The Science of Self-Learning: How to Teach Yourself Anything, Learn More in Less Time, and Direct Your Own Education (Learning how to Learn Book 1)

by Peter Hollins

In all of those stuffy traditional environments, someone else decided what we should learn beforehand, whether it was a school board, a private instructor, or family. Learning conferred a top-down relationship with someone else who had the knowledge we sought. Self-learning—in most, but not all, areas—wasn’t considered as legitimate as getting an education from a known or accredited source. To enter professions or be considered in any positive light, you must have gone through the proper channels and received the pertinent pieces of paper that told people you were knowledgeable. Gatekeepers were everywhere and designed to keep you from rising.

The Internet has opened up broad avenues of information access that are available to anyone with a connection. Somebody who truly wants to learn facts in history, science, the arts, business, technology, or literature can do so with at least a little comprehensiveness through online sources.

Students can supplement their traditional studies, or they can create their own curriculums designed to get them where they want to be. The business titans we worship these days don’t even have the degrees that used to be required.

Still, self-education can seem like a grand undertaking. Indeed, it involves a higher personal drive and commitment than we had in our regimented school days because we’re guiding ourselves when we self-learn. We’re motivating ourselves. We’re often learning in a vacuum, trying to derive meaning and knowledge in subjects...

Self-learning benefits from a mindset that isn’t always picked up in traditional institutions, but that can prove to be a major advantage in more than just education. That’s the mindset of the autodidact. An autodidact is, most simply put, a self-educator. It’s what you’re probably aspiring to. They own the entire method of their instruction, from beginning to finish, from interest to implementation. They’re hungry to learn more about the topics they’re most passionate about, and they’re enthusiastic about learning new subjects from scratch. They manage all the tools they need to learn: books, videos, podcasts, online courses, and even “fieldwork.” An autodidact is comfortable with the notion that they’re both teacher and student, often at the same time. Anyone can be an autodidact—there aren’t any restrictions on age, gender, or background. All that’s required is the willingness to actively find new knowledge and to do so with a discerning, evaluative mind. The autodidact is driven by a strong desire to acquire intelligence and is most successful when they make a concentrated and well-plotted endeavor to do so. An autodidact is especially effective if they have a strong memory and can direct their own study outside of formal education settings. This is a skill to be cultivated. It’s not easy, especially at first, but this mindset is how to take your self-learning to the next level. It’s how you are able to immerse yourself in new knowledge and reach expert levels, even if...

It’s psychologically restrictive. In a traditional education setting, you’re expected to always be attentive and on point. Most if not all of your mental resources need to be applied toward the topics you’re studying, to the extent that grabbing just a few reasonable minutes of free time could make one feel guilty or irresponsible. How can you enjoy the rare two-hour movie when you’ve got a chemistry final breathing down your neck? This is one of the many problems with a one-size-fits-all approach. It often uses fear as a motivator. If you don’t study

hard and achieve success according to the standards of your school or university, supposedly you’ll have no future. Beginning when we’re children, we’re told that if we don’t follow the demands of traditional schooling—if we don’t keep our heads down for 18 years, plug away, and get that degree—then we’ll wind up destitute, unsuccessful, and live a terrible life out on the fringes of society. The problem with using fear as a motivator is that it flat-out doesn’t work—we’ll explain why in a bit. Sure, children might not understand motivation in many other ways, but there are indeed other ways. It limits or even destroys creativity. In school, you do as you’re told. You don’t have any leeway. Your course of study is chosen for you. Your

texts are assigned. Your materials, lab experiments, and resources all come from prepared lists from which you can’t deviate. There is only one answer. Most of the time, there is only one method as well. You’re told to approach problems and questions in certain, specific, and fixed manners. Even if you can better understand a concept through creative thinking and self-driven investigations, you’re expected to conform. The compounding ...

It makes you close-minded. Ivy League colleges deserve their high reputations. But let’s be honest: they often create a social hierarchy based on who went through the proper channels and who deserves what. It’s not just confined to highly ranked universities, of course. The culture surrounding much of traditional education tells that there is truly only one path, and that’s the path they took; anyone else is illegitimate. How could someone do the same job as me when I have a bachelor of arts in sociology from a four-year university? Well… pretty easily, actually. It actually hinders future learning. After 20 years of force-fed learning—tens of thousands of hours of lecture, reading, studying, and accumulating facts—you’re almost conditioned not to learn in any other way. You don’t imagine that there even is another way, much le...

the last thing they want to do upon graduation is learn anything. Some students get so burned out from having their noses buried in textbooks that even the prospect of recreational reading for fun turns them off. When you’ve spent an entire quarter-life enduring the hardships of a strict ...

