Live and learn. Part 5. Self-education: pull yourself together

Are you weak in your 25-30-35-40-45 to sit down for training? Not a corporate, unpaid “office pays” tariff, not a forced and once under-received higher, but independent? To sit at your table with the books and textbooks you have chosen, in the face of a strict self and to master what you need or so wanted to master, that now there is simply no strength to live without this knowledge? This is perhaps one of the most complex intellectual processes of adult life: brains creak, time is short, everything distracts, and the motivation is not always unambiguous. Self-education is an important element in the life of absolutely any professional, but it is associated with certain difficulties. Let's figure out how best to organize this process so as not to drive ourselves and get the result.







This is the last part of the cycle “Live and Learn”:



Part 1. School and career guidance

Part 2. University

Part 3. Further education

Part 4. Education inside work

Part 5. Self-education



Share your experience in the comments - maybe, thanks to the efforts of the RUVDS team and Habr’s readers, the training will turn out to be a little more conscious, correct and fruitful.



What is self-education?



Self-education is self-motivated learning, during which you are focused on obtaining the knowledge that you think is most needed for you at the moment. The motivation can be completely different: career growth, new promising work, a desire to learn something interesting specifically for you, a desire to move into a new sphere, etc.



Self-education is possible at any stage of life: a schoolboy fanatically studies geography and buys all books and maps, a student plunges into the study of microcontroller programming and fills the apartment with incredible DIY pieces, an adult tries to “get into IT”, or finally get out of it and become cool designer, animator, photographer and so on. Fortunately, our world is quite open and self-education without a piece of paper can bring not only pleasure, but also income.



For the purposes of this article, we will consider the self-education of an adult working person - it’s very cool: busy with work, family, friends and other attributes of adult life, people take the time and begin to study JavaScript, Python, neuro-linguistics, photography or probability theory. Why, how, what will it give? But isn’t it time for you to sit down at books (Internet, etc.)?



Black hole



Self-education, starting as a hobby, easily grows into a black hole and absorbs time, effort, money, takes thoughts, distracts from work - because it is a motivated hobby. To avoid this situation, it is important to come to terms with yourself and your educational impulse even before you start practicing with yourself.





The benefits of self-education



You can try new non-standard teaching methods : combine them, test, choose the most comfortable for yourself (reading, video lectures, notes, teaching hours or intervals, etc.). In addition, you can easily change the training program if the technology has changed (for example, ruthlessly quit C # and transfer to Swift). You will always be relevant within the learning process.



Depth of training - since there are no restrictions on the time of classroom work and the knowledge of the teacher, you can study the material from all sides, focusing on those points that you need. But be careful - you can burrow in the information and thereby slow down the whole process (or even quit).







Self-education is inexpensive or even free. You pay for books (the most expensive part), for courses and lectures, for access to certain resources, etc. In principle, training can be done completely free - on the Internet you can find high-quality free materials, but without books the process will lose in quality.



You can work with information at your own pace - record, draw diagrams and graphs, return to already mastered material to deepen it, clarify obscure points and close gaps.



Self - discipline skills develop - you learn to organize your working and free time, negotiate with colleagues and family. Oddly enough, after a month of tough time management, a moment comes when you realize that there is more time.



Cons of self-education



In Russian realities, the most important minus is the attitude of employers who require confirmation of your qualifications : real projects or education documents. This does not mean that the management of the company is bad and disloyal - it means that it has already encountered such "educators" who have run away from trainings about how to earn a million in a day. Therefore, it is worth getting real reviews on projects (if you are a designer, advertiser, copywriter, etc.) or a good pet project on GitHub, which will clearly demonstrate your development skills. But the best thing is to go to courses or a university and get a certificate / diploma based on the results of the self-educational process - alas, while he has more faith than our knowledge.



Limited areas for self-education. There are many, very many, but there are groups of specialties that cannot be mastered independently for work, and not "for oneself" and one's interest. These include all branches of medicine, motor transport and the transport sector in general, strangely enough - sales, many working specialties, engineering, etc. That is, you can master all the textbooks, standards, manuals, etc., but at the moment when you need to be ready for practical actions, you will be a helpless amateur.



