The Study: The Place to Figure Out Everything...

Somewhere between the Renaissance and the modern TV remote, we lost something.

For centuries, learned men and women had studies. Not offices, not man caves — studies. Rooms built around the quiet, relentless pursuit of understanding. Jefferson had one. Darwin had one. Lincoln taught himself law, rhetoric, and geometry by firelight. These weren't people with extra time on their hands. They were people who understood something the rest of us seem to have forgotten: that if you want to move through the world with confidence — if you want to understand why things happen, anticipate what comes next, and help the people around you — you have to study.

I've been trying to do that my whole life.

Not in any structured or academic way. I was never much for roadmaps. I had a question. Actually, I had thousands of questions, but they all boiled down to the same one: How does this all work? Why do economies collapse? Why do good people make terrible decisions? Why does history keep repeating? Why do some people find peace and others never do? What does science actually say about consciousness, about morality, about the universe? What did the great philosophers spend their whole lives trying to figure out, and did any of them get there?

So I read. I read history and biography, philosophy and psychology, religion and spirituality, finance and economics, true crime and forensics, science and mathematics, politics and policy, self-help and personal development, design and computers, adventure and survival, military history and leadership, art and music and magic and paper crafts. I read fantasy epics because world-building teaches you systems thinking. I read memoirs because they're the closest thing we have to lived experience without living it yourself.

When I recently sat down and tried to tally it, the number came out somewhere north of 1,000 books. Here's roughly what that looks like:

Fantasy, Young Adult & Sci-Fi: ~200 books — Feist, Moon, Eddings, Jordan, Tolkien, and dozens more. These were my introduction to the love of reading and laid the foundation for what followed. At first, all that matters is that you read, anything, just find what you like, and build the habit.

Computer & Digital Media: ~100 books — design, coding, video, editing. The tools to build things myself.

Self-Help & Personal Development: ~100 books — habits, productivity, mindset.

History & Biography: ~63 books — how real humans navigated real life circumstances.

WWII & Military History: ~30 books — leadership under pressure, consequence of ideology, senselessness of war.

Science, Biology, Botany, & Mathematics: ~34 books

True Crime & Forensics: ~40 books

Adventure & Survival: ~20 books

Paper Crafts & Construction: ~28 books

Music, Art & Magic: ~30 books

Psychology & Philosophy: ~18 books

Design & Construction: ~20 books

Classics: ~20 books

Religion & Spirituality: a shelf's worth

Miscellaneous: hundreds more — fiction, specialized technical, finance, real estate, politics, social dynamics, body language.

I'm not sharing that list to impress you. I'm sharing it because I want you to see the shape of it. It goes everywhere on purpose. Because the answers to the big questions aren't hiding in one section of the bookstore. They're scattered across all of them, and you have to read widely enough that they start talking to each other.

That's when something remarkable happens. You start seeing the same patterns surface in wildly different contexts. The psychology of a cult leader illuminates a political movement. A principle of physics maps onto a financial crisis. A medieval siege strategy explains a negotiation. The dots connect — not because you're especially smart, but because you've given your brain enough material to work with.

This is what a study is for. Not decoration. Not storage. It's where you go to wrestle with the world on paper, to argue with dead thinkers, to slowly, painstakingly close the gap between what you know and what you wish you understood.

Somewhere along the way, we traded the study for the man cave. And I get it — the man cave is comfortable. There's a game on, the beer is cold, and nobody's asking you to think too hard. But comfort and understanding are working in opposite directions. The man cave is a place to escape the world. The study is a place to figure it out.

If your life isn't where you want it — your income, your relationships, your sense of direction — I'd gently suggest that the answer isn't in the next scroll or the next episode. It might be in a book you haven't read yet. And then another. And another.

Reclaim the study. Not necessarily the room — though I'd love to see a resurgence of actual studies in actual homes — but the practice. The daily, earnest, humble commitment to understanding the world a little better than you did yesterday.

You don't have to read 1,000 books. Start with one. And I promise you, with each you finish, you'll be closer to figuring it all out.

Stay curious...