These flaws of institutionalized learning aren’t universal, and they shouldn’t become excuses for one to abandon their studies. But they do illustrate some of the psychological barriers a traditional education can reinforce and can explain why it can be difficult to retain the information we’re supposed to learn in school. You’re told what to care about a...

In contrast, self-education carries a few potential advantages that don’t necessarily arise in the scope of traditional education. They can be of great benefit—not just for your personal intelligence a...

You can dive as deeply into a subject as you want. All institutionalized school courses are finite. They can’t cover everything about a given subject because they’re beholden to time. But in self-learning you don’t have to follow a strict curriculum. There are no limits to what you can learn, and you can go much more deeply into your subject than your college professor had tim...

decide your own level of difficulty. With self-learning you don’t have to stop and can go as far and as quickly as you want to. Or you could do the opposite: learn more deliberately at your own pace, taking all the time you ne...

You can set yourself up for lifelong learning. Your college degree doesn’t have to be the ending point of your education, yet that’s exactly how many students view it. With self-learning you can develop habits, skills, and interests that will prepare you for learning for the rest of your life by deepening your expertise in a subject and keeping up with the latest developments. Traditional education is about reading and regurgitation. Su...

You can study subjects with a different perspective. Most university graduates are set on a certain, limited career track. They study with a specific purpose and aim for what to do with their newfound knowledge. Even if they achieve success in their fields, these times of rapid change can make their positions less secure, since employees are expected to keep up and know more about different topics than in the past. For example: learning solely business Japanese instead of how to use it in daily settings. Committing to self-learning gives you the upper hand because it allows you to learn with broad purposes, different purposes...

own course in education involves planning, personal management, commitment, and execution. When you can develop those skills yourself, they become more meaningful than when someone else tries to force them upon you. Building self-discipline is one of the handiest “by-products” of s...

You can open up new and unique possibilities. You probably didn’t have time for all the things you wanted to learn while you were in college—you were on a set course of specific study and couldn’t waver too much from it. Self-learning lets you pick up all those interests and passions you might have had to set aside in formal education....

Studies have shown that people, on average, have five to seven careers throughout their lifetimes. Will you be limited by your lack of self-learning abilities, or will you be able to ...

confidence self-management learning Confidence. At the base of Kruger’s pyramid is

the self-conviction that we can learn. There’s no way around this prerequisite, and brain chemistry has something to do with it. When we receive information of any kind, it travels up the spinal cord toward the neural networks of the brain. The first part of the brain to get this information is the emotional center—before the analytical or interpretive parts. Predictably, this causes some problems in our daily life. The job of the emotional center is to determine if the information we get poses a threat to our security. If this part of the brain perceives a threat, then it saps chemical resources from the rest of the brain to deal with the threat. Of course, you know this as the fight-or-flight response, in which our bodies are triggered into arousal to avoid

bodily harm in one way or another. The emotional center doesn’t distinguish between physical threats or personal ones, which means it perceives insults, harsh criticism, and condemnation with the same level of alarm that it would with a fist, a bear attack, or an oncoming truck. It’s responding to a danger to our well-being, and to do so, it hoards the chemicals we’d normally use for other brain-driven activity—such as learning. So motivating someone to learn by threats or reproach isn’t just ineffective—it’s impossible. If one is feeling hurt or mistr...

Therefore, it’s important to establis...

of confidence that we have the ability to learn. If you’re running low in this area, be kind to yourself and take steps to affirm your learning abilities. You’ve learned everything in your life thus far from scratch. You may feel ignorant or that you’re not goo...

There’s not a single subject you can’t understand with perseverance and the occasional stretch of hard work. Resolve yourself to not giving up. Make plans for how you will learn. Be forgiving of yourself if you need to...

The best way to combat this “brain drain” is by working on self-management skills, particularly organization. This simply means taking a lot of time ahead of any task to set up systems, routines, and actions that will make the task easier to execute on an ongoing basis. Preparation is often the critical difference between success and failure, so it’s vital not to rush through it. This is a skill that may have lay dormant since traditional

education was all about imposing a rigorous schedule. But since we must become student and teacher simultaneously, we cannot afford to neglect this.

For the self-learner, this process means organizing yourself and your materials to facilitate gathering information, studying, comprehending, and...

