Mark Twain allegedly said, âI have never let my schooling interfere with my education.â Secular homeschoolers love this quote. We wear it on tie-dye t-shirts, print it on mugs, and I donât think any of us exist who didnât love saying it to schoolers and basking in their baffled stares (homeschoolers get a lot of baffled stares so we learn early on to enjoy them).Â
I went to school for kindergarten, third grade, and freshman year of college so Iâm not 100% but I still know a thing or two about teaching yourself, which means never waiting around for the stars to align (a class to be offered, a mentor to take an interest, a goal to be obvious) before pursuing something that interests you. Thatâs what Mark Twain was saying - to take action, take responsibility, and teach yourself.
Some time-tested techniques:
Do your research.
Look at the people who are already doing what youâre interested in doing. Thanks to the internet, itâs easy to find someone blogging about their process in almost any field you could possibly be interested in. Youâll probably find out how these people got into the field in the first place, what they did in their early career, and what about their work is important to them now.
If you CANâT find someone who is doing what you want to do, you should ask yourself a couple of questions: are you sure that what you want to do is an actual thing, or are you inventing it? Is it a thing only extremely shy hermits do? Do people maybe call it something else? Itâs also possible that the thing you want to do is something that people fall into, or do for a while and leave. Thatâs hard-mode. Be prepared for a tough time.
The beauty of the research stage is that so much information is available for you to consume without them ever knowing you exist. It lets you get to the next stage, which is:
Try it out.
Youâve probably got questions based on the research youâve done, but youâve also got enough information to try things out, to start practicing. Speaking from experience, a good 60%-80% of the questions you have at this stage are things that you can answer yourself by playing around and trying things out. Youâll start to put together a list of questions that youâre not able to answer yourself.Â
Itâs tempting at this stage to skip to the next step early, but realize that itâs only for emotional reasons: you want someone to tell you youâre going about it the right way, that youâre on the right track. The thing is, though, that if you put in the work youâll be able to tell when youâre stuck and youâll get way more out of solving your own problems than was
Find someone whoâs doing it, and ask them the questions you canât answer.
Imagine youâve only got three questions with this person. You donât want to ask them a question where their answer is, âjust do it.â Thatâs what the previous step is for â when you start out, you donât know which of your questions you can answer yourself, but someone more experienced definitely does. Answering âJust do itâ is totally unrewarding for the more experienced person, because you so obviously would have known the answer if youâd tried, and nobody feels like their help is actually helping if the person isnât trying.
A real question is a delight to answer⊠but most likely the overall answer to your questions is going to be: âwork really hard."Â
Work really hard.
Thereâs no way around it. People say it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, and from my experience thatâs true. Look for smarter ways to work, but be wary of secret shortcuts and cheats â those are crutches. Crutches in real life are for when youâre injured; crutches in your process are for when youâre on a completely insane deadline, not for everyday use.Â
Make friends at your level.
Itâs tempting to get close to your heroes, but the people who can really help you, and who will be excited to hear what you figure out and share what they figure out, is the people who are at the same stage as you are. Yeah, youâll be competing with each other, but youâll also be there as support when something goes wrong. Go through it with a group, before you know it newbies will be asking YOU questions.
Never stop learning. You DONâT need a class to start. You can buy a set of watercolors and play around, or challenge yourself with math problems and google what steps to take to solve them, or just get out there and fail miserably at whatever it is.
Youâll never be worse at X than you are right now. How empowering is that?Â
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