Getting Started 🌱
To kick-off Design Your Learning, this week I’ll be sharing my vision behind this newsletter, what you can expect each week, and my absolute favorite reads on the internet for a dose of inspiration.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 42 seconds 💡 Vision
Promote lifelong learning and personal mastery
Help individuals personalize their learning and add a structure to it, even if it’s just for a hobby
Push you to try new stuff and set on the path to become a Polymath
📋 What to expect
Each week I will uncover 1 skill to learn paired with a simple curriculum and resources (mostly free, some paid), and ideas for real-life projects you can do to test your skills.
Followed by my favorites reads on the net on learning, personal growth, and stories that make you think.
What Skills?
Both hard and soft skills with a focus on:
– Creating (using technology + art)
– Improving (personal life + hobbies)
– Promoting (ourselves + businesses)
So everything from Sketching to How to Think to Product Marketing.
📖 Why Lifelong Learning?
People with a learning mindset focus on progress and always searching out opportunities to stretch their existing abilities. Having a growth mindset (the belief that you are in control of your own ability, and can learn and improve) is the key to success.
If everything was the same all the time, life would get boring (at least for most of us).
Before writing this post, I just had a call with a 65-year old man, a retired banker, yoga and meditation teacher, a university professor and he’s now learning WordPress, digital marketing and publshing blogs.
Excelling at more than one thing, or at least, being pretty good at more than one thing, might just be what keeps you investing in a variety of things over the long-term, without getting bored and frustrated.
Note that I am not advocating consuming lessons and courses forever. And your learning does not need to always have professional or monetary benefits. You can learn by creating stuff, by teaching, and even through travel. It’s the mindset that matters.
⌛ “But I don’t have enough time”
We all have lots of stuff to do. Long working hours, a business to manage, and since most of us are staying at home, a duty to our near and dear ones.
I get it. Like everyone else, I struggle with managing my time too. I have been planning to start a newsletter for more than 6 months but only got to it now.
“Most people overestimate what they can do in a year and they underestimate what they can do in two or three decades.” - James Clear
The average person spends about 4 hours a day staring at their smartphone, yet has no time to start that business, go for a run, or read a book. My own average is 5 hours 15 minutes so I’m not going to share my time management wisdom, but here’s a 6-minute video that can help you reduce your screen time.
Another quick tip:
Automate or outsource your repetitive tasks. It doesn’t cost that much 💸 and doing so will free you up to focus only on other fun stuff. Check out Zapier, IFTTT, Get Magic, and Upwork for all kinds of automation and outsourcing options.
❌ Are we anti-college?
Not at all. Self Directed Learning is not against formal education. Even though colleges have major drawbacks and are ridiculously expensive, a university degree is still valuable for the majority of people. It all depends on your goals.
SDL focuses on making the education work for you, irrespective of whether you study in a university, through a Udemy course, youtube tutorials, or through books. The sooner we get in the habit of self-directed learning in addition to our formal university courses, the better.
🗸 I already know this skill
Yes, there will be some skills that you already know or focused on another course that requires most of your time.
In that case:
a.) if you are an expert in that skill, I could use your help to craft a solid curriculum outline. Reply to that email and we’ll hop on a call :)
b.) forward the email to a friend/colleague who you think will find it useful?
🔖 Something to Read:
A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person
Don’t worry about where the job you take puts you on any status hierarchy. Our society’s career status hierarchy is in the midst of changing anyway. Instead, try to do something that people will ask you about for the rest of your life. What was it like to work on a fishing boat off of Maine? What was it like to teach at a nursery school for the children of Mexican farmworkers? You’re graduating into an extremely uncertain time. You might as well get a master’s degree in handling uncertainty. If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.
The List That Made Her Millions
Getting a new business off the ground is the hardest part. The young woman was soon out on the streets, knocking on doors and asking business owners to sign up. In the evenings, she would pick up the phone and cold call businesses. She thought it would be easy, but she hadn’t yet learned the art of hearing, “no”.
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Thank you for tuning in! This is my first foray into writing weekly newsletters so if you have any feedback going forward, I’d love to hear from you.
See you next week!