Power Through Self Directed Learning

Blake Bole’s Guide to Self Directed Learning

Another Great Book: The Teenage Liberation Handbook (How to Quit School and Get a Real Life Education) by Grace Llewelyn

Transcription of Video

Hey, guys. This video is called, How to Learn Faster, Smarter, & Better Than School, or How to be Well Rounded as Fuck. Now education has been monopolized by schools just like the mob. Say hey, you don’t want to go to school? You don’t want to get a standardized education? We’re gonna break your thumbs. You gotta get that degree. You gotta get those good grades. That’s my terrible accent. Now generally I don’t like school, but I love learning like Cookie Monster loves cookies. I’m really kind of nuts about it. That’s why I put my time and energy into these courses, these trainings.

There’s a big distinction. I want you to be able to separate learning from school. Skip college doesn’t mean you stop learning. I want you to learn faster, smarter, better than school. In fact, you’re gonna learn more.

The thrill of learning. Learning should be exciting rewarding, stimulating, fun. I mean think about a relationship, or when you fall in love with somebody. Isn’t it so amazing when you’re learning about the other person? Learning is the essence of a good life in my opinion.

Autodidactic. Technically the definition is a self taught person. And I say it’s not just self taught, but it means someone who can guide themselves to teacher and topics that they want to learn.

Self taught is kind of bullshit because culturally you’re taught these extremes. Either you’re told your a genius prodigy who learned piano or coding with my guidance like Mozart, or Beethoven, or Mark Zuckerberg, or if you’re not a genius then you’re just a normal shmo who needs 16 years of school to learn anything, and how dare you think that you don’t need school. This is a myth that only rare, talented, special genius individuals can learn on their own i.e., without school or formal institutional education like a unicorn.

The reality is everyone has the capacity to be autodidact. The course I teach is self paced. Students don’t have a teacher hovering over them. It’s all done online. And students take what I teach and they run with it. And they become self aware and self educating, and self directed, and it’s amazing. You know yourself, you might have taught yourself music, or Photoshop, or video, or skateboarding. When people say oh, I taught myself this. Usually it doesn’t mean that sat in a room and channeled the information and figured it out without any guidance. Usually it means you watched a video. You found someone who knows how to do it. You read a book. You became engaged in the learning process.

So, the key missing ingredient in learning and why school sucks is the missing ingredient is fun. When you actually enjoy, or have an interest in a topic you’ll learn it much faster, rather than being crammed into a classroom memorizing bullshit.

And the great thing is that as an adult you get to choose what to learn. It is absolutely incredible, guys. So, if you’re 18, as I said, you don’t care what your parents tell you. If you’re 18 you’re an adult. You can choose what you want to learn. If you’re 13 or 10 you can still think this way because you’re gonna be 18. The clock does not stop ticking. You are gonna be 18. Now, you spent decades being mentally domesticated sitting in the classroom. Now class, take out your books. Read from paragraph one. Now it’s time for you to take responsibility for your own learning and growth. You’ve had no control over what you learn, so how can you determine the direction of your life if you aren’t even choosing what you’re learning? You couldn’t and now you can. You can, and that’s where you have power.

Now when I say how to learn better than school it’s a little misleading because it makes it sound like school is a good place to learn. In fact, just by learning outside of school you’re gonna learn faster. Everyone I know in my entire life who’s picked up a topic outside of school has learned it better than they ever did in school.

School is the only American product that is widely considered by everyone to be a failure. It’s just universal. We say, oh the schools are failing. They’re terrible, but you gotta go to school. It doesn’t make any sense. So, here’s what you do, guys. It’s really simple. Read books. Watch documentaries, videos, listen to audio books, take online courses, meet mentors. You are the teacher. You are the one determining the curriculum. I didn’t figure this out until I was about 22, and I just was like, whoa. I can just go to a bookstore and put together a bunch of books that I want to read instead of what they’re telling to read in school. So, when you’re not worrying about grades, or admissions, or essays, or the extra curriculars, or all the other bullshit then you can just focus on what you want to learn life becomes a lot more fun.

