The Ultimate Self-Education Blog

SELF-EDUCATION | SELF-DEVELOPMENT | MODULAR DEGREE

Why Should YOU care?

Every. Single. Person. On the planet should be learning. No questions asked, it is a must.

This being said I know it can be difficult for some to make it to some sort of higher education, or even primary education (high school). Good thought leaders don’t come from pure schools/colleges/universities, they come from the desire to learn more than the rest.

To know something that the rest don’t care enough to know about. Least not until you find it first.

A majority of people stop learning after leaving school, but this leads into mental decline. Starting off slow at youth, giving someone poorer memory, and overall forgetting a lot of what learned because they didn’t practice. However in older age not learning leads to full cognitive decline. The stimulus you get from the process of education is so novel to the brain. So fundamental to the hard wiring of our brains, that it causes us to have dementia or Alzheimer's disease if we do not sustain that mental challenge.

Even reading books is often enough maintain a decent mental level, but I find that we should be constantly be trying to improve the brain instead.

What is Self-Education, Really?

It is the process of learning by teaching yourself. Often called Autodidactism, and it is great. I absolutely love calling myself a self-teacher, for I am captivated by the thought that I could become something greater.

The key to success, life, and the human race itself IS education.

The sole best way to improve the world is by educating the world. This may be a strong reason why the United Nations have “Quality Education” as number Four in the Sustainability Development Goals.

No matter what country you live in, there is a need for growth in education. Why not start with teaching yourself first? You get to choose the topics, and the methods used to learn it!

How Can We Pursue it?

The simple answer is by learning, a slightly more complex answer would be to create a Do It Yourself Degree, and a more advanced answer would be do nothing but learn.

The latter isn’t really an option, so here is the basics of a D.I.Y. Modular Degree:

It consistently gets you to be excited to learn. What you are doing is choosing your courses, if you are bored then you shouldn’t be wasting your time. There are PLENTY of other options out there. I think I should follow my own advice here more.

Conversely do NOT let this be an excuse to just quit when things get a bit boring or tough. I know I said otherwise just a moment ago, but I’ve only quit about 1 course. That was because I knew I was not prepared enough to succeed, as I would need to know more Calculus and Programming.

Many people do give into the failing category, but I take it that if you are here reading this, then you are not one of those people. Even if you are, then you don’t have to be anymore!

What Does a Modular Degree Entail?

It entails that you collect 20–40+ courses, books, articles, and videos. Curate them into a list, which I use Notion.so. Then tackle it head on with constant awareness to your procrastination, and actual learning.

This means you need to obtain a few skills first I would say to truly be successful:

Self-Awareness, Self-Discipline, Feynman Technique, computer literacy, focus (pomodoro or binaural beats helps), productivity tricks, and a few others I would say.

I know I said a few, but don’t let that intimidate you, break it up, just like with the degree. I had to break mine up into different semesters. That is the whole point to learn something new. Self-Development must come first before Self-Education.

This is how should you get started:

First establish your goal; What do you want to get out of it? An alternative to college? A marketable skill for a job, or freelancing? A skill to improve your work you already have? Decide your end point, or you’ll end up in loops.

Second, take some time collecting resources, and honestly I had a lot of fun with this part. However I am a real nerd, I love researching when I have a good topic. Stuff I WANT to learn is definitely a good topic!

This being said don’t get caught up in the paid stuff yet, unless you know for certain, or have strong gut feelings. Paying $50–90 for a course is okay at this point, but anything over $150 is too much unless that is all you are doing. In which case you are pursuing an education which is great, but isn’t a D.I.Y. Degree.

Lastly, and I’m really shortening this all here, you should set up multiple times throughout the week to tackle this goal. I calculated my time so if I COMPLETED a course a day, it would still take me 2–3 years. I have collected over 450 courses, and then turned them into 10+ semesters. I do not believe you will be that audacious. Keep it to about 40 tops, trust me!

Additional World Education PolyInnovator blog posts!

As it just so happened my content creation plan had me creating four posts in one day, so I made sure all four had different spins, sub-topics, and overall feel to the post. This is because I want each person to get something out of my content, and if one post doesn’t do the trick, maybe the others will!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-education-dustin-miller/?published=t

Cheers! -Dustin M, PolyInnovator