Think of this step as sort of a lab report. Before a scientist gets started on an experiment, they write down their hypothesis (or whatever they want to accomplish or prove) and the methods and materials they’ll use to arrive at their conclusions. After each stage of their experiment, they record results and indicate what kind of adjustments they might need to make for future trials. Finally, at the end, they write out the overall results and explain what the conclusions actually mean. Applying this mindset to self-learning, this

means putting a framework in place at the beginning that details how you’re going to execute. If you’re teaching yourself a foreign language, you’d want to make a list of books and online audio resources you’ll be using. You might want to make a list of how you’ll practice and test yourself—maybe with an online sound recorder or a smartphone. And at the end of the course, maybe you’ll translate a hefty amount of English text into the language you’re learning.

Learning. Well, here you are. With your confidence and self-management levels up to par, you’re all set up to learn. Learning is handled by the back brain, which oversees memory, connections, recognition, vision, and meaning, among other functions. This is known as the hippocampus. It’s where all the information will be processed and analyzed. It’s where information is converted from short-term memory into long-term memory and where real physical structural changes in the brain will occur. The thing is, learning itself is not a difficult task. But most people make the mistake of believing that this third stage is where they should begin, rather than addressing their confidence and self-regulation issues. Once you can overcome those hurdles in the learning pyramid, or at least address them, self-learning becomes far easier.

Arts and Sciences The pyramid of learning success outlines the internal assets we need to have in place to embark on education, whether in institutional or self-learning. But with all the subjects we have at our disposal, are there certain courses of study that are more effective in self-education than others? Any subject can be self-taught with proper planning and execution, whether it’s playing music or learning world history or statistics. They’re all possible; however, there are some topics that are indeed better suited to the act of self-education

than others—and it boils down to the difference between arts and sciences.

Every subject or discipline is either an “art” or a “science”—not just the obvious ones like sculpture and biology. The difference between arts and sciences is related to the variation between subjective and objective learning and the role that teachers play in disseminating the information. In the arts, everything is subjective. There are, ultimately, no right or wrong answers in art. Sure, you can be taught “proper” brush strokes or the “proper” way to calibrate a video camera. But it’s not an absolute necessity to do those things in a regimented way to produce a proper piece of art. (It might be horribly difficult, but it’s not impossible.) If the goal of art is to evoke an emotion, and emotion is subjective, then there are innumerable paths to achieve that goal. The content of a course in the arts is changeable, and a huge part of it d...

the arts, and because of that the teacher is indivisible from the subject they’re teaching. Without strong reference points and milestones, this is harder in self-learning. Science, on the other hand, is objective. You deal exclusively with proven facts and hard data. The speed of light, the physical makeup of elements on the periodic table, and the product of 2 × 4 are inarguable. You can’t really have an opinion about whether or not the answers are true; t...

Likewise, every science or math teacher in the world has to tell you these facts. It doesn’t matter how they teach them to you or how they interpret or feel about them. They all have to teach you the same concepts, because it’s literal and true. If a math teacher is telling you 2 × 4 = 13, they’re not going to be teaching too much longer. So objective sciences don’t rely on the presence of a certain type of teacher—whether they’re there or not, the fac...

In self-learning, though, you’re your own instructor. The only personality you have to deal with is your own. You might read the opinions and interpretations of other people, but the final funnel is your own brain. You’re tasked with seeking out relevant material and instilling it in your own head. Because of this, there’s at least a little credence to the idea that sciences are more suitable for self-education than the arts. No matter what branch of science you study—physical science, law, statistics, or economics—there will be a hard set of indisputable data that you’ll have to accept at some point. Those concre...

This does not mean it’s impossible to teach yourself an artistic subject. I’ve spent a lot of time on my own working on my writing skills, for example, and don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. Teaching yourself an art is entirely possible. You just need to make cer...

The rewards of self-learning are instantaneously obvious, but make no mistake: it’s an ambitious effort. You’re serving as both student and teacher. It requires confidence, commitment, and good planning. If you’re not a traditional “self-starter,” the goal may look so work-heavy that it might seem hard to work up the motivation to plow through to it. Self-learning isn’t like typical school, where someone or something else is responsible for setting your goals and motivating you to work toward them. It’s also different from work, where your motivation is simple: finish your job and get paid. Besides, this “carrot-and-stick” motivation strategy doesn’t always result in you producing your best work, and even if you get the requisite compensation for completing your work successfully, there’s a great chance you won’t derive a lot of satisfaction from it.

