Khalid Talakshi
09-05-2026
15 min read
Not to get too philosophical here, but there is something inherently human about the idea of learning. I love the idea of learning new skills and ideas that can help me grow as a person, and its something I advocate for in my workspace and of course try to do it in my personal life as well. However, I have found that I have not been able to do it as much as I want. While I want to say its the lack of time that is causing this, its not the only reason. I have spent months trying to figure out what has been blocking my development, and after stumbling on this video by Odysseas, it not only opened my eyes to what my problems were, but also gave me an idea on how to structure my learning now! In this post I will talk about how I developed my personal curriculum, what it includes, and how I plan on keeping up with it over the year.
One of the biggest struggles I had was a lack of structure. In university, it was really easy for me to learn because there was a tight, rigid structure. On the other side of this though is that school was so rigid I didn’t get the chance to explore. Somewhere in between no structure and university level structure lies a level of organization that I think I can be successful under, and that is where the concept of a personal curriculum comes in. It allows me to pick a series of topics and structure them in some way so that I can always be making progress towards my goal.
On the topic of topics, I have two separate but related problems: I want to study a lot of things but also have a problem with dropping topics as well. This is a mentality thing as I feel like when something gets hard or boring I tend to give up. The personal curriculum addresses this by a) allowing you to structure learning on multiple topics together and b) allowing you to be flexible in what materials and ways you learn. I’m hoping this allows me to feel empowered to continue with topics as I get bored with materials.
Every Personal Curriculum is made up of 4 key pillars:
Each of these pillars are meant to provide our structure we want for learning while also being flexible enough for updates and adaptations to improve our learning process. We will talk about our set of topics later, for now I want to tackle the other 3 pillars and how we can set ourselves up for success with them.
Aside from tasks, every personal curriculum has 3 things: a schedule, a place, and a way to practice. These 3 things can be custom to what you want but they should be defined. Out of all 3, schedule is the one I found the hardest to manage before and predict I will struggle with the most in this new framework. The main reason is because my work is very different week to week and month to month, but also predictable.We can divide my year up into 3 types of weeks: off weeks, low weeks and high weeks. In a 52 calendar year, we have 16 of each type of week, with 4 weeks reserved as vacation/time off.
Each week type comes with its own benefits and downsides. High weeks tend to be more work heavy and tend to spend more time at the office, which lends itself to being able to use some of that time to do learnings at the office. Low weeks are usually normal hours so more predictable and can easily slot in time for learning. Finally off weeks are great for when I need to spend a bigger block of time learning, but these weeks also tend to be the least predictable as ad-hoc work may come up more often during this time. This means its best to have 3 different types of schedules to help ensure continued momentum in realistic ways to my life.
In terms of yearly planning we want to figure out the best time to start and end our year curriculum. In our case this year timeline doesn’t mean get everything done, but rather means we have a year to focus on this iteration and we can do a big update after a year. It helps to visualize a breakdown of week types by month.
xychart-beta
title "Week Schedule By Type"
x-axis [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]
y-axis "Weeks" 0 --> 4.5
line [0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 3, 4, 1, 0]
line [0, 1, 2, 2, 2, 1, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0]
line [4, 3, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 3, 4]
From this we can see a period of relative calm at the ends while the middle months tend to be busier. From this we can do one of 3 schedules:
For myself, I felt like November to October is the best for getting a high amount of momentum, so while we are starting our curriculum for 2026 now, we will use these extra 6 months to refine and develop our practice better so when the schedule does officially stat we are in a better place. We will also do an update at the start of our year in November. We’ll go over our schedule in the topics section later.
The next pillar is place, and while I initially thought it meant where I was gonna learn, it actually means where will I keep my learnings. This is actually the easiest for me to set up because I already have a pretty good setup going for this.
For our notes, we will be using Obsidian to keep track of things. I like obsidian a lot because its local and offline, can be extended to have numerous features that other apps have, and is markdown based which is a format I love to work in. I already started using the Zettelkasten approach of a course I was taking and I think that given my topic choice, combined with Obsidian’s reference linking, will allow me to have a better understanding of my knowledge base. It also requires very little organization which will help me with not losing momentum due to disorganization.
Any coding projects will (for now) be on GitHub. While it has many faults (more so recently), I am pretty well set up in it and its where most of my projects are stored currently. This also has the most potential for change due to how easy it is to change providers and the trajectory of the product.
Finally, any deliverables I am able to create will be published on this site here. I’m hoping to do things like mini essays, papers, and even apps that people can use. What use is a personal website if you can’t post the cool things you do in life on it!
