Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.
This means:
  • whenever you walk into a classroom, give students a link to the material
    Then ask them if they want to talk about anything.
    Then leave the classroom and go produce more good material instead of wasting your time there :-)
  • whenever someone asks as question on an online forum, answer it, and link to the section of your material that also answers that question.
    The material will answer many of their future questions.
  • after you've done something awesome, Google possible relevant keywords that should hit it.
    This will lead you to other websites that talk about the same content.
    Then, leave comments on those pages linking to your stuff, or email the authors of those pages.
    It is borderline spam, but if the subject is closely related, it is a win for everyone.
Eventually, people will find you on the front page of Google searches, and then you will know that you've truly made something useful.
Then, if people find errors, or have questions, they will write a comment near the content itself.
Then, next person that comes along and has the same problem, will also find that comment, and your answer will solve their problems too.
The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub issues
For example, if you write LaTeX files for you PDFs, give both PDFs and the LaTeX.
This allows other people to:
  • modify and reuse your material
  • make improvement suggestions that you can accept by clicking a button
    The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub pull requests
People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
This way people have to link back to you, which makes you more famous.
And they can't steal your material without giving anything back.
This is what Wikipedia and Stack Exchange use.
When you do get face to face time with students, don't teach a large group.
Everything you want to teach is already online.
The only goal of meeting students is talking to them individually or in small groups to:
  • understand what they feel
  • transmit your passion for the subject
and letting them do the same amongst themselves.
If you talk to a large group, you will only reach / understand a very small percentage of the group, so your time is wasted.
It is better to deeply understand what 25% of the students feel and adapt the course material, than to talk to everyone at once, and have only 5% understand anything.
There is only one thing that can truly motivate you to make good materials: becoming famous.
Strive for that. Make good materials. Publish them. Get good reviews. Loop.
This generates a virtuous loop, which makes you produce better and better material.
Just make it very clear what you've tried, what you observed, and what you don't understand if anything at all.
This will already open up room for others to come and expand on your attempt, and you are more likely to learn the answers to your questions as they do.
And there's a good chance someone who knows more than you will come along and correct or teach you something new about the subject. For example, this has happened countless times to Ciro Santilli when doing Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Examples of famous fails:
The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.
Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.
The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.
The Moonshots in Education project also has a fantastic related quote:
Real World Work. Students must produce learning projects with real world applications and an authentic audience.
What big companies have been created in Europe after World War II, that have not been bought or utterly defeated by American or Japanese companies?
Because of all these failures, much fanfare was made as Spotify reached a $50B market capitalization in 2020. An art company, so cute!
As of 2023, the LVMH was the most valuable company in Europe by market capitalization[ref]. Luxury goods. An area of industry that borders between the useless and the evil.
Europe has basically become an outsourcing hub for the United States. The fact that its starts are all sold if they become large enough just means that R&D is also outsourced.
ASML, and perhaps more meaningfully its parent/predecessor ASM International from 1964 is perhaps the biggest exception.
The key problem is that there are so many small countries in Europe, that any startup has to deal with too many incompatible legislation and cannot easily sell to the hole of Europe and scale. So then a larger company from a more uniform country comes and eats it up!
Talent mobility is another issue:
  • people can't generally work remotely from different countries for the same company as regular employees, only as contractors. This is because of fiscal incompatibilities across countries[ref][ref], and has become an increasing problem in the 2020's with the increase in remote work possibilities during/after COVID-19.
  • it is quite rare for people to study at university in different countries than their own, because the entry examinations are in the native language and have local history knowledge components. This also means that people from different countries don't easily recognize which are the best Universities of other countries, making you take a hit if you want to search for jobs elsewhere
So why can't Europe unify its laws?
Because the countries are still essentially walled off by languages. Europe is the perfect example of why having more than one natural language is bad for the world.
There isn't true mobility of people between countries.
You just can't go study or work in any other country (except for the UK, when it was still in the EU) without putting a huge effort into learning its language first.
Without this, there isn't enough mixing to truly make cultures more uniform, and therefore allow the laws to be more uniform.
Europe can't even unify basic things like:
Equally so, it can't force little fiscal paradises who effectively benefit from being in Europe like Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland ("not European", but should that be allowed?) and Cyprus (the EU can't even maintain its territorial integrity, let alone fiscal) to not offer ridiculously low taxes and incentives which make them entry points for foreign companies to rape Europe.
For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the United Kingdom will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the United States (although at times it seems that it would rather endosymbiose with China instead). On 2025 the British parliament beautifully put it that the country:
risks becoming an "incubator economy"
Historically, this disunion is partly due to the European balance of power, whereby countries would form alliances with old enemies to prevent another country from taking over. Also linked are failed military unification attempts by Napoleon and Hitler, though we are likely better off without the latter succeeding!!! Though those also partly failed due to wider balance of power issues involving the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and USA, not only due to internal balance. Of course, none of that matters anymore after World War II, where other more unified Europe-sized potencies rose, first the USA and the Soviet Union, and then China, and now European disunion is nothing but a burden.
Evidence such as those makes it clear that the European Union is a failure.
One thing must be said in favour of Europe's mess however: it favours international collaboration in huge projects as a more neutral middle ground. This can be seen more clearly in the ITER and the fiasco that was the Superconducting Super Collider that was cancelled a couple of billion dollars in partly because it failed to attract any foreign investment, compared to the Large Hadron Collider which went on to find the Higgs boson as mentioned at www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supercollider-that-never-was/.
Bibliography:

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact