Unlocking the Secrets: Discover What No One Tells You About Self-Learning
“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” ― Isaac Asimov
So you want to learn something new. Maybe you want to learn how to throw a football or how to write in cursive. Maybe you even want to learn how to run a business or how to build a computer.
You’ve probably heard the saying, “Learning is a lifelong journey.” This is true, but most of the learning you do is in the early stages of life in school and during childhood. It is really self-learning — the ability to learn by yourself — that continues throughout the rest of your life. Self-learning is one of the most important skills required for success and if you can master this skill, you will be able to accomplish anything you can dream of.
In this blog post, we will uncover what self-learning means and how you can use it to your advantage to learn anything you want at a pace you thought wasn’t possible. I’ll also reveal what a coach’s job is and how important having a coach/mentor/teacher is.
It’s All Trial And Error
Self-learning, at its core, is just trial and error. When you are a beginner, you don’t know which direction to head in or which path to take. As a result, you are left to your best guess and your intuition to find the right way.
Imagine self-learning as going through a forest, where each fork in the road represents a stage of the learning process. You walk into the forest knowing nothing about where the destination is or how to get there.
Soon after you enter the forest, you are met with not just one fork in the road, but a dozen. Out of these dozen paths, only one takes you to the destination you are trying to reach. How in the world do you know which path to take? Simply put, you don’t.
So you decide to go to the first one, all the way to the left. Going down that path, you are met with a dead end. No good. So you try the second path. Going down the second path, you are met with yet another dozen paths which you discover all lead to dead ends. You keep trying all the paths until you discover the one that can take you the furthest. So you choose that one and repeat the process for every fork you encounter in the future.
This is what self-learning is like. Experimentation and trial and error.
How To Learn Faster
“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.” — Thomas J. Watson, former CEO of IBM
There is only one way to learn anything faster. Try more and fail more. By constantly experimenting and failing, you will be able to quickly find the correct way to do something.
With the abundance of information on the Internet and the infinite resources we are provided, self-learning has never been easier. Want to learn Spanish? Just sign up for an online course and buy some textbooks. Want to learn basketball? Watch YouTube videos of coaches and apply them to the court.
No longer do we have to shoot a basketball on our driveway with no clue of what we are doing. We can use these free resources to our advantage and expedite the learning process by taking information from the internet and applying it to real life.
Despite the boost that the internet can provide, a lot of self-learning is still up to us. For example, you can learn as much as you want about swinging a tennis racket, but it will be useless until you go out and try it on a court. The amount you decide to experiment in real life is the single biggest factor in how fast you can learn.
The same applies to business, comedy, and even writing. Only once you have tested enough products will you be able to find the perfect one. Only when you have told enough jokes that failed will you be able to consistently deliver amazing jokes. Only once you have written enough will you know who your audience is and what it means to write well.
The Role of a Coach
So you may be wondering, “If all learning is self-learning, why do I need a coach? Why does anyone need a coach?”
Coaches are beneficial because they have already walked a path through the forest of mastery and their job is to guide you through the fastest and most correct path. This removes a LOT of time spent on trial and error because the coach can quickly tell you which is wrong and which is right.
So imagine that instead of wandering through the forest searching for the correct path, you are given a guidebook telling you exactly where to go and how to get there. It will still take a long time to get to the destination you are trying to reach, but the time it will take will be comparatively much shorter.
The sooner you follow a coach the better because the first few stages of learning anything are crucial to your development later on and the full potential you can reach. That way, you can travel on the correct path from the very beginning instead of having to be corrected later on.
For example, if you are trying to learn English but learned the alphabet wrong, it would be quite hard to learn new words, grammar, and sentence structures. Starting with a strong foundation is essential for success and finding a coach early on will ensure that you have a strong foundation.
Final Words
The ability to self-learn is in all of us. Everyone can pick up something brand new and improve at it given enough time and effort. However, the speed at which people self-learn varies a lot from person to person.
Oftentimes, successful people have mastered the skill of self-learning and can improve at a much faster rate than most others. With the right mindset and the willingness to experiment, you too can “improve at improving” and create a fast track to your learning success.
Regardless of what your goal is, the ability to self-learn at a high level can help us reach our goals much sooner and forge a path to a more fulfilled life.
