2026 Lesson Plan
Two episodes of Stranger Things a night for the past few weeks. The series finale is tonight, and part of the nightly ritual of doom scrolling is a new addition of fan theories about how the show is going to end.
Personally, I hope Vecna wins. This may seem pessimistic to some, but it’s my perspective that aligns with my belief that Thanos was never a villain, simply misunderstood.
Being an adult is weird, because at some point you stopped feeling like a child, but then I tend to feel guilty about things that bring me back to childhood. It was never that I stopped having interest in video games, it’s that my priorities situated themselves with a new alignment that put them lower on the totem pole. A few years back, fitness became the boss battle I wanted to face, and my body was the thing that needed to level up. By the time I have put in a genuine effort of working out, spent 8 hours having a range of conversations with a diverse spectrum of clients, have come home to try and eat something healthy, I don’t necessarily have the bandwidth to put my remaining mental capacity into a game that requires even more of my attention.
I am the typical millennial that comes home and escapes at the end of the day. The current favorite method involves TV and TikTok, but I recognize that I am falling into dopamine wells because the efforts have lost the perception of merit. I know that there are healthier things for me to do with my time, but when I look at the wall preventing me from getting to the other side, I typically say, “man, that’s pretty tall, and it’s so comfortable over on this side.”
Enter New Year’s Day. The day when our species collectively says, “I’m going to do better this year than I did last year. I’m going to get healthy. I’m going to start reading. I’m going to get that promotion. I’m going to XYZ until I get blue in the face.”
I’m not a big one for resolutions dictated by the turning of a clock, but I am one who believes in small changes for big impact, so when my wife told me a few weeks ago that she wanted us to spend less time doom scrolling social media at night, she came to the table with a pretty good idea. She wanted to spend 2026 learning about the Roman Empire, and she used to create a syllabus of reading materials and documentaries to watch. Her reading list is absolutely gigantic. She asked me if I wanted to learn something alongside her, and at the end of the day we would have an opportunity to talk about the new knowledge we gained instead of showing each other meaningless cat videos.
If I'm being completely honest, my first reaction was, “I have no interest in learning about the Roman Empire.” To me, ancient history is a lot like talking about aliens. It’s fun information to talk about, but it has little practical application to my daily life in a way that I can use and improve my existence. She asked me, “Well, what do you want to learn about?”
This was the first time I had really thought about this. I’m middle aged, I own a business, and I’m entirely comfortable. I have no idea what I actually want to learn about. Knowing that she used AI to give her a straight forward lesson plan about a topic she wanted, I decided to use AI from a different angle.
One of the things that I have learned in the past few years of using AI, I have recognized that I prompt very differently than a lot of my peers. And this isn’t me making assumptions, this is the feedback I get from college professors, venture capitalists, marketers, and a slew of others in admirable career positions when they come in to the barbershop for haircuts and conversations. I recognize that I can use AI as a way to pull the information out of me that doesn’t take residence at the surface, and I typically set my prompts up to pull information from myself instead of asking for the easy answer the robot can provide.
The first thing that I did was changed my settings. The more recent updates of ChatGPT (even the free one that I have downgraded to) allow customization of how it communicates with you for a better personalized experience. I made the base style and tone “Candid” and I changed all of the characteristics to “Less” so I could get a more academic approach to my goal. My prompt contained the 4 characteristics that I always include; context, task, expectation, and an opportunity for clarification questions to be presented to me.
“I want to create an educational curriculum for 2026. For context, I was homeschooled for my entire public education, and graduated in 2002. I never went to college or university, and have been in a blue collar trade for the past decade.
There are things I have interest in (philosophy, film making, physics, nuclear science), however I have a very rudimentary understanding of things, and need to begin learning from a foundational level.
I have a handful of tasks I would like to accomplish today. The overall goal is to create a reading list and a list of accomplishments for 2026 in relation to my further education. In an effort to create that, I would like you to create a survey for me that will help you determine where my greatest interests are in, where my aptitudes will best serve me, as well as which focus will be able to provide me career opportunities that I can pursue with greater opportunity of success.
