We are living in an information age. Some maintain that information is doubling every 18 months, others every 12 months. In a previous post, we looked at the importance of enhancing skills and even gaining new knowledge under the brooding reality of robots taking 5 million jobs over the next 4 years.
How do you educate yourself? How do you enhance your skills and, minimally, stay on top of the surge of information?
Here are a few tips:
1. Attitude: Educating yourself is an attitude, a desire, a way of being. Its important to stay curious; to want to learn. As Socrates said, "A wise man admits he knows nothing."
2. Read: Are you a reader? If not, you will need to be. Reading enhances your brain activity in a much different way than watching televisual imagery--even audiobooks are better for the brain than movies. Reading will challenge your ideas and way of seeing the world. One book that is a must is "How to Read a Book," by Mortimer Adler and Charles VanDoren: it starts with the basics of reading and takes you through skill after skill until you are at the level of academic reading.
3. Good books: Now that you are reading, you need to figure out what to read. Classical educators will urge you to read the classics, books like Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy as a beginning. "How to Read a Book" will give you a list of the Western Canon: those books considered necessary reading for a solid education in western culture. But there are other lists too that take a simple Google search: "Best books on business," "Best books on design," "Best books on economics," "Best technology books in 2015"--get the picture? Once you have those lists, start to build your library. Do you like ebooks--check out a resource like Open Culture for hundreds of free e- and audiobooks.
4. Online Courses: There is a lot of information on hacking your education, from websites to courses, to websites like LifeHacker. An amazing resource is iTunes University from which you can take all kinds of university courses from top schools like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. Download them to your mobile device, plug in your earbuds, and you can be learning 24/7.
5. Notebook: This is a real art, and yet it's simple: buy a notebook, carry it around with you and jot down thoughts, quotes from books, notes from online courses, and overall observations. This is one of the most basic and powerful things you can do to educate yourself. There are people, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Buckminster Fuller, who were made famous simply for their notebook accumulated over decades. In fact, if you observe the practices of many famous people throughout history, they have carried and worked in notebooks. Now some might claim that putting your notes on your mobile phone is good enough--I disagree. Working in pen and pencil and paper is a kinesthetic practice whose results in thinking and learning are different and arguably outweigh those of simply tapping your phone screen.
6. Dialogue: We learn when we are unhoused, when we're challenged by others' opinions. Joining a reading group, or starting one yourself, is a great way to enter into conversation with others. And when you have a conversation around a good book, or set of books, there's a richness to the conversation that enhances learning. You'll notice as well that good companies study good books among their employees and leadership.
7. You're never too old: Learning is something we're always doing, and always have been doing since we first entered the world as babies. You're never too old to pick up reading books you studied decades ago in college. You're never too old to pick up a new skill. You're never too old to buy a sketchbook and start drawing out and documenting your daily experiences. You're never too old to join a book club or study group or lecture series at your local university. One of my mentors at Stanford was highly acclaimed as a translator in Greek, and yet, even as a senior professor, was taking intro-level Greek to keep his basic skills polished.
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