I once stood at a crossroads: pursue a neuroscience degree at UC Berkeley or stay home with my young children. Torn between academic aspirations and motherly duties, I chose an unconventional path - becoming my own professor.
Autodidact. It's a fancy way of saying self-taught, and it's a topic buzzing in our #pifo Maker's Guild this week. As someone who's failed often but succeeded enough to know its worth, I have some insights to share.
Learning, I've found, comes in two flavors: structured and serendipitous. Structured learning - the kind we get in schools and colleges - makes up about 20% of our lives. It's neatly packaged with curriculums, professors, and grades. But serendipitous learning? That's the other 80%. It's what happens on the job, in side projects, or when curiosity strikes. Yet we rarely give it the same weight.
What if we flipped the script? What if we treated serendipitous learning with the same seriousness as formal education? Imagine being your own Learning & Development department. You'd learn for curiosity's sake, skip the boring parts, choose inspiring projects and mentors, and craft your own curriculum. No fancy degrees perhaps, but the knowledge? That's all yours.
This is exactly what I did when Berkeley wasn't an option. I took their curriculum and made it my own. In just 18 months, balancing startup life and motherhood, I gained more neuroscience knowledge than I'd ever imagined. This success propelled me into behavioral science, astrology, metabolism, even cocktail making! Suddenly, I felt like a superhero with the power to learn anything.
Of course, my journey wasn't without missteps. Those early mistakes cost time and energy. But over six years, I've honed a system for effective autodidactic learning.
Tomorrow, I'll share the components of this system. For now, remember this: you have the power to revolutionize your learning and become unstoppable. The world is your classroom - are you ready to enroll?
