Today, I’d like to introduce you to Meg who will be sharing some great tips on how to live a simpler and more authentic life.

You see, most of us are driven to follow the consumerist trends and lifestyles that govern modern society. We’re tempted to buy the newest gadgets (yup, I have an iPhone and a MacBook), eat at fast food joints or lavish restaurants while forgetting the art of cooking. Instead of living our own lives, we spend our weekends watching how the wealthy (whom we so envy and admire) squander their riches on Louis Vuitton shoes and suitcases…

Although I would never let go of my MacBook, I’ll admit that there are many areas in our lives that seriously need some rethinking. So how can we break free from the fetters we’ve allowed on ourselves, and start living a more rewarding life?

(Hands the mic over to Meg…)

The following is a guest post by Meg Rain of Eat Breathe Blog

Before I start, I must admit that I have no PhD in living ecologically. I am just a student in the thought school of making this world a more livable and beautiful place. If you are here looking for some form of personal health insurance or medical support, I am not the one to provide you with that need. But I will openly express to you my view on the importance of simplifying your life and treating others with utmost respect and how in treating others well you too will live a happy and fulfilling life!

My main piece of advice is: Simplify your life. That’s it. It sounds feasible. It sounds “simple,” doesn’t it? I think so, but in all actuality it might be one of the most difficult things you’ve ever been asked to do! It’s a huge task that can and will take a long time to complete. It has to become something you are constantly aware of and willing to change (for the better) or I fear you will never be able to find the happiness you are pursuing.

This might all sound pretty abstract and flowery to you right now, but in the lines that are to follow I plan to give you some pointers and insights into simplifying your own life. I hope to inspire you to take your happiness into your own hands and stop listening to the commercial world when it comes to what they tell you they “know” you “need” in order to be content in this life.

1. Live YOUR Life

Okay, for starters, stop watching TV. Instead, why don’t you go DO something? Why don’t you go for a walk to the library and read a classic book filled with information no modern day television show could possibly provide for you! I’m not trying to knock down all television broadcasts, I do enjoy watching the History and Discovery channel from time to time, but I enjoy LIVING life more than watching others live their lives. I’ve noticed over the past decade the amount of reality television we are being exposed to. It makes me sad and sick at the same time. Why do we care more about what other “celebrity” types are doing with their time then what we could be accomplishing with OUR own time? It doesn’t make much sense to me at all.

2. Be Yourself

Secondly, I think this might follow suit once you start using your time more wisely, stop caring what the media thinks you should look like. Stop trying to be “perfect.” Just be you. Be real. Be honest. Be kind. Find out what makes you tick? What is that driving force that makes you want to wake up in the morning? And I don’t mean waking up to make money so that you can buy nice things. Find what really makes you happy and then do everything in your power to retrieve it. Don’t waste your precious energy on things you can do without. Find and hold tight to the things you know you couldn’t exist without.

3. Fill Yourself with Love

Most importantly, learn to truly love. I don’t mean in a romantic sense or in a “I love my dog sooooo much” kind of way. I mean truly love EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. The Buddhists have the saying “Namaste” which means the light in me appreciates the light in you. In my opinion, everyone has light in them. This is a world of duality that we live in. Light and dark, good and evil, night and day. Try to see the light in everyone you encounter on a daily basis. They are just human too. And don’t all humans just want to be happy and content anyways? I know I do! It is important to not just value the people you can gain from financially or materially. I think it is important to treat everyone as if they are a part of you, because after all, they are. We are each made of the same light, the same energy that this very world we inhabit is created of!

Learn to truly love. Embrace yourself. Embrace others. And forget about all the riches money can buy, the true gold is what you hold inside!

Meg Rain is an inspired artist, designer, and poet that graduated from Herron School of Art + Design in Indianapolis, Indiana with a degree in visual communication design and a minor in creative writing non-fiction. She is striving to make a name for herself in the music industry as a freelance music promotion designer and songwriter. Her motto is “the sky is the limit.”

It’s been a while, as you might’ve noticed. In January I was conscripted to serve my country, which is part of the reason why I haven’t been updating the website recently.

In Finland it’s every man’s duty to undergo military service for a period of 6–12 months. For gun freaks and lovers of physical labor it is a garden of pleasure, but for an average guy (such as myself) it can easily feel like a waste of time.

Now, I won’t criticize our draft system as I honestly do believe that it has its own merits regarding discipline, precision, cleanliness, fitness, etc. But there’s something else that I want to talk about.

