In Cities and Ambition, Paul Graham says that when we talk about cities in the sense that they are, what we really mean are the “collections of people” who are a part of the cities.

A city speaks to you mostly by accident — in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. The conversations you overhear tell you what sort of people you're among.

In the “Learning How To Learn (LHTL)” course that we are building, we are gathering a group of aspiring lifelong learners who want to explore, collect, think, create and share knowledge, and projects together. Learners of the course are citizens who are building a digital learning “city” together.

What kinds of conversations would we like to hear in this city?

Paul says people get discouraged when no one around them cares about the same things they do. This is similar to a phenomenon called “Intellectual Loneliness” shared by David Perell as one of the important reasons why he started writing online: to connect with like-minded people.

In this digital learning “city”, citizens care about improving their learning day by day, bits by bits. Walking through the city’s community center, also known as the grand Discord server, people might overhear each other talking about the coolest learning technique or the coolest thing they have found about a topic of their interest.

How can a city nurture one's ambition?

Some people know at 16 what sort of work they're going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems to precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven't decided yet whether they're going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon. There's nothing wrong with that. But it means if you have this most common type of ambition, you'll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You'll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

Through trial and error, the citizens of this city will know what sort of ambition they have. It’s okay to not have figured out our passion yet. Before finding the specific thing we are ambitious about, we will learn how to learn, how to share and connect with like-minded citizens, and how to persevere in our learning journey.

Learning first, passion will follow.

In Alan’s “My Vision: A new city”, he says that the current Internet doesn’t give him the source of ambition that a physical city might do.

Yes, Amazon told me, “You should buy more stuff,” Facebook told me, “You should talk to your friends,” Netflix told me, “You should have more entertainment.” But the Internet itself has no strong message, but a lot of noise.

And this is not how the Internet should look like. I totally agree. There are so much noise on the Internet, so many options that make me overwhelmed, so many extremities from the media that make me scared. It makes us feel less about ourselves in so many ways and have a sense of anxiety looming over us. No wonder why people seek digital minimalism. But should that be the point of the Internet? There is also SO much connectivity, love, and potential.

Thus, I want to build a digital learning city that brings people together through one ambition - become better learners: a city where people feel safe sharing ideas and accepting that learning can be hard sometimes, where they wouldn't want to shut it down because it’s too much toxicity, where they would get inspired by looking at their neighbors’ “digital” windows or eavesdropping in conversations.

We learn and nurture our ambitions together.