Aditya Kothadiya’s Blog

Targeted Audience: Students, Recent Graduates, Entrepreneurs

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. — Isaac Asimov

 

I recently read this quote and was fascinated by its meaning. So I decided to expand this thought to a blog post.

First, please answer these questions - 

• When was the last time you spent some time on learning something on your own which was solely for your own development and which was not required because your job or school assignment demanded it?
• How frequently you spent some time for self-learning?

You might realize that we spend very little time on our own for our own development.

If you remember, when we were kids, our learning was very rapid. We learned most of the things during our childhood days because we were curious to learn those things. And most importantly, we learned many things without any formal schooling. It was the best example of self-education. 

But this self-education process extinguishes as we grow up.  When we are in the school or working in the industry, we are learning what our job or school require. Most of the times, we have to learn that we do not enjoy. And if we don’t find such learning experience an exciting one then we don’t really grow from it. We barely manage to learn what is required so that we can pass the exam or complete the assigned task. 

We don’t learn what we want to learn. We don’t grow the way we want to grow. But we don’t have any other option as well. We can’t blame the school or our job for such situation. I don’t think we can remove this situation. I think we have to find the solution around this existing scenario. 

We have to develop a self-education environment. We have to design our own curriculum such that we learn beyond what it is taught in the school and in the job life. We have to enjoy our curriculum such that we really learn and grow from it. 

I recently talked to my supervisor, a very young and highly knowledgeable person. I discussed with him how he learned all these things in such short duration. To my surprise, he told me that he just has a Bachelors degree and did not pursue his Masters. He also informed me that he did not take any extra professional courses or training classes. All his knowledge is an outcome of the extra time he invested in self-learning. Pushing hard after office hours, learning between available free time, identifying what to learn, and practicing it on continuous basis – this is how he managed to learn what he wanted to learn.

Let it be a student, a working professional or an entrepreneur, there is no alternative to self-education. It is no more an optional thing for extra performance. It is a necessity. 

We have to create our own curriculum, decide the time line and just work on it. The challenging part would be to define our own curriculum. 

Creating our own curriculum involves:

• Writing down our quantifiable goals
• Identifying what to learn to achieve those goals
• Deciding our measures of success to track our progress
• Preparing a schedule to complete our self-learning
• Discussing and refining our plan with our friends or mentors
• And the most important thing – committing to our plan.

To make this self-learning process more interesting, try to align our self-curriculum such a way that it helps our job life or school life either directly or indirectly.

Please take some moments to design your curriculum by this weekend. And lets start achieving our goals through a enjoyable journey.

For more articles from this series, please visit – Beyond Intelligence