There’s much ado about “lifelong learning” as a requirement for our fast-changing times, but not much about how you can enrich your life and, perhaps, your career by teaching yourself.

There’s a fancy word for that. It’s “autodidact.” Become one and you join a distinguished club made up of people who’ve taught themselves important things. Members include Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, Michael Faraday and many others.

If your perception of “education” is based on the years you spent in school, you’ll find that teaching yourself is a very different experience, indeed. When you teach yourself, you follow your own interests, down any path that they may lead. The result is that you’re spending most of your time learning about things that interest you, not things that someone else crammed into a curriculum.

There are practical advantages, too. Having what David Ogilvy called a “well-furnished mind” gives you the stuff of creativity. Most good ideas come when you connect an idea from one area of your life to a totally different area.

Your brain does that naturally. And the more you learn, the more things there are to connect. It’s a powerful tool in the Knowledge Economy.

Start your adventure at “The Autodidact Course Catalog.” This article from Johns Hopkins magazine lists resources for a variety of subject areas. There’s cognition, cosmology, computer security, constitutional law, children’s education and a host of things that don’t begin with “C.” There’s business and nature and design and more.

Dumb Little Man has an excellent post on “10 Ways to Become a Self Taught Master” that will help you get started. There are dozens of other great resources on the web to help you expand your learning. Here are three of my favorites.

Wikipedia is a great place to start learning about any topic. Terms are defined and there are links to related resources.

MIT has put all of their courseware online. It’s free, but you really should make a donation to support it.

ipl2 is the result of a merger of the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians’ Internet Index (LII). I loved both of those and the combined version is even better. It’s an “annotated collection of high quality Internet resources, selected by IPL staff for their usefulness in providing accurate, factual information on a particular topic or topics.”

So pick a topic that interests you. Find a place to start. Then, student, teach thyself!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 10:50 am and is filed under Tools and Strategies for Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.