The first two months in the military are the same for every recruit—regardless of whether you’re serving in the army, navy, or the air force. The Finnish Defence Forces expect everyone to acquire a set of basic combat and survival skills before learning the secrets of aircraft maintenance, sniping, underwater combat, or calculating rations.

While six to twelve months is not a long time in our lifetime, it can feel like an eternity if you’re assigned to a position where you only feel uncomfortable. Instead, if you do a bit of research on what options you are entitled to, you can even take some profit. Rather than spend your time digging bunkers and running in the woods with 60 pounds of combat gear hanging from your shoulders, wouldn’t it be more worth your time if you could choose to learn something relevant to your profession or personal interests?

15,000 recruits, 4 web admin spots

When the time came for us to submit our specialization applications, we had to write down three posts that we wanted to apply for. But apart from the ordinary positions with large quotas, such as artilleryman, infantryman, military police, etc., there was also a handful of snug office positions on offer—the turn-off, of course, being the modest number of spots available.

This spring the general staff were recruiting 4 web administrators in Helsinki. This meant that if all 15,000 recruits were to apply, the chances of being selected would be quite depressing. What we needed to take into account, however, was that most of the people were not going to apply for these positions anyway. For example, in our little island fortress of 140 recruits, there was only one applicant for the web administrator gig—i.e. myself. One-hundred-forty isn’t much if we look at all the fifteen-thousand dudes (and a few gals) undergoing military service in the country, but zero competitors out of 140 is still zero competition for me in my company alone.

Although I don’t know the total number of people that applied for the position, it turned out that only about 8 people were invited to be interviewed. The staff told us that they had been surprised how few had actually applied. This, of course, meant that every interviewee now had a 50-percent chance of being selected. That’s every other dude, and a huge leap from the initial 15,000 recruits.

The key is not to be intimidated by numbers

The great thing about low success rates is that most people tend to get intimidated and never manage to get any farther than look at the numbers. So those of us that think differently should take advantage of the common mentality and do the exact opposite: apply, and try our best to qualify.

After all, it’s natural to think negatively when the odds are against you, but you need to get over the fact that you’re battling against such and such number of competitors. In fact, you shouldn’t waste your time mulling over it—just concentrate on convincing the examiners that you are the right person for the job.

Update (3/20/2011): It appears that there had been a total of 46 applicants for the 32 positions available (cameramen, journalists, etc.)—out of which 4 had been web admin spots. This means that 70% of all applicants had gotten in.

Something happened last semester that will probably have a permanent impact on my self-esteem.

It was in cold January that I enrolled in a compulsory course on information security in which we had to split into small groups of three to four members, and develop a security system.

These projects are usually quite demanding, since you have to do a great deal of research on your topic, figure out how to put that theory into practice and create a functioning system, and document every step from the project plan to implementation.

This means that every group member has to play an integral role throughout the project. If one person tries to sneak away and let the others do the work, his name gets crossed out pretty fast. Free rides are never permitted.

It just happens that our team wasn’t performing too well. We were contacting each other via email but at one point one of our three members suddenly went M.I.A. She stopped responding to our emails. She no longer appeared in class. She just vanished. A couple of weeks went by, and she finally wrote back to us saying that she has been sick. Well, okay, that makes sense. And although she probably could’ve sent a short message just to let us know that she can’t work on the project for a while, we thought that being sick was a valid enough reason for her to be away. No hard feelings.

Being some three weeks behind schedule, we finally decided to do our project on the security of WLAN networks, and create a comprehensive set of security measures for the university’s wireless networks. Even though we were running behind other groups, we felt much better now that we were finally making progress.

The other member (who had been active the whole time) and I wrote the first draft of the project plan and sent it to the third group member, and asked if she could review it, add her stuff, and send it back to us. But it never came back. We had vanished again. The two of us still tried to keep the project alive despite the group’s having a missing member. But then, after a week or so, I received an email from my partner saying that she, too, was going to ditch the project and try again next semester because she didn’t think that we could get a good grade for “half-assed” work. That was shocking news. That course on information security was one of the very last remaining courses for me, so there was no way I was going to repeat the same crap all over again in September. What’s more, I would also have to take two exams—one of which I had already passed.

I was really upset at the time, because it meant that I would have to do an extra semester just because one group member had stubbornly decided to jump ship all of a sudden—and for ridiculous reasons. We had already lost one member but it didn’t mean that we wouldn’t be able to finish the work properly.

So finally I decided that I would try to finish it alone. I emailed the teacher and told him what had happened to our group, and asked if I could do the project on my own. Of course, I mentioned that I wouldn’t be able to make it as thorough as we could with a full project group, but I’d nevertheless try my best. My request was accepted, so I started working on it. At least I didn’t have to rely on lazy members this time around.

