Open source your second brain, like open sourcing the model weights

What is Learning in Public?

Learning in public means documenting and sharing your learning journey on the Internet.

For example, if you’re learning to build an app with Cursor, you could write blog posts about your experience and lessons learned to use it more effectively.

Or if you’re exploring DeepSeek, you could post on social media about how you set it up locally and your thoughts on its comparison with OpenAI.

It’s like open-sourcing your knowledge.

For an in-depth exploration, I highly recommend swyx’s article on the subject.

Why learning in public?

Deepen Your Understanding

Explaining concepts to others forces you to clarify your own understanding, highlight gaps, and reinforce what you’ve learned. Teaching is one of the most effective forms of learning.

Accountability

Sharing your progress creates a natural commitment to follow through. Knowing that your journey is public can be a powerful motivator to stay consistent and productive.

Empower Others

Your journey might inspire or guide someone else. Maybe someone is stuck on a problem you’ve already solved a few weeks ago. Helping others makes learning more meaningful.

Receive Valuable Feedback

By sharing, you open yourself up to advice, encouragement, and even constructive criticism. Feedback helps you improve faster than learning alone.

Build Your Personal Brand

Over time, your shared learning journey becomes a record of your growth. This “content portfolio” can attract like-minded people or opportunities. The audience you build will be a distribution channel when you launch your own products or services.

Simplest way to start building an audience

Being a content creator and building in public are two common ways to build an audience. But they are hard to get started.

Content creation is hard. We need to constantly think about topics and publish content. But we might already have a full-time job and family priorities to take care of.

Building in public is hard too. The product you are building may not be ready to share publicly. Or you are building products for employers, making the matters unsharable.

But learning in public has neither problem.

First, you are already learning things and taking notes of your learnings every week, so organizing and publishing your notes can be a natural step in the flow.

You don’t even have to think hard to create totally new idea or new content - it can be just summary of the content you just consume, or a brief note of the event you experienced.

Second, sharing what you have learned hardly reveals proprietary information. They do not have to be about a specific product.

Why weren't people learning in public?

We used to learn in private. We consume lots of content every day. We may sometimes jot down notes for ourselves. But we rarely share those notes publicly.

But if the benefits are there, why aren’t more people learning in public yet?

Their main concerns are:

1. Low Return: The immediate return of prioritizing content is low vs. prioritizing day jobs.

2. High Effort: It requires effort to produce quality content in various formats (esp. images and videos as the preferred formats by many social media platforms).

3. Potential Risk: They fear that their content is wrong, of low quality, or sounds cringe.

I had the same concerns. I have a lot of notes in my Notion, but I rarely shared them publicly.

How did I overcome these challenges?

First, I started to understand compound effect of content creation and personal branding.

Think of them as long-term investments. The result does not happen overnight, but the compounded return of previously produced content can be massive and is totally passive.

Second, regarding the effort and risk—what if I am empowered with tools that can:

1. Capture your learnings easily

2. Create shareable bites of content from my learnings for various platforms

3. Check and optimize content to reduce mistakes in facts and writing

4. Make the entire process effortless and as automated as possible

That seems achievable with software and AI. I want to leverage various tools and am experimenting with what works best. I will share them in other posts.

For #2, I decided to create my own tool: Visually. It can transform your learning notes in Markdown into shareable images (like carousels) optimized for social media. I also make it free for you to use.

On the fear of being wrong or imperfect, that’s okay. I am just sharing my recent learning after all. Just be authentic and open to feedback.

My prediction on the trend of learning in public

I think learning in public will become more common in 2025, driven by two tailwinds:

• Creator Economy: People realize creating content can generate massive benefits.

• Generative AI: Creating quality content has never been easier and cheaper.

In fact, it has been taking place — people are sharing their learnings on Medium, LinkedIn, Reddit, RedNote, and YouTube, even if they are not intentionally practicing learning in public.

While I believe the trend will continue, I don’t think there will be mainstream adoption yet. But that’s actually an opportunity for early adopters before things get saturated.

Call to action

This blog is my own action to start learning in public in 2025. I will be sharing my takeaways and insights on AI in this blog. I will also continue to work on tools like Visually to simplify the process of learning in public. What are your actions?