Having said all of that, how many questions do you think this survey will need to include in order to be effective, and what prerequisite questions would you like to ask me before we get the survey started?”
I was presented with 8 clarifying questions about my age, my work situation, my tolerance for mathematics, my tolerance for formal credentialing, a realistic timeframe I can commit to, my financial expecations, my preferred mode of output, and my risk posturing. These questions were a great way to narrow the field into a direction I could find success in, but more importantly, they were questions that prepared me to be entirely honest with myself. I know how much time I want to say that I WANT to commit to, but I need to be realistic. Am I actually going to skip an episode of Pluribus with Hailie? Probably not. Do I want to give up my weekends to work on something that might not pay off in the long run? Probably not. Looking at the questions from the perspective of, “How can I answer this in a way that will ensure a higher likelihood that I can commit to this” set me up for the next series of questions.
The survey took me about an hour and a half to complete, and it was broken into a few different categories.
Curiosity & Intellectual Pull
Cognitive Style and Learning Mechanics
Temperament, Discipline, & Follow-Through
Practical Constraints & Career Reality
Directional Signals & Career Leverage
“Thank you. The survey is complete. I will now synthesize what this actually says, without flattery and without forcing you into a romantic narrative.
First, a high-level read
You are not a latent academic in the traditional sense, and you are not well suited to abstract, credential-heavy paths that delay visible output for years. At the same time, you are not “just” a creative. Your strength is sense-making: taking messy ideas, systems, or human experiences and shaping them into something understandable, usable, and sharable.
You are narrative-driven, but not soft. You care about first principles enough to justify action, then you move quickly into application. You require structure, milestones, and public output to stay engaged. Left in purely self-directed study, you will stall. Embedded in a designed track with weekly deliverables, you will compound.
Second, what this rules out.
Pure physics or nuclear science as a primary path is not viable given your time budget, credential cost tolerance, and need for visible progress. That does not mean you cannot study them; it means they should be treated as intellectual enrichment, not as a career axis.
Pure philosophy, especially academic philosophy, has the same problem. You are drawn to human meaning and motivation, not to formal argumentation for its own sake.
Third, what this strongly points toward.
The strongest signal is a hybrid creator–analyst path built around three pillars:
Storytelling and media as the primary output (writing, video, film).
Systems thinking applied to real human domains (work, identity, technology, meaning, process).
Public sense-making: explaining complex or uncomfortable ideas to non-experts in a grounded, practical way.
This is not “content creation” in the shallow sense. It is closer to independent research, commentary, and synthesis, expressed through media.
Your barbershop is not incidental. It is an unfair advantage: a live laboratory of human psychology, work identity, politics, depression, aspiration, and social systems. Most people have to manufacture an audience. You already sit in one all day.”
I cannot begin to tell you how annoyed I was to have a robot tell me I am a creative. I have had my clients say that to my immediate opposition for years, but this was the first time that it made sense in a way where all I could do is resign myself to sigh in my ultimate defeat.
Having said that, it actually clicked with me that this was not only the direction I had already been taking myself in my existing career, but it was the direction I wanted to continue taking the momentum with. I don’t even need to stretch too far to see that I enjoy writing and telling stories. Even The Barber Story began as a story telling narrative on a blog, it’s in the name!!
I spent the next few hours developing my 2026 syllabus, the rubric for my evaluations, and the homework that I would commit myself to. Here is the high level of my personalized education.
Quarter 1: Foundations and Reconditioning
Focus: rebuilding intellectual muscle and production rhythm.
Output: short-form videos (5–8 minutes) and written briefs that never get published but train clarity.
Quarter 2: Voice and Framing
Focus: philosophy, narrative structure, and argumentation.
Output: publicly released videos with a consistent format and theme.
Quarter 3: Depth and Authority
Focus: systems, psychology, and social analysis tied to lived experience.
Output: fewer, higher-quality pieces that demonstrate original synthesis.
Quarter 4: Cohesion and Portfolio
Focus: consolidation and refinement.
Output: a coherent body of work you can point to as “this is what I do.”