The individual work finally paid off, as I got full marks for the project (although I’m sure the teacher showed great generosity when evaluating my project), and fortunately didn’t have to repeat the course.

All this may sound like I’m just bragging about my small accomplishment, but that’s not why I shared the story. I wanted to share it because it was a big eye-opener for me, and I’m hoping that you can also draw some encouragement from it. I almost gave up when I realized the group had disbanded, but the fact that I tried to fix things by asking the teacher for an alternate way to complete the project allowed me to reach the goal, which, at one point, felt impossible to arrive at.

This is why I encourage you not to give up hope easily. You’ll automatically fail if you don’t try. The group member who quit was actually one of the top students in my year—with much better grades than what I had, which is probably part of the reason as to why I felt so good about the accomplishment.

Have trust in yourself and be willing to face challenges, because that’s the best weapon for battling against failure. Never accept failure just because you see other people quitting.

Studying at school and studying by yourself are like the yin and yang of education (terrible cliché, I know). The government takes you to school, and makes you learn a bunch of things, mostly related to subjects that are of no interest to you. But this raises a huge problem. Many of us didn’t like studying in school, especially in junior high school, and that impression about education has developed into a mess of negative emotions that flare up whenever we face the need to learn something new.

Your boss might tell you to get an additional certificate, and for this, you need to invest your free time in studying the materials for the exam. Or you might be thinking about going to college because it will bring you more job opportunities, but a bachelor’s degree is quite difficult to earn without studying. When we are forced to study, it naturally makes us resent studying.

Have you ever felt resentment when you were playing a roleplaying game on the Xbox, and you were enthusiastically looking for guides that tell you how to get the Chrysamere sword with enchanted powers? Or did it ever bother you that you had to read up on Paris Hilton or Wentworth Miller because you wanted to know more about them? These are both examples of the kind of voluntary studying that you would do on your own initiative. No one is forcing you to do it; you do it because it provides value to you.

The truth is that there really isn’t any difference in studying the lives of celebrities or studying Spanish philology. In one case, we’re learning why Paris Hilton decided to dabble in music; and in the other, we’re looking at why the Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands is sometimes closer to the Spanish used in distant Latin America than it is to the Spanish spoken in mainland Spain—which, in comparison, is just 600 miles off the Spanish coast. The questions follow the same, simple pattern, but only the subjects are different. Neither subject is intrinsically any better than the other. The one who decides its value is the person learning it.

It’s evident that people’s views on studying changes according to the context. For most people it’s easier and more fulfilling to read about holiday destinations than it is to study math. But once you get rid of the pre-conditioned beliefs and impressions about a school subject like math, learning can become equally or even more fulfilling than the “easy subjects”.

It’s ultimately the topic that matters at first. You need to be okay with it to willingly start learning. But even if you hate math, I strongly believe that you can transform the hate into attraction by approaching the subject with the right mindset. It’s enlightening when you finally understand that studying isn’t that bad after all—in fact, it’s pretty cool.

Last week’s theme was primarily centered upon the topics of giving up easily and being discouraged by slow results. Today, I’m also going to continue along the same path and talk to you about the mistakes we make and why we should treat them positively.

We’ve all heard the phrase “we learn from our mistakes” many times in our lives. I heard it first when I started learning how to ride a bicycle. I’m sure many people treat it as a mere cliché, but many of us also fail to fully incorporate the philosophy into our lives. We acknowledge it at a certain level, but we still tend to get discouraged by our failures and don’t try to get out of them. The negative emotions caused by our mistakes (especially big ones) too often overcome the rationality of getting something positive out of a failure, so it becomes almost impossible to imagine gaining any merits from a failure. But the reason why the negative emotions triumph is that we haven’t adopted this mindset before the blunders blow in.

Develop a positive mindset first

If we don’t have a positive mindset at the time of failure, it will easily influence us in a harmful way. So before we can start to think positively about failure, we have to work on conditioning our mind to accept them, and understand that the world is not going to come to an end even if our attempts only produce faults in the beginning. Beginners make mistakes but so do experts.

The good thing about most failures is that there’s nearly always a chance to try again. And we will be much wiser on the second try. Isn’t that great? We might come to the same overall conclusion again, but we’re always learning something new. The failures teach us and lead us to a different direction. And the more we fail, the better will our sense of direction be on the following attempts. If you fail to pass your blue belt exam in Jiu-Jitsu, the world is not going to end. You’re not going to die because of one single mistake. You’ll most likely have a second chance, and you will definitely do better in the future unless you give up. The changes may not be always visible to you, so you might have to wait longer to see the proof of your progress, but believe, and know, that your mistakes have taught you a lot and improved you as a person.

