How to Become Self-Taught the Easy Way (The How-to Guide)

Most of the skills I use to make a living are skills I’ve learned by becoming self-taught: Web design, desktop publishing, marketing, personal productivity skills, even teaching! And most of what I know about science, politics, computers, art, guitar-playing, world history, writing, and a dozen other topics, I’ve picked up outside of any formal education.

This is simple to point out that if you stop to think about it, much of what you know how to do you’ve picked up on your own. However, we rarely think about the process of becoming self-taught. This is too bad, because often, we shy away from things we don’t know how to do without stopping to think about how we might learn it by teaching ourselves.

The Keys to Learning Anything Easily
How to Become Self-Taught Effectively
Final Thoughts
More Self-Learning Tips

The Keys to Learning Anything Easily

Learning continues and comes easily to people who have developed:

Curiosity

Being curious means you look forward to learning new things and are troubled by gaps in your understanding of the world. New words and ideas are received as challenges, and the work of understanding them is embraced.

People who lack curiosity see learning new things as a chore—or worse, as beyond their capacities—and will likely shy away from becoming self-taught.

Patience

Depending on the complexity of a topic, learning something new can take a long time, and it’s bound to be frustrating as you grapple with new terms, new models, and apparently irrelevant information.

When you are learning something by yourself, there is nobody to control the flow of information, to make sure you move from basic knowledge to intermediate and advanced concepts.

Patience with your topic and with yourself is crucial—there’s no field of knowledge that someone in the world hasn’t managed to learn by starting from exactly where you are.

A Feeling for How Things Are Connected

This is the hardest talent to cultivate, and is where most people flounder when approaching a new topic.

A new body of knowledge is always easiest to learn if you can figure out the way it connects to what you already know. For years, I struggled with calculus in college until one day, my chemistry professor demonstrated how to do half-life calculations using integrals. From then on, calculus came much easier, because I had made a connection between a concept I understood well (the chemistry of half-life’s) and a field I had always struggled in (higher math).

The more you look for and pay attention to the connections between different fields, the more readily your mind will be able to latch onto new concepts.

How to Become Self-Taught Effectively

With a learning attitude in place, working your way into a new topic is simply a matter of research, practice, networking, and scheduling:

1. Research

Of course, the most important step in learning something new is actually finding out stuff about it. I tend to go through three distinct phases when I’m teaching myself a new topic:

Learning the Basics

Start as all things start today: Google it! Somehow people managed to learn before Google (I learned HTML when Altavista was the best we got!), but nowadays a well-formed search on Google or other online resources will get you a wealth of information on any topic in seconds.

What I look for is basic information and then the work of experts—blogs by researchers in a field, forums about a topic, organizational websites, magazines. I subscribe to many RSS feeds to keep up with new material as it’s posted, I print out articles to read in-depth later, and I look for the names of top authors or top books in the field.

Hitting the Books

Once I have a good outline of a field of knowledge, I hit the library to continue my path to becoming self-taught in an area. I look up the key names and titles I came across online, and then scan the shelves around those titles for other books that look interesting.

Then, I go to the children’s section of the library and look up the same call numbers—a good overview for teens is probably going to be clearer, more concise, and more geared towards learning than many adult books.

Long-Term Reference

While I’m reading my stack of books from the library, I start keeping my eyes out for books I will want to give a permanent place on my shelves. I check online and brick-and-mortar bookstores, but I also search thrift stores, used bookstores, library book sales, garage sales, wherever I happen to find myself in the presence of books.

My goal is a collection of reference manuals and top books that I will come back to, either to answer thorny questions or to refresh my knowledge as I put new skills into practice—and to do this cheaply and quickly.

2. Practice

Putting new knowledges into practice helps us develop better understanding now and remember more later. Although a lot of books offer exercises and self-tests, I prefer to jump right in and build something: a website, an essay, a desk, whatever.

A great way to put any new body of knowledge into action is to start a blog on it—put it out there for the world to see and comment on.

Just don’t lock your learning up in your head where nobody ever sees how much you know about something, and you never see how much you still don’t know.

Check out this guide for useful techniques to help you practice efficiently: The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice

3. Network

One of the most powerful sources of knowledge and understanding in my life have been the social networks I have become embedded in over the years—the websites I write on, the online communities I belong to, the people I talk with and present alongside at conferences, my colleagues in the department where I studied, etc. They have all helped me on my journey to become self-taught.

These networks^[1] are crucial to extending my knowledge in areas I am already involved in, and for referring me to contacts in areas where I have no prior experience. Joining an email list, emailing someone working in the field, and asking colleagues for recommendations, all are useful ways of getting a foothold in a new field.

Networking also allows you to test your newly-acquired knowledge against others’ understandings, giving you a chance to grow and further develop.

Here find out How to Network So You’ll Get Way Ahead in Your Professional Life.

4. Schedule

For anything more complex than a simple overview, it pays to schedule time to commit to the learning process. Having the books on the shelf, the top websites bookmarked, and a string of contacts does no good if you don’t give yourself time to focus on reading, digesting, and implementing your knowledge to join the ranks of self-taught people.

Give yourself a deadline, even if there is no externally imposed time limit, and work out a schedule to reach that deadline.

Final Thoughts

In a sense, even formal training and education is a form of self-teaching—in the end, a teacher can only suggest and encourage a path to learning, at best cutting out some of the work of finding reliable sources to learn from. Ultimately, you must learn how to teach yourself.

If you’re already working, or have a range of interests beside the purely academic, formal instruction may be too inconvenient or too expensive to undertake. That doesn’t mean you have to set aside the possibility of learning, though; history is full of self-taught successes.

At its best, even a formal education is meant to prepare you for a life of self-guided learning; with the power of the Internet and the mass media at our disposal, there’s really no reason not to follow your muse, wherever it may lead.