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

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.

This is one of the many problems with a one-size-fits-all approach.

It often uses fear as a motivator.

It limits or even destroys creativity. In school, you do as you’re told. You don’t have any leeway.

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.

It makes you close-minded.

you’re almost conditioned not to learn in any other way. You don’t imagine that there even is another way, much less that you are able to direct it yourself.

There are no limits to what you can learn, and you can go much more deeply into your subject than your college professor had time for. You go at your own pace, and you are only limited by your motivation and discipline.

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.

Susan Kruger. She developed the learning success pyramid, which identifies the necessary elements one must bring to ensure accomplishment in learning throughout their life. Thoughtfully, Kruger kept her number of blocks to three, down from Wooden’s 15: confidence self-management learning

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.

So motivating someone to learn by threats or reproach isn’t just ineffective—it’s impossible. If one is feeling hurt or mistrusted, or if they’re dealing with depression, stress, difficult personal issues, or fear, they don’t have any resources left to help them learn.

For the self-learner, this process means organizing yourself and your materials to facilitate gathering information, studying, comprehending, and testing yourself on what you’ve learned.

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.

objective.

You can’t really have an opinion about whether or not the answers are true; they are whether you like it or not.

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.

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.”

That’s why American educator Francis P. Robinson developed a method meant to help students really get the most comprehension from the texts they’re assigned—and, ergo, the subject they’re studying.

The technique is called The SQ3R method, named for its five components: survey question read recite review

It’s just like taking a look at the entire map before you set off on a road trip. You may not need all the knowledge at the moment, but understanding everything as a whole and how it fits together will help you with the small details and when you’re in the weeds. You’ll know that you generally need to head southwest if you’re confused.

table of contents, then you need to be able to create it for yourself. Yes, this is the difficult part, but once you are able to lay all the concepts out and understand how they relate to each other at least on a surface level, you will already be leaps ahead of others.

form an outline of what you’ll learn. In a sense, it’s more like you’re plotting out a metaphorical “book” for yourself.

This turns the dry title the author has given into a challenge or problem for you to solve.

Now that you’ve organized your resources for study planning, you can arrange some of the topics you’re going to cover into questions you want answered or objectives that you want to meet.

what specific answers are you hoping to find in your studies? Write them down.

Ask questions—out loud, verbally—about what you’re reading. This is also the point where you take copious notes in the margins of the text and underline or highlight key points. Recitation is verbal and also through writing.

it’s important to restate these points in your own words rather than just copy phrases from the book onto a piece of paper.