The final pillar is practice, which is how are we planning on validating and proving our knowledge. While this sounds a little harsh, we ultimately want to prove what we know and identify what we don’t so that we can target our learning better. My goal is to have a couple deliverables for each project in some of the following forms:
In addition to deliverables, we want to use our obsidian to link topics together for stronger connection and easier review. One of the other things we will try is using AI to help with our learning. While AI is a controversial topic, there are a couple uses for it that I see myself benefiting from, such as knowledge searching and generation of review materials. Our goal is to not use AI to help generate the content but rather as a tool to create some of the resources traditional learning is good at. This will be an experiment and we will track its effectiveness.
This is the main part of our 2026 curriculum, the topics we want to learn. It took me a little bit of time to figure this part out, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Its not realistic to do everything I want, but I also didn’t want to compromise my personal or professional goals. To do this, I created 3 criteria for whether a topic fits into this years curriculum.
The first two are career related, as I’m relatively young in my industry and want to keep growing while also expanding the areas I work on. The third is probably my favourite goal because its personal to me. It allows me to decide what I want as long as I can justify it will help me in the long term. So while basket weaving may not be on my curriculum today, it may be on the future if baskets become an integral part of my life!
I also to categorize topics into groups for prioritization. In life unpredictability happens so having a clear structure on what topics are more or less important means if push comes to shove and I need to choose a topic to bump down, I can. To keep it simple we have two groups: Core and Electives. Core subjects will take priority over electives as they will help me in career advancement which is the main goal of this years curriculum, while electives are more for personal growth and exploration, or are things I can explore in my work.
| Core | Elective |
|---|---|
| Bayesian Analysis | Home Labbing |
| Spanish | Data/Systems Engineering Theory |
| Player Evaluation | Mechanics |
I have been wanting to learn more about Bayesian Analysis since I first heard about the topic in 2024. While I have dabbled into it a little bit, I ended up deciding to add it to this years curriculum because
Now I am “cheating” a little (as much as cheating can happen on a personal curriculum) because I have started working on this already, but I have barely scratched the surface, and also this is a personal thing so who cares if I have already started.
I’m hoping to creante a few blog posts and papers using this (there is already one up on the importance of grid position placement in F1) and the resources I’m currently looking at exploring all have quizzes and assignments to help me practice.
For me, I didn’t just want my personal curriculum to be all technical/STEM subjects, I wanted to include some of the arts. One thing I regret from my post secondary time was not learning a language. I did French all 4 years of high school but it never really stuck and I think it was because learning a language in a classroom setting just didn’t work for me.
Spanish also is useful in my career as a lot of people in my industry speak and work in spanish, so it will help with advancing my career goals as well, and given its latin routes it will open up improving my french and growing my italian. For this I’ll mainly be doing duolingo and trying that out, alongside some other resources like podcasts and shows.
Working in baseball, you ultimately pick up a little bit of what makes a good player and what doesn’t. However I barely get time to practice this in my personal life and in other sports. To me this subject is aimed at creativity and exploration. There are no set rules, no set structure, all I have to do is read and learn.
This subject will mainly be focused on Baseball, F1, Football (American and British) and Hockey. These are all sports that mean something in my life and by learning more about them I can get more enjoyment out of the sports. I’ll mainly be doing readings and videos, with writings in the forms of blog posts and reviews.
A homelab is essentially a personal IT infrastructure that you can learn and practice building stuff on. It allows you to own your own data while also customizing features you want in your life. Whether it be smart home automation, content streaming, storage or even hosting your own apps, a home lab will help you with all this.
I was lucky to be gifted an old tower PC that had a decent enough processor and RAM to start this journey, but honestly I just never did. Adding home labbing as an elective allows me to explore cool areas of tech I want to try out, solve problems for myself and my family that we have and open up new ideas for technology that I want to do in future curriculums.
I have been working in the tech space for a long time, but I always felt like my theory side has been a little off. I can implement things really easily, but when it comes to initial design I struggle and need to grow. I have a ton of books on systems and data engineering that I haven’t touched that I really want to digest and understand. I’m hoping we can extend our Zettelkasten to include more of the theory side of things and use that to help with my work projects as well.
This is the one I’m probably most excited about and also the least prepared for. Ever since discovering motorsports I really wanted to learn more about cars, more specifically how they work. My biggest struggle here is gonna be where I can find materials and how I can practice. I have my own car but don’t want to risk ruining it so while an oil change may be easy, a full engine teardown and rebuild is not something I will even know how to start, but I do know I want to get there!
The final step in all this is making sure I keep on track with this curriculum. This part is gonna be developed and refined as we go through the curriculum but I know immediately some of the things I want to try before we hit our first review.
Now lets see if I can stick with this and am able to complete my 2026 curriculum! I’m excited to see how this goes and what I learn along the way. I’ll be doing regular updates on my progress and any changes I make to the curriculum, so stay tuned!