Welcome to Five Things I’ve Learned, our personal collection of classes from people we admire.

Five Things I’ve Learned makes it easy for artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers to share live, online classes with people who admire them as much as we do.

Every Five Things I’ve Learned session is a deliberately handmade, personal class designed to share the essential ideas and experiences of a lifetime. No two classes are alike, but every class first takes place live, online. We make the video archive of each session available soon after.

Miss a live session and you can easily view it on-demand, whenever and wherever you like. (Explore our growing list of archived classes by clicking “All Classes” in the upper right of the menubar on top of every page. You can also purchase on-demand access to the 100+ classes offered during our first four years with our discounted Multi Pass.)

If you like what you see, register for our newsletter to ensure that you’re among the first to know about the latest upcoming classes.

You can also get a sense of how great – and how different – each Five Things I’ve Learned class can be by viewing two of our recent favorites with our compliments – National Book Award Winner Phil Klay’s Five Things I’ve Learned Thinking and Writing about Censorship and Pulitzer Prize Winner Jerry Saltz’s Five Things I’ve Learned about Where Art and the Art World Are Right Now.

To learn more about a class, view the personal video and text invitations on the corresponding class page. Get a ticket from that page, and then immediately look for an email with all you need to join an upcoming class, or to start viewing on-demand right away.

Have an idea, comment, or a question? Email works best. Please send a quick note to hello@myfivethings.com. We’ll get back to you right away.

Phil Klay

Five Things I’ve Learned

Thinking and Writing about Citizenship

View the archive of this two-hour class from U.S. Marine Corps veteran, writer, and teacher Phil Klay and discover the Five Things He’s Learned about American citizenship – what it means, the obligations it places…

Jerry Saltz

Five Things I’ve Learned About

Where Art and the Art World are Right Now

View the archive of this two-hour class from Pulitzer Prize winning critic and author Jerry Saltz, and discover the Five Things He’s Learned about the remarkable advances that have refashioned art and the art world…

Click the class image above to learn more. Then, register to enjoy each complimentary class.

TicketsYou and a guest could win two tickets to the class of your choice.

Register now. We share two tickets every day, and an email newsletter with news about our latest upcoming classes once a week.


By sharing your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you’ve purchased a ticket for this online class and you find that for some reason you can’t make the live session, you have two choices:

  • The first: View the session archive. You can view the session archive as soon as it’s posted – or any time, as often as you like. We’ll make an archive of this class available within 48 hours of the live session, and we’ll send every ticket holder details on how they can view it. As a ticket holder, you’re able to view this full session archive any time– as often as you like.
  • The second: Request a refund. Just send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com, and we’ll help sort things out. Please keep in mind that we can only accommodate refund requests made more than 48 hours from the start of a live session.

We take data security and the need to protect your privacy as seriously as you do. That’s why we use Stripe to process your registration transaction. They take your credit card and secure your data – in fact we don’t even have access to your credit card number. Which is just the way we like it!

The information we do retain we protect carefully.

We’re committed to keeping personal information collected from those individuals who visit our website and make use of our online programming and services confidential, secure, and private. Our privacy policy ensures that we meet – and when we can – exceed most existing privacy standards.

Want to know more? Read the ExtendedSession Online Privacy Policy Agreement.

Still have a question? We’d be pleased to hear from you. Send a note to: pre.event@extendedsession.com.

The receipt you receive via email immediately after you register is all you need to confirm you’re set for the upcoming session.

About 48 hours before the live class is scheduled to begin, we’ll send you a personalized email confirming that everything’s on schedule and containing easy instructions for accessing the class.

We’ll send another reminder on the day of the class itself, and we’ll be available online just before the class begins to make sure you have no problems joining when the time is right.

Have a question in the meantime? We’d be pleased to hear from you. Send a note to: pre.event@extendedsession.com.

If you’ve not received confirmation of your purchase, it’s not because we haven’t sent it. In fact, we send an immediately confirmation to the email address you share with us to ensure that we can reach you with class details.

If you don’t receive a confirmation within 10 minutes or so making your purchase, please first check your “junk” or “promotions” email first — some people’s email programs group unfamiliar emails in these types of folders. The email date and time should match closely the time you purchased your ticket online.

If the confirmation email is not there, there’s a small possibility that your email address wasn’t entered as you intended when you registered. (You’d be surprised, but this happens.)

In any case, we want to make sure we can reach you. And we want to make sure you’re registered for the class you want. if you can’t find your confirmation email, please send us a note at pre.event@extendedsession.com. We’ll get back to you right away.

Your ticket entitles you to ongoing access to this class — even after the live session concludes.

If you purchase a ticket in time to join the class live, you can view the archive as soon as it’s posted, as often as you like. Look for an email with information about how to access the course archive within 48 hours of the end of the live class. Once you get it, you’ll have all the information you need to access it as you like across any and all devices you own.

If you purchase a ticket after the live class takes place, you can view the archive immediately, and you can return to it as frequently as you like

If you’d like a refund, we can happily credit the card you used to register for the session. Please send a note to pre.event@extendedsession.com , and we’ll confirm receipt as soon as we see it (We don’t need your credit card info – just your email address and date of purchase.)

There are two things to know:

  • Unfortunately, we can only accept cancellations and refunds up to 48 hours before a scheduled session.
  • There is sure to be a lapse in time between the time we refund your order and the time a corresponding credit appears on your credit card statement. So that you’re not left waiting and wondering, we’ll contact you as soon as we’ve processed the credit in our system.

For reasons we hope you’ll understand – the biggest of them the fact that we make a point of compensating the folks who host Five Things I’ve Learned classes as quickly as we can – we can’t accommodate refunds for tickets purchased within 48 of the start of a scheduled live event. We can also accommodate refund requests for the purchase of an archived session only within 24 hours from the time of purchase.

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Thanks for stopping by!

Find out first about every new class.

TicketsYou and a guest could win two tickets to the class of your choice.

Register now. We share two tickets every day, and an email newsletter with news about our latest upcoming classes once a week.



By sharing your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.