We call that reward-or-punishment framework extrinsic motivation: the compensation you get comes from an external source, such as the company you work for or the school district you study in. Somebody else is generating your payments or rewards according to guidelines that they set up—not you. This kind of motivation might have worked for a while in the past, when options for study and employment were more limited and people just wanted to survive. The opposite of this concept is intrinsic motivation. Rather than performing a task to gain rewards or avoid punishment from someone else, a person experiencing intrinsic motivation does an activity for how it will enrich them on an intangible level. The rewards one gets in this framework are self-generated: pride, sense of accomplishment, enjoyment, rising to a challenge. These kinds of rewards, quite simply, feel better and have more personal meaning than a paycheck or a grade. Research over the last fifty years or so has consistently found that intrinsic rewards are far more motivating than extrinsic ones. In fact, studies conducted in the 1970s by professors Harry Harlow and Edward Deci found that extrinsic motivation actually detracts from intrinsic motivation: if you’re doing a job because you both get money and seek personal satisfaction from it, the motive for outside rewards will diminish

the quality of the internal rewards you pursue. Author Daniel Pink has written several key works on his theories of contemporary motivation. In current times, he says, the idea of “Motivation 3.0” is more likely to bring about the personal success we all desire. This follows the eras of Motivation 1.0, which is merely the primitive need to survive, and Motivation 2.0, the reward-and-punishment model your parents might have experienced in theirs. Motivation 3.0 is all about intrinsic motivation. It’s spurred by Pink’s belief that “the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to make a contribution.” Pink described three different factors that make up intrinsic motivation. Autonomy. Freedom is a big, driving impulse for ...

anybody else and you’re able to set yo...

Autonomy motivates us because we want to believe that only we truly affect our own lives. Nobody actually enjoys the prospect of somebody else manipulating the levers in their existence; it implies that we’re being restricted by somebody else’s expectations or wishes. We’re bred to want indepe...

Mastery. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing something well, that you’ve worked and practiced hard to achieve your own standards of excellence. That’s what mastery is: the drive to improve our skills or knowledge in areas we’re passionate about. Mastery is a motivating factor because it gives us a sense of progress (at least if we can stick it out through the beginning phases of learning something brand new, when we’re bound to be frustrated from time to time). We keep pushing through in areas because we want to learn something new every day. We want to arrive at a point where we do only what we want to do, without being sidetracked or stunted by “busy work” or purposeless tasks. We want a sense of accomplishment that we can draw upon daily. Mastery might be the most obvious stimulating component in self-learning. You might be driven to understand every nuance of Shakespeare’s work, build a mechanical go-cart from scratch, become an ace audio producer, or understand all the ins and outs of business contracts without having to call a lawyer. The goal of every student is to gain expertise in their field, and a great self-learner keeps the prospect of mastery uppermost in their mind at all points in their journey. Mastery is doubly gratifying when you know that it’s because of you and your drive alone, rather than following the droning of a set of professors.

Purpose. Although part of the definition of intrinsic motivation is doing something for its

own sake, there’s also merit in the belief that we’re doing something for the “greater good.” That’s what a sense of purpose delivers. We believe that what we’re doing has a positive effect on more than just our personal lives—it’s also contributing to the general goodwill of the planet, helping somebody other than ourselves, or restoring a sense of higher meaning in our lives. We’re driven by purpose because, well, deep down inside, none of us really want to be jerks. We want to believe that we’re “good” people, that we’re responding to the highest calls of nature and society. We want to believe that we offer something important to the ...

yes, we crave independence and self-direction, but we also want to believe we’re worthy member...

During the course of self-learning, it will always help to orient your mind toward the internal rewards and improvements you’re seeking. Inspiration is, invariably, a stronger force than

compulsion. Keeping your eye on what you will give yourself through self-learning will always be a strong, guiding force in your studies, and nobody can provide that to you but yourself. Takeaways: Self-learning is a pursuit that isn’t new, but what’s new is how possible and attainable it is. The world is your oyster, courtesy of the Internet, and we have the ability to learn anything we want these days. Traditional learning has some positive aspects, but it also severely limits our approach toward education and how we seek to enrich ourselves. To combat this, we must first take a cue from autodidacts and understand the difference in mindset between reading and regurgitation and intellectual curiosity.

The learning success pyramid accurately lays out the three aspects of learning, two of which are typically neglected and thus serve as enormous barriers for most people. First, you must have confidence in your ability to learn, otherwise you will grow discouraged and hopeless. Second, you must be able to self-regulate your impulses, be disciplined, and focus when it matters—you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Third comes learning, which is where most people tend to start—to their detriment. Learning is more than picking up a book and reading, at least psychologically. Self-motivation is related to self-regulation.