1 Textbook OR in-depth book
- 1 “casual” book (layman’s book)
- 1 podcast/specific episode
- 1 community (online and/or in person)
- 1 newsletter by an expert
My preference is to gather materials in each major category to really immerse myself in the topic I’m learning.
Think of it like learning a language. Just like immersion is incredibly effective for acquiring a new language, the more you surround yourself with information on the topic you want to learn in different forms, the more likely you are to learn it faster and more effectively.
And as you begin to search for the resources that fit into each category, you can simply vet the ones you come across to ensure they are relevant to your learning goals.
As an example, if your goal is to learn about the Roman Empire and why it collapsed, you’d only choose a podcast, book, lecture series, etc, that dives into Rome’s decline or any other specific learning goals you have (like why it took the Byzantine empire so long to decline in comparison).
This is what my resource list looked like for my World History curriculum:
- Khan Academy World History course
- The Dawn of Humanity book
- The Rest is History podcast
- r/history community on Reddit
- A Little Wiser newsletter
Enough variety that I’m immersed, but not so many resources that I’m overwhelmed.
Step 5) Figure out your retention strategy
Now that you’ve got your resources figured out, the next step is to ask yourself:
How am I going to actually study these materials?
This is incredibly important to figure out, because if you expect to absorb the information you’re learning about just by passively reading or listening, think again. I made the mistake of doing this when I first started my World History curriculum only to realize after several months of watching my course videos that I could barely remember anything I had learned. Passive learning is a massive waste of time.
This is why you need a retention strategy in place before you start learning — something that will force you to slow down and really digest the information you’re consuming so you can move it into your long-term memory. And ideally, you want to do this for each resource you are using.
As an example, when you watch your lectures, will you take notes on it or go up to your mom and talk about what you learned afterward? Or when you read your textbook, will you create summaries on it, flashcards, or something else? You need to figure out how you will study, and not only learn.
True learning only happens when you actively study the material, so plan in advance how you plan to actively work with the information you’re consuming.
Step 6) Choose your duration
Once you’ve chosen your specific retention strategies, you are in a much better position to finally start learning. But before you do, you first need to figure out exactly how long you want your personal curriculum duration to be.
This is entirely dependent on you.
How deeply you want to learn your topic or how long you want to spend learning it will affect your course length. As an example, if you want to become an expert in mythology, you’ll probably need to spend more than four weeks studying that subject. But if you only want a foundational level knowledge, that timeframe may be sufficient.
Or, you may want to become an expert in a topic but still not want to spend 12 continuous months learning it, and so you may plan to only study it for six weeks, take a break, and then come back to it later.
Keep in mind, your learning intensity will also reflect the duration you choose. For example, I’m currently reading a psychology textbook with 12 total chapters. If I wanted to complete this personal curriculum in an ambitious 4 weeks because I’m a masochist, I’d have to read three chapters a week. That’s insane, and impossible to achieve (unless I was unemployed without a social life or hobbies). Thus, I decided to pace myself at one chapter a week, and my duration just reflected what I could realistically handle each week (which turned out to be 3 months).
When choosing your course duration, you’ll have to keep your level of depth goal and amount of time you can devote to studying in mind. It’s better to be realistic with your duration than ambitious, especially if you’re only just starting out. Aiming for 6–8 weeks is what I recommend for most beginners.
Step 7) Schedule your learnings
Finally, once you have determined your course duration, the last step is to schedule your learnings.
This is an incredibly important step to complete. If you don’t figure out when you’ll sit down to actually work through your curriculum material, then you won’t. No plan for learning = no learning.
But how do you create a schedule?
My preference is to treat my schedule like a university schedule. If you’ve ever been enrolled in a university course, you would know that each course includes so many lectures you need to attend each week, like a 1hr lecture every Monday and Thursday at 2pm. That’s what I’m going for with my own curriculum schedule.
So whenever I start a new curriculum, I’ll just figure out a specific time slot each week that I have to “show up to class” for. This will be the time I use to watch a lecture or read a textbook chapter. In my case, that’s every Monday at 11am for 2–3 hours.
So on my calendar right now, I have 12 lectures (total amount) scheduled for the next three months to read through every Monday at 11am. These are scheduled obligations, just like an actual university course, that I must attend.
Now, how you create your schedule depends on the duration you’re aiming for and the total amount of material you need to get through. If you happen to be following a MOOC, you can also simply follow the posted schedule for that class instead of figuring it all out yourself.
Keep in mind though, this schedule only watching lectures or reading a textbook — not studying. It’s important you also schedule in blocks of time to properly study what you learned outside of “class.” In my case, I set aside an hour every morning to write notes, create flashcards, and actively study the material I learned on Monday.
All-in-all, being consistent with your learnings and making progress with your curriculum becomes dramatically easier when your learning sessions are already pre-planned. Instead of constantly deciding on what to study and when to study, all you have to do is sit down and follow your schedule.
And that’s it.
That’s how you can properly create a personal curriculum for any subject you want to learn — and actually follow through with it. If you’re interested in reading about the most common mistakes people make when building their own curriculums, I wrote a free 5-day email course called The Self-Education Roadmap that goes over each major mistake people make when building their personal curriculums and how to overcome them.
Lastly, if you have any additional tips for building a personal curriculum that wasn’t mentioned here, please keep the conversation going and write your tips in the comments! I’m always looking for ways to improve, and I’m sure there’s lots I haven’t discovered. Thanks for reading :)
