We Asked People About the Skills They’ve Had to Teach Themselves And This Is What They Said
You’ll learn about prioritization, design & development, and speaking with authority. Everything you need in this crazy modern age!
It seems there are a lot of autodidacts these days. With the rise of online courses and the fall of college (sorry, professors), we’re seeing a new era of individuals who gobble knowledge up from the most available and not always reliable source — the Internet. Maybe it’s because there is something intrinsically satisfying about knowing you’ve done it yourself.
But first things first. What’s an autodidact?
History is full of examples, like Shakespeare, Hemingway, da Vinci, the Wright Brothers, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk.
Today the numbers are growing as things like remote working, MOOCs, and Peter Thiel’s scholarship have come into being.
So we asked our community of digital creatives what they’ve had to teach themselves and what resources they recommend.
While the answers were diverse, we’ll outline the top 3 for you.
“Prioritisation and going towards the goal without getting lost in the vast amount of available distractions.” Richard Meikshan
Distractions, eh? Whatever do you mean? Only the constant buzzing of your phone, the annoying notifications from Slack, the strange desire to check social media… must I go on?
It’s true, we have entered a distraction-filled era, and it’s of the utmost importance to teach ourselves to deal with it.
When we asked Richard to elaborate, he sent us this list:
- Honesty is the key — you need to be honest with yourself. Go through the things you do / the things you like / the things you would like to do and understand what matters to you the most. Example: how much time you spend with people on weekly basis and how important each of them is to you. If you have not seen your mom in 2 weeks but met some 3 random people from work — in my scale, something is not right, but again that depends on the person.
- There is a saying that you should never be a penny wise but a dollar stupid so bring that into your life not only money wise but also the company you keep, things in which you invest time, things you do in your free time.
- But above everything truly ask yourself —
Does it make me feel happy? Or does it serve somebody else?
4. And yes, learn to say “no” to people and they will start appreciating your “yes” a lot more as it will not be taken for granted.
It’s easy to get lost in things we think we “should” be doing, but every once and again we must all invest more time and energy in the things we “must” do because we love them and because they propel us forward.
“ I mostly had to teach myself design skills and a bit of coding skills.” Aurelie Chazal
Design and coding skills must be today’s top two required skills. Face it, tech is running the world and if you can contribute to this madness, you might end up landing your dream job and being paid very handsomely.
But not only designers and developers need these skills. Aurelie, for example, picked them up to help with her marketing. And if you work in tech, you know that every skill will help. Now let’s look at Aurelie’s story and recommendations.
For design:
When I started working for CustomerIcare and had to create some basic graphics for the blog, I just started using Keynote’s vector drawing tool. It’s enough for what I need to do and it’s super simple to use.
I learned a lot creating presentations for Slideshare. I used pictures at the beginning but it’s tricky to find good pics that are free to use for commercial use. Of course, you can buy stocks but they’re not unique so I started creating my own vector shapes inside Keynote. I really learned by doing and I haven’t seen any super useful tutorial on this (thinking about creating my own right now).
[Somewhere’s note: There are a lot of free photos here and here and here.]
What helps me a lot to learn is to look for inspiration daily.
Here are some good resources I’d recommend everyone check out:
- About PowerPoint presentations;
- The Muzli Chrome extension for daily inspiration;
- The Canva design school;
- I also run searches for “flat icons” on Google Image to get inspired.
For HTML and CSS:
I started with CodeAcademy as I had zero coding knowledge whatsoever. Their introduction course on html and CSS is amazing and really fun.
Once I had the basics I started experimenting in WordPress by creating a new draft page and using some in-line CSS to test the result.
Now I’m also looking at the source code of other websites to learn (I do this in Google Chrome with the “inspect element” option: right click on any part of a page and click “inspect element” and it shows you the html and CSS code).
The W3Schools Tutorials are also amazing.
The best advice I could give is to just start doing stuff and learn along the way.
If you encounter a problem, google it and you’ll likely find the answer on a forum somewhere. And I think that’s how you learn.
P. S. Thanks, Aurelie! We certainly hope this helps someone with their own unique learning experience.
“Projecting “leadership presence” comes naturally to a few, but not to most. Speaking w/ authority is often a self-taught behavior.” Elias Jones
Now that’s a challenge if we ever saw one! Can you imagine being thrown into the lion’s den without a chair and everyone’s expecting you to tame them? Well, there must be a trick, right?
Let’s see what Elias has to say.
A wonderful project manager gave me a priceless tip — research! Conducting just a half hour of extra research on a subject you’ll be speaking about loosens you up and boosts your confidence. I also studied behavior profiles using DISC, through which I learned to adjust my communication style to meet others’ expectations.
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And those are only a few of the answers we got. See more on the site.
Please recommend this article if it helped you. We’d also appreciate it if you checked out our diverse community of digital creatives.
