While the The Path To Polymathy is a simple Notion database, an organised collection of blank pages, guiding your learning of new topics, there are some things I’d like to explain that will help you get the most out of it. This page takes about 4 minutes to read through. Ultimately though, it is just a Notion database; do with it what you will.

Some key aspects:

• Everything is sorted in alphabetical order, not the order you should learn topics in.
• You will find duplicate topics within different fields. This was done deliberately, so that no matter what you decide to learn, you will come across everything pertinent to that field.
• Some of the topics are examples of topics that could be found in the parent topic, but aren’t necessarily exhaustive lists of all topics you would find. An example of this would be the Noteworthy People section; I have listed some examples, but feel free to add your own.
• Off the back of the above note, you can of course add new pages and sub-pages to this Notion database yourself, depending on how in-depth you would like to go, and if there are topics you would like to add yourself. If you come across an area of the database you think is lacking, incomplete, or needs changing, please consider leaving feedback here: Feedback / Suggest A Resource

How To Use

This database was built with polymathy in mind. While anyone can use it, your learning is going to be guided yourself. How deeply you want to cover a topic before you consider it “Completed” is up to you. Naturally, you will probably find yourself doing cursory research on some topics, and exploring others a lot more.

The way in which I intend to use the database is to make notes on the pages with no “Child Topics” for the most part, as these are essentially the deepest I have gone on that particular topic. In many cases, it would be excessive to break down these topics further, however for the sake of practicality, there are others where you might feel you would be better served adding your own child topics to these. There will also undoubtedly be notes that apply to a higher level topic, such as the field of Philosophy as a whole, so notes can be taken on all pages as well.

Each page also has a ‘Resources’ section, so you can keep track of any relevant sites, courses, videos, and creators you find that you might want to come back to. Again, feel free to contribute your own resources via the form on the page Feedback / Suggest A Resource. The project is starting as a blank slate, but over time, my hope is that we can fill out the starting database to help more people.

The database itself has over 3,000 pages in it. When navigating through, you may experience slight lag if you have every drop-down arrow expanded. Only expanding the one you’re currently looking at could help with performance.

Fields & Views

There are a few fields in the database that I would like to explain. You can keep or delete the ones you feel will be useful to you, as well as add any of your own. Understanding the fields first will help you understand and better use the views, explained just below.

Fields

• Parent Topic: Simply to identify the topic that a given topic is ‘under’.
• Child Topic: Lists topics that come under a given topic. Both Parent and Child Topic are fields that are hidden in most views.
• Resources: Keep track of any resources that you want to save for later.
• Status: By default, this is “Not Started”. When you start learning a new topic, you can change it to “In Progress”, and when you feel you don’t need to research that topic any further, you can change it to “Complete”.
  • NB: When you complete all Child Topics for a given topic, you will need to manually set this to “Complete” yourself; a “Rating” (see below) of 100% won’t automatically change the Status to Complete.
• Completion: This is a percentage of a topics Child Topics that have a Status of “Complete”. This can help guide your own personal journey to “mastering” a new topic.