As your interests, feelings, curiosity, enthusiasm, and concerns begin to converge on a particular topic, it will be well to draft, purely for your own use at first, a brief statement of your plans. I have never known an independent scholar who did not discover, at the end of an hour or two of work on such a one-page statement, that he or she had sharper goals.
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By making the process of browsing a bit more self-conscious, you can conduct your own informal “reconnaissance” of the terrain of learning. All you have to do is follow these three rules:
