3 habits of self-directed learners, according to brilliant polymaths

There’s a pattern hiding in the biographies of the most brilliant minds: repeatable habits anyone can practice.It has nothing to do with being a genius. You don’t need talent or intelligence, though that helps. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write by dismantling essays he admired, rewriting them from memory. And comparing his version to the original. Charles Darwin spent years obsessively collecting barnacles (spineless animals that look like small circular white rocks) before publishing anything about evolution. Richard Feynman rebuilt physics from first principles in notebooks he kept purely for himself. None of these men was following a specific rule. Nobody assigned them a reading list. They were doing something harder and rarer: They were directing their own learning. And in doing so, they accidentally revealed a set of habits almost every serious polymath shares.I’ve been trying to apply the wisdom of these thinkers, and I’m enjoying the process so far. It’s fascinating how