How to be a lifelong learner

Ability to learn continuously without stops and interruptions through your life is a true treasure that allows for unlimited self-development. If you think about it, any almost goal is achievable with enough knowledge and persistence. And from my experience having ability to get knowledge persistently is a key ingredient for achieving your goals. For the last 8 years, my life motto is to “do not stop learning”. After looking back at my experience and intersecting it with some books on personal development and education methods a concept of Continuous Learning was born. I hope that this short guidance in methods of self-education will help someone to achieve their goals too.

Motivation

Most of us see the learning process through a lens of fearsome scholarship years: the week before finals, spending sleepless nights trying to carve out complex formulas in our memory, intimidating long hours of violent tests and exams. After such a stress it comes out that few people like to learn or feel enough motivation to continue their journey of acquiring new knowledge. More likely we’ll just say “Whew, it’s finished. Now I can finally proceed with my life!”. But it shouldn’t be like that! Learning can actually be fun, it can take less than an hour a day and it can become an ultimate tool for self-improvement that constantly gives you fruitful results: personal development, new career opportunities, and hobbies. This post will propose a learning framework that can work wonders if you put enough effort in it.

There has never been a better time…

Because of the cute cat videos and memes it can be hard to notice, but the Internet is not a mere entertainment hub. Actually, it’s the largest free library that contains an uncountable number of quality materials on any given topic you want to learn about. Practically anything is under your fingers: quick to consume blog posts, thick books, people that can help you and answer your questions, and even free courses from top universities in multiple languages. You just need to find the right info, and that’s a very valuable skill to have. Gladly, the Internet is also a place for thousands of reviews and recommendations that will help you to narrow the search to only the best of the best materials that will help you on your learning journey. Think of it: for a single area of interest, you can get your hands on numerous university courses, several books and a large community of people sharing the same interests and having skills you seek for. Even scientific research tends to be a lot more open now and thousands of new papers become available for free each day at arxiv.org. There has never been a better time for autodidacts.

Continuous Learning

A centric theme of this post is a concept of Continuous Learning. The main idea is that it does not matter if you read a whole book in one day or a single informative tweet: all learning counts. If you learn something new each day, even a small amount, in the end, you will not only move a bit closer to the goal of learning something, but also develop a set of habits that will allow you to acquire more and more knowledge without even noticing it. After a while, Continuous Learning will be a part of your life, being a natural hunger for new useful information, a scheduler that optimizes your free time in the background and squeezes spare minutes that you spend commuting, waiting in long store lines to help you to progress towards something that really matters for you. Sometimes this will be an intentional behavior, but mostly it works unnoticeably, triggering and motivating your mind to start learning.

Small is Big

The trick of Continuous Learning is to educate yourself to achieve your learning goals in small batches. If you are in the mood you are likely to continue and do more work. If not, you still have learned something new and moved on.
At first, this can be a way of achieving some singular goal. Then, after making first accomplishments, you realize that this way of thinking allows you to learn more: apply it to a new area of expertise, skill or topic of interest. Few months later it will become a part of your life, helping you to get better every day.

Here are some simple steps that will help to start a continuous learning process on the topic of choice:

1. Start a project

Learning new things can be bewildering and even frightening. Thinking about this process as a personal project can motivate you for completion and help you to move in a structured and understandable way. I hope that 4 simple stages that follow below will help you to see your goal and all intermediate steps more clearly. In the end, it’s not so scary at all, isn’t it?

1.1 Define

Define yourself a goal, visualize it. What do you want to achieve? Learn maths? Learn how to make a beautiful drawing? Land a new job that requires completely new areas of expertise? Or maybe learn to play guitar? Consider achieving your new goal as a personal project that you need to complete.

1.2 Research

Research is important. You need to collect as many sources of information about the topic of interest as you can. Investigate everything about your new goal: what do you need to learn to achieve it? What new skills do you need to acquire? Are there any books and free materials on the internet that can help you?
Try to collect as many materials as you can, and select the best among them. Looking for book recommendations from other people at Quora, Stack Overflow and Reddit can help you. Amazon top rated search and Google are also your friends.
Another important part is looking at other people’s experiences. Try to find recommendations from someone who already mastered what you want. Good chances that you will be able to find an active community on Reddit, Slack or another resource.
Keep in mind that it is not mandatory to sign up for expensive and time-consuming classes at this point: you’ll feel when and if you really need it. For now, just concentrate on getting into a context and collecting as much helpful information as you can.

2. Plan

Have a plan in mind. Not a detailed one, just a set of course steps that you think will move you towards your goals. For example:
1. Read a book on the topic
2. Have a weekly practice session
3. Finish online course
4. Finish a project
5. Read next book on the list

3. Execute

Short, regular sessions are more effective than long, but irregular ones.
This is the most difficult part. After all previous steps are completed you will need to start to actively adopt new knowledge. Remember to start small. The time you put in wouldn’t yield any results if you practice for straight eight hours several weeks in a row and burn out as a result. Like in sports, persistence is the key. Taking too much weight when your body is unprepared can harm your muscles. The same goes for your motivation and your mind.
Try to practice daily, even if you spend a minute to achieve your new goal. Every second counts. Given that Chinese has more than 8000 characters, spending 1 minute a day to learn Chinese may seem like nothing, but actually, this is a key ingredient for forming a habit. Once you have a habit and a routine learning efficiency and time you spend on achieving your goals will start to raise more and more. So don’t let you fool yourself, just keep at it!

4. Iterate

Please keep in mind that those four steps can be repeated and iterated through your learning process. If you feel lost, do Research or Planning and you’ll be back on track in no time.

Forming a habit

Well begun is half done

Most books on self-productivity tell you that it’s OK to start something even if you do not in the mood of working on the task. Actually, it’s not only OK, it is the most important thing to do. Once you start actively doing something chances that you’ll like it more than in a passive state are a lot higher.
Once someone asked one of the most successful and important figures of Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol, about what he does when his muse leaves him alone. And he replied:

— I start writing
— But what do you write if right words do not come out?
— Simple, I write: ‘I can’t write anything today, I can’t write anything today, I can’t write anything today, but I need to. I can’t even decide if my protagonist is big or small, but it turns out he can be small. I can’t outline the main scene, be it restaurant or street, or maybe a theatre full of people…’

And here it goes on. Most of the times all we need is to start doing something and then it will flow naturally.
It is very important to keep consistency in what you are doing, even if it’s for 2 minutes a day: it forms a habit. I bet you won’t notice the moment when you’ll start achieving your goals unconsciously. For example, today I returned from a busy day at work and was waiting at a restaurant to take some food home for my wife. The waiter told me I’ll have to wait for about 20 minutes till the dinner is done cooking. I opened my iPad to check the news, then something reminded me of this article and another few passages were finished. After that, I felt that I have the energy to do a couple of drills on English vocabulary I try to expand. Same goes for learning, side projects, musical instruments, drawing or anything else you want to master.
Good habits are your ally. They may be even the strongest companion for your learning goals.

Keeping at it

Sometimes you’ll feel that all is lost and it’s just better to stop. This is the moment when you should try to recall how much progress you have made this far. Chances are high that you are improving. If you feel that you aren’t, look closer again. Some progress is surely there, keep at it and it’ll explode like exponential.

Conclusion

One can make the world a better place through self-improvement. Truly, if we all become better bit by bit each day there is no way this couldn’t happen.
Consistency can open any door you want. Just remember: talent can only get you so far, so keep exploring, learning and practicing. You are in control of who you want to be and who you will be, not the others. Surprise them.

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