Reading My Way In

For the last eight months, I have been teaching myself the AI industry. Not simply how to use the tools, but how the industry works underneath them, where the value is likely to sit, why the technology behaves the way it does, and what its limitations remain regardless of how confidently it is marketed.

There was no course for what I wanted to understand. The certifications available largely teach people how to operate the tools, which has value, but the questions that interested me were more fundamental. Where is the field actually heading? What is structurally sound, what is temporary, and what is being mistaken for progress because so much money and attention are moving in the same direction? The field also changes faster than a curriculum can follow. By the time a course is assembled, approved, and taught, some of the ground beneath it has already moved.

I kept returning to an older example while I worked. Abraham Lincoln taught himself law with less than a year of formal schooling behind him. He read in New Salem, Illinois, a town he later recalled as never having contained three hundred people, and was admitted to the bar in 1836 without attending law school. When a young man named Isham Reavis wrote to him in 1855 asking to study under him, Lincoln declined because he was away from his office too often to be of much help. He then gave Reavis the method he had followed himself.

“Get the books,” Lincoln wrote, “and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing.”

He added that a person’s own resolution to succeed mattered more than any other one thing. There was nothing grandiose in the advice. Lincoln did not claim that books made study easy, that effort guaranteed mastery, or that teaching yourself placed you above those who learned formally. He simply believed that serious reading, sustained attention, and personal resolve could carry a person much farther than circumstances might suggest.

That was the path open to me, so I took it. I read research papers, technical explanations, earnings calls, market reports, and the public arguments of people building the technology. I used the systems extensively, built ideas with them, and watched where they broke. I learned not to accept a claim because an AI system stated it fluently, an executive repeated it confidently, or an industry had invested billions of dollars behind it. I tried to test each claim against how the technology actually behaved and whether the underlying logic held together.

The books were different, and the subject was different, but the discipline Lincoln described still applied. Find the material. Read beyond the summary. Stay with it until the principal features begin to emerge. When the explanation stops making sense, do not move past the gap simply because everyone else seems comfortable doing so. Go back, examine the assumptions, and keep working until the pieces fit or the argument fails.

Somewhere during those months, my relationship to the subject changed. I was no longer only learning the terminology or following the industry’s explanations of itself. I had begun to see recurring structures, contradictions, and missing foundations that I could examine independently. I found that I could contribute meaningfully to conversations with people who had worked in the field far longer than I had, not because I knew everything they knew, but because sustained study from outside the established path had sometimes led me to questions they were not asking.

That distinction matters. Teaching yourself does not mean believing you cannot be wrong. It requires the opposite. Without an institution, credential, or established authority standing behind you, the work has to carry its own weight. You have to be willing to test your conclusions, revise them, and admit when the evidence does not support what you hoped to find. Confidence, when it comes at all, should come from having done that repeatedly, not from deciding that effort alone makes you correct.

None of this required admission to a particular room or permission from anyone already inside it. It required access to the material, the determination to continue, and enough honesty to keep asking whether what I believed actually held up.

Lincoln understood that long before I did. It was true for a self-taught lawyer reading his way into the law on the Illinois frontier, and it remains true for anyone trying to understand a new field from the outside today.

The credential was never the knowledge. The work was.