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Most, if not all of the skills I have overtime been using to make a living are skills I’ve learned on my own. From content creation and marketing to web and graphics design,digital communication personal productivity skills, and even public speaking! And most of what I know about new technology, science, art, business world history, design, writing, and a dozen other topics, I’ve picked up outside of any formal education. You would be surprised to know that i studied one of the most widely perceived irrelevant courses in this era.
I say all of this with all sense of humility and no deliberate act towards tooting my own horn in any way; just think about is as well,much of what you know how to do now, you’ve probably picked them up on your own without even realising it and this is because we rarely think about the process of becoming self-taught. This of a truth is too bad, because often, we tend to shy away from things we don’t know how to do without taking out time to think about how we might learn it, most probably on our own — in many cases, it turns out fairly easy. Borrowing from the paraphrased words of Dustin Wax:
The manner in which we approach the world around us, to a large extent dictates if or if not we will find learning new things easy or hard.
The Keys to Learning Anything Easily
Learning comes and will only keep coming easily to those who have developed the following:
Curiosity
This really should not come new as the first point, being curious basically means you looking forward to learning new things and are in some way troubled by the gaps in your understanding of the world. New words, new ideas etc all these are received as challenges thus the task of understanding them is embraced. Individuals who lack curiosity tend to see learning new things as
a chore, or worse still, as something beyond their capacities.
Patience
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Now patience as a second key to learning anything easily ultimately depends on the intricacy or complexity of the given topic,thus learning something new can take a long or really long time. And it’s bound to be frustrating as you grapple with inflow of new terminologies, new models, and apparently new but irrelevant information.
When self teaching or learning something new all by yourself, there really is no one to control the flow of information, to ensure you move from your basic knowledge to intermediate and then finally advanced concepts. Patience with your selected topic, and more importantly with yourself is very crucial — there’s really no field of knowledge that someone out there in the world hasn’t somehow managed to learn, starting from exactly where you are, yes exactly where you are right now!
A Feeling for Connectedness
This is widely perceived as the hardest talent to cultivate, and appears to be where most persons stagger when approaching a new topic but it really ought not to be so.
A new topic or body of knowledge always proves easiest to learn if you have been able to figure out the way it connects to that which you already know. Now this is my personal story, for some years, I struggled with economics in college until a certain day when my economics teacher demonstrated how to approach economics as an integral part of life using our every day activities such as the shopping list, exchange of money at the market etc. From then on, economics came fairly much easier, because I had made a connection between a concept I understood well and a field I had always struggled in.
The more time you give to looking out for and paying attention to the connections between different fields, then the more readily your mind will be ready and able to latch onto new concepts.
Efectively self teaching - This is where i would be continuing from in my post, i would be in the comment section to hear your thoughts on this, hope you would share them with me.
