★ About Self Made School
Nobody is bornknowing this stuff.
School taught you trigonometry, then handed you a lease, a W-4, and a 401(k) form and wished you luck. Self Made School is the school for everything after the diploma, built primarily for young adults who'd rather learn it now than regret it at 40.
Why we exist
Adulthood is a curriculum. Someone should teach it.
Every year, millions of people graduate into the most consequential decade of their lives (first paychecks, first leases, first big calls) with zero formal preparation. We think that's absurd. So we built the missing grades: the 13th for foundations, the 14th for money, the 15th for the decisions that shape everything else.
What we believe
Academics are overrated.
There. We said it. Life doesn't grade essays; it hands you decisions. What adults actually need are real-life skills, and the most successful, most effective adults all share one habit: they learned how to learn, and they never stopped. That's the whole school, and it runs on three house rules.
Plain English or nothing
If a lesson needs a finance degree to follow, we rewrite the lesson. Jargon is a tax on people who weren't told the rules.
Doing beats knowing
Every unit ends with a real action taken in your real life. A budget you built counts; a budget you watched doesn't.
No shame in the syllabus
Not knowing was never your fault. Nobody taught you. Every question here is a fair one, asked by thousands before you.
Who we are
It started as a letter to three daughters.
Self Made School began with Neil Kadakia and his wife, Archana, parents of three young daughters, talking about what young adults really need and what school never gets around to teaching. Neither of them wanted their girls learning the important parts of life the way they had, late and expensively.
Many conversations, a lot of research, and years of deep thinking later, those talks became a curriculum. Neil began writing it all down as a letter to their daughters, and Archana shaped it the whole way: many of the financial education sections started as her ideas, argued out at their own kitchen table.
What came out was the thing they wished someone had handed them at eighteen. How money actually works. What to say to yourself after you fail. How to make a decision you can live with. Not a lecture. A manual, in plain English, written by people who love you.
It is not one family's voice anymore. Teachers, financial educators, and writers who have spent their careers explaining hard things to young adults have shaped every unit here. They argue about the wording, cut the jargon, and refuse to publish anything they would not hand to their own students.
Because it was never only about three daughters. Everyone graduates into this, and almost nobody is handed the manual. So the letter became a school: open to anyone who wants it, free for as long as we can keep it that way, and taught with the same care it was written with.
A love letter to three daughters, and to every young mind coming up behind them.
Neil and Archana Kadakia · Founders, and the educators who built this with them