Article 192 - Self-Education & Continuous Learning

How to make self-learning and personal development enjoyable and fun?

Whether someone receives a degree from college or university after graduating from High School or not, self-education is what enables us to use the knowledge and skills acquired for many years to come. Sure, having educational base is important, and I am not necessarily referring to college degree. Base knowledge could be acquired K-12. However, if one is choosing to go beyond High School to further formal education and study a particular major, than that’s great. There could never be enough knowledge. That is why I believe that everyone should invest time and energy into personal development, self-education, and continuous learning indefinitely.

Often, our best teacher could be failure that we’ve experienced at any given point in our life. It may not seem or feel that way at a time, but if we looks back at that experience, I am sure we can find one or more things that we can improve on so that we don’t make same mistake again. Right? I know I have certainly learned and continue to learn from the mistakes that I make, then improve the process, and try again until I am satisfied with the result. The main goal is not to repeat the same mistake twice. We all make mistakes throughout our life, and making mistakes is ok, as long as we can learn something new from each experience and have something to take away which could help us in the future.

Self-education is not all about making mistakes and learning from our failures. Self-education is finding something that we can do to learn more every day and to expand our knowledge base. This could be an activity such as reading a book, even if it is few pages each day. So, what I am saying is that one doesn’t have to pick up a book and read it non-stop, unless you are so inclined, but, perhaps, read it over a period of time – few days, weeks, or even months, depending on the size and complexity of the book. Reading is supposed to be interesting and something that brings you enjoyment, not something that you do because someone expects it from you. Now, this is different from reading and studying educational material in textbooks, or other educational materials such as lecture notes, study guides, etc., while attending grade school and/or college. You must read textbook to learn the information you would need for a class, test, and to build informational base in our brain that could be tapped into sometime in the future.

Self-education and reading as part of self-education is something that you do on your own accord anytime you have free time after school or work. The whole concept of self-education and personal development is centered around us seeking and creating opportunities to learn something new or something that we are interested in learning more about each day, on top of the base knowledge received through formal education.

Some additional ideas for self-education and personal development could be – listening to audio books, reading business and world news, attending digital online training courses on LinkedIn Learning, etc. What’s important here is not which self-learning activity one selects, or the number of different learning activities one completes, but doing something each day to grow and expand our knowledge, and do so every day, not just some days.  Personal development and self-education is something that’s ongoing and never-ending, and it’s very important to learn about things that we are interested in and actually enjoy learning something new daily vs. feeling like we must do something just to be able to say that we did it. This type of learning will not be enjoyable, will quickly be forgotten, and placed in the “I’ll get to it tomorrow or later” folder of our daily lives. Make learning fun, enjoyable, and create opportunities to learn something new each day.