Self-taught skills are a massive part of my professional and personal repertoire today. Over the course of my life I’ve taught myself everything from programming and PCB design to photography, cooking, and more. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve noticed that many people seem to believe they can only learn in a classroom or with the help of a mentor.
Frankly, in the age of the internet, where any information you could ever wish for is available with just a well-worded query or two, this seems insane to me. To be clear, this isn’t going to be some long-winded anti-college rant (although I could very easily go on one). But a lack of ability to teach oneself is something I’ve seen so many people suffer from, and I’d like to share some of the strategies that’ve worked for me in self-teaching.
Before you can teach yourself anything, you obviously need to know what you want to learn. Sometimes this part is fairly simple- you have some need (changing your car’s oil, for example) and decide you’ll fill it yourself rather than going to a professional. This will obviously require you to learn that specific skill or process.
Other times, though, you might only have a more nebulous idea of what you’re looking to gain through this process. In those cases, it’s important to break your goals down into their elementary parts. Want to be qualified for electrical engineering jobs? Ok, let’s start with what tasks you might be expected to complete on a daily basis, then figure out what knowledge you’ll need to complete them. This basic process can be applied to pretty much any skill, qualification, or goal you’d like to achieve, and the more atomic concepts it produces will be much easier to attack later on.
Now that you’ve got a good understanding of your goals, it’s time to actually get to the learning bit. There are many approaches to this, just as there are many different kinds of learners in the world. In my experience, though, the single best way to learn and retain skills is through their application. The reasoning for this is two-fold. Firstly, retention of knowledge is hugely improved by hands-on tasks and application of that knowledge to real-world scenarios. This is why schools give homework, it’s why apprenticeships are the most common way to learn many skills, and it’s proven reliable through centuries of use and across various studies. Secondly, learning by doing will inherently give you practice with the knowledge you need and skip over the knowledge you don’t. Many university curriculums add tons of padding to fill 4 years of your time, but realistically a lot of the history and theory/derivations can be skipped if you’re only interested in applying your skills to real life.
Since we’re focusing on applications, we’ll need a task to complete that applies the skills we want to learn. For me, this usually comes in the form of a project in the area I’m interested in. When I wanted to learn embedded systems development and PCB design, for example, I built a guidance computer for rockets. When I wanted to learn about networking, I spun up a server on a disused desktop and ran as many utilities as I could think of on it. I’ve found few strategies more effective than just diving right into the thing I’d like to learn to do, and we’ll be diving further into that here.
The key to getting the most out of this learning strategy is picking the right project. You want something that you can work on in increments, starting from a stage you feel relatively comfortable with and building up to the more difficult/troublesome areas. For example, with my first avionics systems, I started by testing individual components with an Arduino and a breadboard, and eventually worked up to building a full custom PCB with firmware, etc.
This strategy allows you to get some smaller wins early on, and these will then drive you on to push through the harder stuff when you get there. Also, it builds up the difficulty incrementally, so you only have to learn smaller bits at once. Again, we’re using the same strategy as we did when understanding our goals- breaking down the bigger, harder tasks into smaller pieces that are easier to attack individually.
Great, you’ve chosen a project. Now comes the more interesting part! At this point, you just need to do the damn thing. “But wait,” you may say, “I don’t know how to do the thing- that’s why I’m here!” You’d be correct in this observation (obviously) but that’s the entire point. Try to do it anyway, even though you don’t know how. You’ll probably butt up against something you can’t do almost immediately, but now that we’ve broken our project into smaller pieces, you’ll have an immediate and specific idea of what knowledge you’re missing.
By breaking down our goal into its component parts, we expose the knowledge we already have and the knowledge we’re missing in greater detail. From there, it’s fairly trivial to search through the internet, reference textbooks, libraries, and other resources to fill those knowledge gaps. As you move through your project, you’ll eventually find yourself looking at a new task and noticing that you know how to do almost all of it. This is a huge confidence builder, and motivates you to continue on through the task at hand. In the end, you’ll be completely confident in your skills and have a solid foundation to build into more complex projects.
Great news- this cycle will continue for the rest of your life! You will never stop learning, ever, and that’s actually an amazingly good thing. Most people I’ve met who make it to old age have a hard time staying motivated, largely because they feel they have little more to explore in life. This is just false- again, we have the entire internet at our disposal! It’s the largest ever collection of human knowledge and skills, so please, use it to your advantage and boost your skills, resume, and confidence by teaching yourself instead of relying on others to do it. You’ll likely find yourself happier and more fulfilled, and other people with the same mentality (who are usually pretty cool, if I may say so) will be consistently drawn to you.