There’s a great book I recommend by Blake Boles who’s a contemporary of mine, called The Art of Self Directed Learning. How to Light Your Mind on Fire. Learning How to Learn. Information vs. Knowledge. Time Wealth. This is a very stimulating out of the box book. I really highly recommend it. It’ll give you a little more direction on how to be a self directed learner because you will find it will come naturally once you get into it. But, you spend so many years being a sheep in school it takes a little practice to be the person to be responsible for your own learning, and it’s very, very exciting.

Now being well rounded, while I do focus on money in this course I recommend you learn about other things as well. And I think well rounded the concept, oh you’re gonna go to college to become well rounded. Being well rounded it just never happens in college. You don’t get well rounded from paying $40,000 to sit in the classroom. You want to learn about things like history, or science, or art, or music, or just something that interests you. I think Netflix documentaries teach more than school. Go to the Civil War documentary by Ken Burns, The War, which is about World War II, The Dust Bowl. There’s docs on Medieval history, nature documentaries. They’re more entertaining and you’re more likely to remember things.

Critical thinking and context. I watch historical docs to see how things change in the world. So, I just think anything you’re learning think of it in the context of the world, or being a human being. Art and music may not have practical application, but it expands your spirit, and it has virtues that are beyond just dollars and sense. Learning about history I think gives you a historical context and makes you a smarter person.

The Dust Bowl was an example of a great documentary about what happened in the 30s. The farmers over farmed the land and it led to this insane dust cloud, which is very relevant today because we’re obviously having issues with the climate. The Dust Bowl was fucking insane. It was almost like a Hollywood movie. These dust clouds would come and just consume these small towns, and this actually happened. Now 70 years later, 80 years later we’ve forgotten about it. I think historical documentaries are great because it not only gives you an awareness of what happened in the past, it helps you appreciate where we are now, and gives you a sense of what might happen in the future.

But whatever you learn, do an experiment. Find a school related topic that you’re actually interested in and study it on your own. That’s it. There’s a 95% chance it’s gonna be more fun and interesting because I love history and science now. I hated it in high school. I hated history class so much. You come in there. You’re learning about the American Revolution, or whatever. You’re memorizing this statistic that fast. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t engaging. Now I watch documentaries on history, on science. I think it’s fascinating. So, forget about classes in general. What I say is a douche bag who major in English is still a douche bag. College and classrooms are not gonna change fundamentally who you are, but travel will.

If you go to other places, other countries, meet people from different backgrounds, it’s stimulating and more educational than classes. I would say expand your mind by experiencing the world through someone’s eyes and world view. You don’t even have to work at it. If you just go to another country and actually engage with people in another culture you will learn something. You will grow. It will affect you. It will affect you. You will look back on that time in your life and go, wow that really affected me. And it’s a beautiful thing. I gotta wait for this thing to beep.

That is the biggest missing, especially in American education and culture. In every other developed country, in Europe, and Australia the young people travel after high school. They get out there into the world, and they actually experience something outside of the stupid classroom. That’s the thing that pisses me off the most about college. People say college expands your mind. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. You spent your whole life inside of a classroom. How can you be a fully fledged human being if you’re not out there in the world?

So, I think school does this, infantilize, to treat someone as a child, or deny your maturity. Grades, recess, approval. You have to do this. You have to do that. You have to be a good student. Maturity equals power. So, look up words. Learn stuff. Handle it yourself. I’ll provide the guidance, and you run with it.

Responsibility also equals power. So, in all of my courses I relate to you as an advanced person. I don’t care if you’re 10 years old. I think of you as a capable, smart, resourceful person. You can learn and figure things out yourself with some guidance. That’s who you are. You’re not some helpless student who needs help getting an A in math, or something like that. You have what it takes. You have power.

So, that’s this video. And I want you to come into the rest of the course with that context. The next video, the next section is called, How to Actually Fucking Make Money. And I’m gonna teach you on how to fucking make money. It’s gonna be I think wildly exciting for you, but you need to come to it from this context as a responsible person who’s capable of learning, and exploring, and figuring stuff out yourself. So, I hope you enjoyed this video, and I will see you in the next one.