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June 2 - June 2, 2020
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.
You can develop self-discipline. Charting your 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 self-education because it can be replicated in all other areas of your life.
confidence self-management learning
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 take a lot of time and mark your progress as you go along.
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.
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.
Autonomy.
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. It’s an essential aspect of self-learning because there is no educator to impose rigidity upon you—just yourself. You are both the teacher and the student, and that comes with the task of self-motivation. There are three main aspects of intrinsic motivation to keep yourself moving toward your goal of self-learning: autonomy, mastery, and purpose/impact. The intangibles tend to be far more powerful than what you would traditionally consider motivating.
The traditional classroom setting of reading and regurgitating certainly isn’t the most effective, but it’s the only model most of us know. Robinson’s approach is suitable for more than just reading: your entire study plan can be modeled on Robinson’s method and adapted to your self-learning. The technique is called The SQ3R method, named for its five components: survey question read recite review
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. However, it’s important to restate these points in your own words rather than just copy phrases from the book onto a piece of paper.
The Feynman technique is a specific application of elaborative interrogation. Remember, the goal is not to actually answer the questions; it’s to see what you are unable to answer—that is the information it provides. It has four steps.
Step one: Choose your concept.
Step two: Write down an explanation of the concept in plain English.
Step three: Find your blind spots.
Step four: Use an analogy.
Takeaways:
Interaction with information—in other words, how to take something that’s on the page and screen, understand it, and make it usable to yourself at a later time. That’s learning in a nutshell, but there are best practices you should embrace outside of the traditional classroom setting.
First is the SQ3R method. Use it. It stands for survey, question, read, recite, review. This is not just a process for attacking a book, but rather a plan for attacking entire disciplines and fields—and whatever you are trying to learn for yourself. Most people will use some elements of the SQ3R method, such as the read and review portion, but without the other elements, deeper comprehension is rarer and more difficult.
Second is Cornell notes. Use them. Cornell notes split your note-taking into three parts: taking notes, writing cues, and summarizing. In this way, you create your own study guide, with the ability to go into as much detail as you want on command. The fact that you’ve gone through the information three times also doesn’t hurt.
Finally, self-explanation. Do it. When we are forced to try to explain concepts through self-inquiry, we will quickly discover what we do know and what we don’t know at all. These are called blind spots, and they are far more common than you might like to think. Can you explain why the sky is blue or how gravity works? Probably not off the top of your head, even though you think you understand those concepts. The Feynman technique is an offshoot of self-explanation that helps find blind spots as well, with an added component of using an analogy to explain what you think you know.
These are Adler’s four levels of reading, from simplest to most complex: elementary inspectional analytical syntopical
Takeaways:
This chapter is geared toward imparting how to read faster and also retain more information at the same time. It sounds like a tall task, but it’s unlikely you’ve learned much about reading since when you were learning the alphabet—that is to say, not much. There are a few important aspects to reading faster.
You must stop subvocalizations. This is when you mentally read words out loud. You can think and process faster than you can read out loud. This means instead of sounding out and pronouncing words, you must imagine their meaning in their place. It’s a tough habit to break.
Second, you must train your eyes. After all, each eye has six muscles that control its movements. You must train your eyes in two ways: to move less and to look wider with peripheral vision.
Third, you must learn how to strategically skim by avoiding useless words, focusing on important words, and ignoring words at the edge of the pages.
Finally, you must learn how your focus and attention works in regard to reading. Give it the respect it deserves and take scheduled breaks, make games to read faster, and eliminate distractions.
How do you read a book? A final section details the four levels of reading as articulated by author Mortimer Adler. The levels are elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. Most of us only get through the first two levels and don’t engage with the material and have a conversation with it. That’s where deep, true comprehension comes from.
Franklin devised a list of 13 qualities he felt he needed to develop in order to live a healthy and conscientious life when he was 20 years old
Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak
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So using Franklin’s overall concept for your own schedule, here are some guidelines you should follow:
Give yourself a couple of daily blocks to focus on your primary work. But give yourself as much flexibility within those blocks to mentally wander. Large blocks of time are more forgiving and allow you the space to go where the wind takes you.
Schedule some time for recreation, leisure, personal reflection, or socializing with family and friends. Franklin knew these aspects were crucial enough to make room for them, especially personal reflection and understanding what went well and what needed to change during the day. The brain can’t run on full speed all the time.
Treat your personal goals with the same respect as your professional goals—in other words, schedule your self-learning with the same priority as your other responsibilities.
Spend a relatively equal amount of time planning, ruminating, analyzing, and preparing as you do actually taking action. What went well and what didn’t? Make sure you’re doing the right thing instead of the easy thing and that you learn from your mistakes and inefficiencies.
Wash. Definitely find time to wash.
how can we use goals to plan ourselves into better self-learning? The first guideline is to accept that you don’t really know what you don’t know yet, and you’re not going to find out until you finally know it.
One handy mnemonic device that can help guide your goal-setting is the SMART acronym. When you’ve come up with a goal for learning, evaluate it to ensure how it meets five standards—that your goal is the following: Specific: clear and definitive Measurable: easy for you to track progress Achievable: within your reach but not too simple Relevant: personally significant to you and your life Time-based: organized to some kind of schedule
The bottom line is to remember that by taking on self-learning, you’re doing something that is uniquely rewarding that only some of us ever do. It will impact your life and your confidence in exponentially positive ways. It’ll be hard, it’ll be frustrating, and it’ll be a while. But embrace the uncertainty and the challenge and keep the long view uppermost in mind. When you finally get to where you want to go, all those obstacles will look like anthills in retrospect, and you’ll know you’re the better for them.
Takeaways:
There are certain skills and habits you must cultivate in your quest for self-learning and self-education. Many of these stem from the simple fact that with no one else to regulate you, you must do it yourself. Again, the theme that you must be both student and teacher rears its ugly head.
First, plans, schedules, and goals should all figure heavily into your self-learning. In fact, they should be one of the first things you create—all three of them. Take a page from Benjamin Franklin (twice) and implement a daily schedule that simplifies your decision-making, as well as a plan and schedule for accomplishing your goals. Make sure your goals are challenging enough to be motivating but not so impossible as to create discouragement. Think SMART.
Information itself is not going to teach you. You must have a dialogue with the material you discover and interact with it in a way that makes up for not having a stimulating teacher or professor. You must pull information out. You can accomplish this through asking critical and probative questions—the goal is to gain understanding, context, and perspective, not to seek a correct answer. As long as you focus on the overall purpose of finding a nuanced and three-dimensional view of a topic, your questions will be well-guided.
Research. It’s not as simple as going to the library and checking out a book or consulting Wikipedia and calling it a day. In the same vein as the previous point on pulling information, you must ensure that you are finding a complete and thorough understanding of a topic through five steps: gather, filter, find patterns, seek dissent, and put it all together.
Self-discipline is needed in heavy doses because self-learning is not innately a pleasurable pursuit. It’s work. And it can induce anxiety, stress, and discouragement that ultimately lead to giving up. Look at your moments of anxiety and view them as temporary and passing. The pain won’t last forever, you’ll grow accustomed to it, or you’ll solve it. These are all acceptable outcomes to the occasionally painful process you must endure.
Deep learning and surface learning are different. Deep learning comes from understanding concepts and patterns, and often, then supersedes the need for shallow, surface learning. The same parallel exists with regard to trying to memorize something, versus trying to understand it. If you simply prioritize concepts and understanding, you’ll be able to fill in the blanks of specific information by yourself.