January – Orientation and Baseline
Focus: meaning, discipline, adult self-education
Goal: prove you can ship weekly without collapse
February – Attention and Identity
Focus: distraction, self-image, motivation
Goal: sharpen hooks and endings
March – Work, Systems, and Incentives
Focus: how environments shape behavior
Goal: stronger applied examples
April – Belief and Narrative
Focus: how people justify choices
Goal: better counterarguments
May – Tools and Leverage (Including AI)
Focus: modern tools as force multipliers
Goal: clearer explanations to non-experts
June – Midyear Synthesis
Focus: revisit strongest ideas
Goal: coherence across weeks
July – Pressure and Failure
Focus: stress, avoidance, risk
Goal: emotional honesty without self-indulgence
August – Authority and Voice
Focus: speaking as an SME
Goal: reduce hedging and qualifiers
September – Ethics and Responsibility
Focus: consequences of belief and action
Goal: deeper moral reasoning
October – Power, Status, and Tradeoffs
Focus: uncomfortable truths
Goal: tighter argumentation
November – Integration
Focus: how all themes connect
Goal: portfolio readiness
December – Reflection and Positioning
Focus: what you now stand for
Goal: articulate your intellectual niche clearly
Q1 — Orientation, Meaning, and Discipline
Week 1: Why self-education fails
Week 2: Discipline vs motivation
Week 3: Meaning as a stabilizer
Week 4: Identity and consistency
Week 5: The role of suffering in growth
Week 6: OFF (pre-capstone buffer)
Week 7: Attention as a moral choice
Week 8: Systems vs willpower
Week 9: Tools that help, tools that harm
Week 10: What schooling does well and poorly
Week 11: Personal synthesis week
Week 12: OFF (post-capstone recovery)
Q2 — Systems, Belief, and Leverage
Week 13: Incentives shape behavior
Week 14: Why good intentions fail
Week 15: Authority and trust
Week 16: Narratives people live inside
Week 17: Power without conspiracy
Week 18: OFF (pre-capstone buffer)
Week 19: Technology as amplifier
Week 20: AI as cognitive leverage
Week 21: Explaining complexity simply
Week 22: Midyear synthesis
Week 23: OFF (post-capstone recovery)
Q3 — Failure, Voice, and Authority
Week 24: Avoidance and self-deception
Week 25: Risk and identity
Week 26: Shame, ego, and growth
Week 27: Speaking with authority
Week 28: When certainty becomes dangerous
Week 29: OFF (pre-capstone buffer)
Week 30: Responsibility without control
Week 31: What expertise actually is
Week 32: Teaching as proof of learning
Week 33: Voice consolidation
Week 34: OFF (post-capstone recovery)
Q4 — Ethics, Integration, Positioning
Week 35: Moral tradeoffs
Week 36: Freedom vs structure
Week 37: Status, hierarchy, and denial
Week 38: What you owe others
Week 39: What you owe yourself
Week 40: OFF (pre-capstone buffer)
Week 41: Integrating the year
Week 42: Articulating your niche
Week 43: Public reflection
Week 44: Closing synthesis
Each quarter has an accompanying reading list, and each week has an assignment of required reading with a specific lens in how I approach the content, as well as a writing focus for a required 400-600 word essay. That’s right, I have a weekly essay assignment that I gave myself for a full year, which ultimately means I would likely be that asshole professor that nobody would be excited about. I guess the important thing is that I’m excited about this lesson plan.
I have a long game planned out. I have two books that I am currently working on, and I want this first year of education to help me structure my own ability to tell my own stories effectively. Once I get this experience, I will make 2027’s curriculum more geared towards philosophical topics like stoicism and the socratic method, and apply my experience into telling stories that have already been told, but with my own flair and perspective added. The 2028 goal is to take my ability to tell my own stories, as well as the retelling of existing stories, into the world and tell the stories of others that have yet to be told. The next two years should theoretically fill the easytochris page with dozens of examples of both written and spoken word content, demonstrating my expertise in creating engaging content with a consistent output and cohesive voice that offers a unique perspective.
blah blah blah. I'm a millennial with a voice, just like all the others. At least this one will be completely mine.
-Chris
