Power Your Self-Directed Learning
Educate Yourself! — Your #1 Newsletter for Accelerated Learning
“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.” -Ray Bradbury
Three Strategies to Power Your Self-Directed Learning
The most important skill for a young person today is learning quickly and effectively. Since the Great Recession, nobody buys the false impression that you can get a credential after studying for four years, land a job, and then have a career with the same core set of skills over your entire life. Even professional career tracks like medicine and law are under outside economic and technological pressure to change and adapt at a faster pace than ever before.
The idea of school and college teaching you the skills you need to succeed is so laughable today that it is considered a joke among employers. This holds true even in an entry level job. People expect high-performers to constantly learn and improve outside of their formal education. Economic, information, and technological forces have come together to form an economy where agility commands more value than entrenchment.
Those who master this skill become captains of their fate. Those who ignore it are at the mercy of economic and technological forces around them.
These are three effective strategies for self-directed learning, taken from my upcoming book, The Little Guide to Learning Anything and learned from some of the most successful self-directed learners I’ve met and studied.
Trending Today…
The world’s most famous man was bored.
Stripped of his title for the second time — this one taken in the ring by a gap-toothed, goofy Leon Spinks rather than a judge — he still immediately drew adoring crowds whenever he went out. At home on Chicago’s South Side, he was surrounded by his wife, Veronica Porché (a former model) and kids from various marriages. His younger brother Rahman lived nearby. Half a block away stood the home of his spiritual mentor, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. It was still occupied by the Black Muslim hierarchy after their leader’s passing, three years earlier. Still, in mid-March 1978, six weeks after losing his championship belt to Spinks, Muhammad Ali was rotating in a very tight orbit.
Monday Motivation…
Becoming Incredibly Successful Means Saying No to the Wrong Money — Everything you do should be executed with purpose. This means saying no to the “wrong money.” Taking up a job just because it gives you an easy or comfortable paycheck prevents you from spending your time and energy on the things that really matter to you. Here’s how the wrong money will keep you in mediocrity.
They didn’t intend to come as conquerors — We all know of Christopher Columbus’s (re)discovery of the Americas. Many of us are even familiar with Leif Erikson’s voyage to America centuries before Columbus. Here’s the story of an impressive and little known transaltanic voyage that took place 26 million years before either of them.
ARx Designers — The Future Kings and Queens of Silicon Valley — “New technologies like Augmented Reality together with social changes are altering the face of Silicon Valley, and the impact will be on par with the introduction of apps a decade ago.”
