Why We Should Learn in Public
The Fastest Way to Grow Is to Think Out Loud
AI can now answer any question in seconds. It can summarize a field of study you’ve spent years in, simulate expertise, and produce polished outputs on demand. So here’s an honest question: if AI can do the thinking for you, why bother sharing your own?
We’ve been thinking about this a lot at Glasp — a company built on the belief that your highlights and your learning process don’t just belong to you. They belong to the people who come after you. And the more AI flattens the surface of knowledge, the more we keep coming back to the same answer.
Learning in public isn’t just a content strategy. It’s the way knowledge has always compounded across generations.
“You Already Know That You Will Never Be Done Learning.”
Shawn Wang — known as swyx — wrote this at the top of what became one of the most widely shared essays in developer culture. The essay was called Learn in Public, and its premise was deceptively simple: most people learn in private, and lurk.
They consume. They take notes nobody else sees. They accumulate expertise that vanishes with them.
swyx’s alternative wasn’t complicated. Write blogs. Post your questions publicly. Make tutorials. Speak at meetups. Leave comments. Build a visible record of what you’re figuring out — not a polished portfolio, but a live journal of your curiosity. He called this learning exhaust: the byproduct of learning that, if shared, becomes fuel for everyone else.
The insight wasn’t just philosophical. It was strategic. The relative rarity of people who actually do this means that joining that group makes you stand out immediately. Mentors find you. Opportunities appear. The people who care about what you’re learning come to you, because you’ve made it possible for them to find you at all.
As swyx put it: “You can learn so much on the Internet, for the low, low price of your ego.”
→ Explore swyx’s writing on Glasp
The Serendipity Vehicle
David Perell gave this dynamic a name that stuck: the Serendipity Vehicle.
When you publish your learning online — a blog post, a thread, a newsletter, a highlighted passage with your annotation — you’re not just sharing information. You’re building a signal. And that signal travels to people you’ll never meet, in places you’ll never go, at hours when you’re asleep.
“You put out a signal,” Perell describes, “and it’s as if thousands of little minions, who work 24/7, carry your ideas to people who think like you and are interested in the same things you are.”
The result isn’t just more followers. It’s more aligned people. It’s the collaborator you didn’t know existed. The introduction you couldn’t have manufactured. The opportunity that came through a stranger who read something you wrote two years ago and only now reached out.
This is why learning in public isn’t self-promotion in the conventional sense. You’re not broadcasting to impress. You’re tuning a frequency — and letting the internet deliver you to the people most likely to resonate with it.
The same thing, by the way, is true for non-technical people. Patrick O'Shaughnessy — investor and host of Invest Like the Best — built his understanding of industries he didn't yet know (tech, energy, consumer) by inviting experts onto his podcast and thinking out loud in public. He never claimed to be the expert in the room. The podcast was the learning process, made visible.
Show Your Work: Process Over Product
Austin Kleon made the same case for creatives in his book Show Your Work!, and it applies far beyond the art world.
The conventional instinct is to hide your work until it’s finished — to only share once you have something polished enough to be proud of. Kleon’s argument is the opposite: the process is the interesting part. Most people never see behind the scenes of how ideas develop. When you let them in, you become more than a source of information. You become someone they’re rooting for.
“Think about what you want to learn,” Kleon writes, “and make a commitment to learning it in front of others.”
That commitment does two things. It keeps you accountable — it’s harder to quit when other people are watching. And it attracts your peers. Not the audience you imagined, but the actual people who care about the same questions you’re sitting with right now.
Kleon calls these people your knuckleballers — the fellow practitioners who find you because you were findable. You couldn’t have found them any other way.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants — and Leaving a Ladder
Isaac Newton’s most famous line has always been about humility: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” But there’s a responsibility embedded in it that we rarely talk about.
If the knowledge that got us here was passed down — from generation to generation, through books and letters and now through the open web — then we are the beneficiaries of everyone who chose to share rather than hoard.
The question isn’t just: what can I learn? It’s: what am I contributing to what comes next?
When you publish your learning process, when you annotate what you read, when you share the questions you’re working through, you’re not just building your own career. You’re building a resource that future learners — people who don’t exist yet — will be able to discover and learn from.
This is the principle Glasp was built on: to democratize access to other people’s learning and the experiences they’ve collected throughout their lives. Not just the conclusions, but the journey. The highlights, the annotations, the “I don’t understand this yet, but here’s where I’m starting.”
The rule of 1:9:90 — 1% of people create, 9% curate, 90% consume — isn’t inevitable. It’s a default. And every person who makes even a small part of their learning visible shifts that ratio slightly, for everyone.
What Stops Most People
It’s worth being honest about the friction. Learning in public requires something that doesn’t feel natural for most people: being wrong, in front of others, on purpose.
Not accidentally wrong. Deliberately wrong-for-now, in the process of figuring something out.
swyx’s advice here is blunt: “Try your best to be right, but don’t worry when you’re wrong. A much better strategy is getting really good at recovering from being wrong.” The pace of your learning matters more than your batting average on any given post.
The other barrier is the blank-page problem. Most people don’t know where to start because they’re waiting until they have something important enough to say. But that threshold never arrives — or it arrives so rarely that the habit never forms.
The solution isn’t a burst of ambition. It’s a very small consistent act. Share one thing you learned today. One passage that made you think. One question you don’t have the answer to yet. The audience for that is larger than you think — and the act of sharing it will clarify your own thinking in ways that private notes never will.
How Glasp Fits In
This is where Glasp’s design philosophy comes from.
We built Glasp as the lowest-friction version of learning in public: highlight something, and it’s already shared. Not a blog post. Not a thread. Just the moment of genuine intellectual contact — the sentence that stopped you, the passage you reread twice.
That highlight is your footprint. It’s public. It’s searchable. It’s something the person learning after you can discover, not in a generic search result, but in the context of what a real person found worth saving.
Over time, your Glasp profile becomes exactly what the original idea of learning in public was meant to create: a visible record of your intellectual journey. Not curated for performance. Not polished for an audience. Just honest documentation of what you found worth your attention.
When someone discovers your profile because their curiosity overlaps with yours, that’s the Serendipity Vehicle working. When your highlights show up in someone’s research months after you made them, that’s the shoulder of the giant — without you having to do anything more.
The Glasp Take: The Learning You Don’t Share Disappears
In the age of AI, here’s what changes — and what doesn’t.
AI can generate knowledge. It cannot generate your process of acquiring it. Your questions, your confusions, your “I didn’t understand this until I saw it this way” moments are not replicable by a model trained on someone else’s data.
What you share publicly is the only version of your learning that has any chance of outlasting you.
swyx put it simply: learning in public is the fastest way to build expertise, network, and knowledge. We’d add one thing: it’s also the most generous. Because every time you make your learning visible, you make it slightly easier for the next person to figure out what you figured out.
That’s not a small thing. That’s how knowledge has always worked.
So: what are you learning right now that you haven’t shared yet? Start there.
→ Browse what people are highlighting on Glasp
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What’s something you learned recently that you almost didn’t share — and what held you back? Leave a comment. We read every one.
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