The stuff school skipped.

Marj teaches the technical and social skills that school leaves out — to people roughly 15–22 — step by step, on real interfaces, and always ending in something you actually made.

The problem isn't that this knowledge is missing from the internet. In English it's everywhere — scattered, out of order, undated, and rarely leaving you with anything in hand. What's missing is a sequenced, maintained system: lessons that start from zero, genuinely challenge you, and hand you a working result.

The sharpest example is the social column. Advice you can't practise is just advice. So every social lesson comes with a rehearsal partner — an AI that plays the other side at a difficulty you set — so you can run the hard conversation ten times before it counts.

The output contract

One promise runs under everything: when you finish a lesson, you have a working thing. A configured account. A published repo. A recorded pitch. A cleaned dataset. It is the single decision that separates Marj from the rest, and every line of the curriculum is written to keep it.

Nine editorial principles

1. Treat the reader as an adult. This audience hates being simplified. We don't skip the hard part because it's hard — we add steps.
2. Show the mechanism, don't moralise. Not "be careful investing" — show how a discount rate ties to interest, and let the conclusion follow.
3. Every lesson leaves an output. A file, an account, a script, a recording, a table. "Read it, got it" is not a finished lesson.
4. Real interface, real steps. No "you can do this in settings." Which menu, which button, which version.
5. Version-date everything. Tool lessons go stale fast. Every one carries a last-verified date and gets re-checked on a schedule.
6. Sources are mandatory. In money, health and law, primary sources. A claim without a source doesn't ship.
7. We don't sell products. No affiliate links to brokers, courses or tools. In this category, trust is the only asset.
8. We don't give investment advice. The money column explains mechanisms. It never says "buy this." Every finance lesson opens with that line.
9. Define the jargon, then use it. A technical term is defined on first use, then used in full — never left unexplained, never assumed.

How we source and review — including who signs off on finance lessons — is on the Standards & review page.