Teach yourself just about anything using the internet and a few good books
As Noam Chomsky once said, the contents of the Harvard Library can be found online. The key is finding them all in one place. The freedom of being able to teach yourself something is that you can choose how you want to learn. The challenging side is finding the right materials to learn from. Teaching yourself takes motivation, focus and adaptivity, but the results are rewarding. With nothing more than access to the internet and a few carefully chosen books, you can pretty much teach yourself anything. As a highly successful self-learner, here are some things I’ve learned along the way.
Establish Your Sources of Information.
The first step in self education is always to establish your sources of information.
Always go to the foundation of a given topic: so many websites and books are derivative material. They spin off other people’s ideas and dance around the subject. Finding materials that are comprehensive, high quality, and cover the origins of a topic are paramount to training yourself well. Often this means going to the original author or finding the reference tome of a given subject. If you can pair this with a material that matches your learning style, you’re golden.
A powerful way to determine whether a source high quality or not is to compare multiple sources on the same topic and find the one with most academic approach and the most explanatory style. Sometimes this means finding just the right YouTube channel and watching through the videos. For a complete education however, you will likely need to delve into deeper resources, such as textbooks. Frequently, sources like these will be notation heavy. Good sources will teach you the notation as part of the learning, but don’t be intimidated if they omit this part. Finding unconventional ways (and often secondary sources) to teach yourself the notation is part of the process and necessary to understanding the highest quality knowledge. It will make the deeper learning more accessible and less daunting.
Know Your Learning Style
Matching the style of your materials to your learning style is crucial for the success of your self-study. A dictionary can have all the information you need, but flashcards or a set of videos may be more helpful for actually learning the vocabulary. Taking the information from a given source and restructuring it into a more usable form will not only make it easier to learn, you’ll also learn something about the material in the process. Try making lists, collections of practice problems, and organizing content in different ways based on similarities. Collect all the parts of CSS related to positioning or find all the different ways to use a single JavaScript function.
The Power of Example
When it comes to learning, people are more likely to remember something if it is multisensory, creatively interpreted into multiple forms, or based on human interaction. People are also more likely to remember something if they have been able to express it. Learning by example allows you to get your hands into the information you are learning and try it out for yourself. Start with the most basic scenarios and work your way up to more complex situations. Try writing a piece of code that animates some text or write a simple mathematical proof by disproof. Make a creative illustration of your learning and show visually how the different parts relate to each other. Using simple variation such as multiple colors and labeling diagrams will also have a positive impact on your memory of the material.
Use Your Sources to Organize Your Learning
Use your sources as the structure to plan your learning. Book chapters, websites etc. should be organized in a manner that allows you to comfortably traverse the material with the appropriate prerequisite knowledge before moving on to the next topic. This will help you avoid a lot of frustration and requires you to get some initial familiarity with the broad strokes of the material as a whole, easing you into the topic. This can be as creative as you like. Always feel free to skip around and break your own rules, but having the initial structure to push against is invaluable. Knowing that you need to know basic CSS before you tackle an animations book will get you a long way.
Motivation (and how to keep it)
Once the initial inspiration wears off, progress will seem much more arduous. To combat this, keep track of your progress by writing a journal or logbook and celebrate your successes by taking the time to pat yourself on the back. Finding ways to reward yourself for even small progress is incredibly important for motivation; everyone needs to take a step back and look at the big picture once and a while.
Another strategy is to divide and conquer. Break down goals into smaller pieces to make them more attainable. This will also change your perspective of the work needed to accomplish a single task making it seem more attainable.
As you progress in your self-education, several things will start to happen. You’ll become familiar with your own learning style and you will fall into a natural rhythm. You will become an independent thinker and start to question what people tell you. You’ll become more discerning of what information you expose yourself to. You will also become adaptive to reading, learning and expressing yourself in multiple settings. Teaching yourself will offer you more than what you originally intended to learn. For the journey, you will be all the richer.