For example, you can know all the anatomy, pharmacology, master all treatment protocols, understand diagnostic methods, learn to recognize diseases, read tests and even choose a treatment plan for common pathologies, but as soon as you, God forbid, encounter a stroke in a person with ascites, with pulmonary embolism - all that’s the only thing you will be able to do is to dial 03 with wet hands and drive away the onlooker. You will even understand what happened, but you cannot help. Unless, of course, you are a sane person.



Little motivation. Yes, self-education at first is the most motivated type of training, but in the future, your motivation will continue to depend only on you and your desire, and not on the alarm clock. This means that the factor of your motivation will be household chores, entertainment, processing, mood, etc. Breaks begin quite quickly, missed days and weeks, you may have to start learning again a couple of times. In order not to deviate from the planned plan, iron will and self-discipline are needed.



It’s hard to concentrate. In general, the degree of concentration strongly depends on the place where you are going to practice. If you live with your family and they are not used to respecting your space and time, consider that you are not lucky - the conscience that will help parents and play with children will quickly eat your impulses to learn. For someone, my option is more suitable - to study at the office after work, but this requires the absence of chatty employees and the permission of the management (however, I have never had to face a misunderstanding of 4 times).



Be sure to organize your workplace and time - the situation should be academic, business, because in fact these are the same activities, but with a high level of self-confidence. Wouldn’t it have occurred to you to suddenly open YouTube on the second highest or watch the next part of a good series?



There is no tutor, mentor, nobody corrects your mistakes, does not show how easier it is to master the material. You may misunderstand some part of the material, and these erroneous judgments will be pulled further in order to give rise to a lot of problems in further training. There are not so many exits: the first is to double-check all doubtful places in different sources until they are fully understood; the second is to find a mentor among friends or at work in order to be able to ask him questions. By the way, your study is not their headache, so clearly and concisely formulate questions in advance in order to get the correct answer and not kill someone else’s time. And of course, in our time there is another option: ask questions on the Toaster, Quora, Stack Overflow, etc. This is a very good practice that will allow you not only to find the truth, but also to evaluate different approaches to it.



Self-education does not end - you will be pursued by a sense of incompleteness, lack of information. On the one hand, it will stimulate you to study the issue even deeper and become a pumped specialist, on the other hand, it can slow down development due to doubts about your own competence.



The advice is simple: as soon as you understand the basics, look for ways to apply knowledge in practice (internships, your projects, company assistance, etc. - there are enough options). Thus, you will be able to evaluate the practical value of everything that you study, you will understand what is demanded by the market or a real project, and what is only a beautiful theory.







Self-education has an important social nuance : you study outside the social environment and interaction with others is minimized, achievements are not evaluated, there is no criticism and no rewards, no competition. And if in mathematics and development this is for the best, then in the study of languages ​​“silence” and isolation are bad allies. In addition, studying alone with yourself puts off the timeline and reduces the chances of getting started in the area that you are studying.



Sources for self-education



In general, self-education can take any form - you can cram the material in the evenings, you can interact with it as soon as possible in every free minute, you can go to courses or get a second higher education and continuously deepen your knowledge there independently. But there is a set without which self-education is simply impossible - no matter what online schools, skype teachers and coaches say.



Books. It doesn’t matter if you study the psychology, anatomy, programming or agrotechnology of tomatoes, nothing will replace your book. You will need three types of books to study any field:



  1. The classic basic textbook is boring and tedious, but with a good information structure, a well-thought-out curriculum, correct definitions, wordings and correct emphasis on basic things and some subtleties. (Although there are also boring textbooks - for example, Schildt's excellent C / C ++ guides).
  2. Harkor professional publications (such as Straustrup or Tanenbaum) are deep books that you need to read with a pencil, pen, notebook and a pack of stickers. Those publications that you need to understand and from which you will receive deep theoretical knowledge and the basics of practice.
  3. Scientific books on the topic (such as "Python for Dummies", "How the brain works", etc.) are books that are interesting to read, that are well remembered and that explain the operation of the most complex systems and categories on the fingers. Be careful: in our time of the general informational gypsy, you can run into charlatans in any field, so read carefully about the author - it’s better if this is a scientist of some university, practitioner and preferably a foreign author, for an unknown reason they write very cool, even in very good translations).


It is important to understand that there are areas where foreign authors are for the most part completely useless, for example, law and accounting. But in such areas (as, incidentally, in others), one should not forget that any industry operates in the legal field and it would be nice to study the basic regulatory acts . For example, if you decide to become a trader, it is not enough for you to install QUIK and take an online BCS course, it is important to study the legislation related to the circulation of securities, the website of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, tax and civil codes. There you will find accurate and comprehensive answers to your questions. If you are at a loss in interpretation, look for comments in periodicals and legal systems.



Notebook, pen. Write notes, even if you hate them and the computer is your friend. Firstly, you’d better remember the material, and secondly, it’s much easier and faster to turn to material in your own way than to look for something in a book or video. Try not just to roll the text as it is, but structure the information: draw diagrams, develop icons for lists, a system for marking sections, and so on.



Pencil, stickers. Make notes on the margins of books and stick stickers on the desired pages, attributing a description of why this page should be accessed. Great for easy reuse and better memorization.









English language. You may not speak it, but reading is highly desirable, especially if you are self-taught in the IT field. Now I really want to be a patriot, but many books are written much better than Russian ones - in the IT field, in stock and brokerage, in economics and management, and even in medicine, biology and psychology. If the language is completely trouble, look for a good translation - as a rule, these are books of large publishers. Originals can be purchased electronically and in print on Amazon.



Lectures on the Internet - there are a lot of them on university sites, on YouTube, in specialized groups on social networks, etc. Choose, listen, take notes, advise others - it is very difficult to choose an adequate course!



If it comes to programming, then your faithful helpers are Habr, Medium, Toaster, Stack Overflow, GitHub , as well as various projects for teaching writing code like Codecademy, freeCodeCamp, Udemy and so on.



Periodicals - try to find and read specialized magazines on the net to know how your industry lives, what people are its leaders (as a rule, they write articles).



For the most stubborn stubborn there is another superpower - free attendance at university classes . You agree with the faculty you need and sit quietly listening to lectures that you need or are interested in. To be honest, the first time is scary to approach, rehearse your motivation at home, but they rarely refuse. But it requires a lot of free time.



General scheme of self-education



Our cycle has repeatedly said that the articles are quite subjective and the author does not claim to be the ultimate truth. Therefore, I will share my working proven scheme of working on new information for the purpose of self-education.



Draw up a curriculum - use the basic textbook (s) to draw up a plan and an approximate schedule of the subjects you need. The fact is that sometimes it is not possible to manage with one discipline, you have to combine 2 or 3, in parallel you understand more their connectivity and the logic of interaction.







Select training materials and write them in the plan: books, sites, videos, periodicals.







Stopping training for about a week is a very important period for which the information received during the preparation of the plan fits into your head, in the course of passive thinking new ideas and needs arise for learning purposes, thus, a cognitive and motivational basis appears.







Start self-study on a convenient schedule - to engage in a set time and try not to miss the "self-study". The habit, as they correctly write in the literature, is formed in 21 days. However, if you have a real workload, a cold, problems, postpone your studies for several days - in a stressful situation, the material is absorbed worse, and the background of nervousness and irritation can be fixed as an association to the learning process.







Combine materials - do not work with books, videos and other means sequentially, work in parallel, fix one with the other, find intersections and common logic. This will make it easier to remember, reduce time to master and quickly show where exactly you have gaps and the most advanced successes.







To take notes - it is imperative to compile notes and leaf through them at the end of work on each part of the material.







Repeat the past - scroll in the head, compare and link with new material, try it in practice, if there is one (write code, write text, etc.).







To practice







Repeat :-)



Speaking of practice. This is a very sensitive issue for those who undertook self-education not for fun, but for work. You should understand that, when you get self-education in a new field that is not related to your work, but connected with your dream or desire to change your job, you do not become who you read this article, but an ordinary junior, almost an intern. And if you really want to change jobs, then remember that you will lose in money and actually start from the beginning - for this you must have a resource. But once you have decided firmly - look for work on a new profile as early as possible in order to learn and practice. And you know what? You will be gladly taken and not even at the lowest wage, because you already have commercial experience and those same soft skills. However, do not forget - this is a risk.



In general, self-education should be constant - in large blocks or micro-courses, because only in this way can you become a profound professional, and not just office plankton. Information goes forward, keep up.



What is your experience of self-education, what advice can you give to Khabrovites?



PS: And we are completing our series of education-related posts, “Live a Century - Learn a Century” and will soon start a new one. Next Friday, you'll already know which one.








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