Accept every failure

Take a positive approach on failure and you’ll be able to overcome most objects on your path. Always remember that as long as a mistake doesn’t kill you, you will be able to do something about the mistake and work toward better results in the future. Now, most of the failures that we have to deal with aren’t deadly at all. They can cause a lot of anxiety and discomfort, but they are often just negative thoughts inside the head. Worry can certainly be a deadly ailment in the long run, and you shouldn’t take it lightly by any means, but any single mistake that we do is often fixable. And if you learn to take your failures positively, you won’t be bothered by worry.

Take a look at the following list of example failures. How many of them, do you believe, are unfixable? Should they be treated as good enough reasons to quit what you’re trying so hard to accomplish?

• Failure to pass an entrance exam
• Failure to work for your dream company
• Failure to make money from your online business
• Failure to get a girlfriend/boyfriend
• Failure to use a language you learned in junior high school
• Failure to lose weight
• Failure to finish a marathon

The reality is that a lot of us quit when we fail at first. But anyone should be able to work out logically that the aforementioned failures are just temporary. Sure, there may be a one-time only chance to apply for a pilot’s job at All Nippon Airways, but hey, not all of us end up as presidents either. There are certain limitations, but generally speaking, none of those failures are cases that can’t be improved on in the future.

It is a good habit to take every failure in a positive way. First think of the worst thing that can happen to you. Then realize that you are not in that worst situation, and that you can make things better by striving to learn from your mistakes and advancing toward your goals. Failures shouldn’t be seen as deep pits that you can’t climb out of. They should be treated as milestones or checkpoints that eventually lead to the finish line.

Last time I talked about why people quit so easily. There can be many underlying reasons why we end up quitting activities. One major discourager is not being able to apply the skills immediately. We know how much time we’ve invested in learning a skill, but after all those hours we realize that we still aren’t able to put them into use. It is quite understandable to become disappointed in the results to such an extent that it causes us to quit the pursuit altogether.

It’s understandable, and also very regrettable. We humans are controlled by our emotions, and even our own emotions don’t always know whether their advice will be good for us in the long run. They just want to make us feel better and more comfortable by pulling us out of the predicament.

My emotions might tell me to quit boxing if I keep getting my butt handed to me by others month after month. If I never get to see any progress why would I want to continue? Why should I waste any more of my valuable time?

And despite the fact that we often try to press on, most of us end up quitting after enduring for a while. The reason is often nothing more than believing that we’re not good enough. That we don’t have what it takes.

Stop the self-criticism

Let’s say that you’ve read in an article how somebody was able to earn $10,000 in a month after applying a set of online money-making techniques for a period of six months, but you decide to try it only to discover that you’ve managed to collect a mere $4.67 from your AdSense campaign. As soon as you fail to meet your expectations, and fail to repeat what the author of the article was able to accomplish, you make yourself believe that the author was only lucky while you’re just too ordinary a person to accumulate such earnings. And, as a result, you give up.

It’s hard to control your emotions, but you must understand how harmful they can be. It may be difficult to notice immediately, but people are ultimately controlled by the beliefs they adopt. And believe me, it doesn’t take much to develop a new belief… Like when you fail for the first time. Some people just never get over their failures.

Start with low expectations

When our expectations are high, we might never have the patience to ever get that far. When our goals are low, however, they’re easier and faster to reach. It doesn’t hurt to be realistic from the beginning.

It’s awesome to have big dreams, and you definitely should have them, but you should also have smaller short-term goals that are faster to reach than the big ones. Your short-term goals will ultimately take care of acquiring the crystal trophy anyway. If you’re a marathoner, rather than go for the gold medal headfirst, try to first work your way through the lower positions—at your own pace.

Enjoy the process

When you’re a newbie, it means that you’re learning a lot of new things. So try to enjoy it. You’re most likely not going to become a pro in six months. Try to enjoy the fact that you have been lucky enough to be provided with the tools enabling you to work toward your goals. Some people never get the chance. Be thankful for the situation you’re in. No one is (or at least shouldn’t be) expecting you to become successful right off the bat.

Give the process some time, and enjoy doing it. Have those small goals to keep you on track, and try not to bite off more than you can chew. Be comfortable and have trust in yourself. Don’t let yourself believe that you can’t do something because you’ve failed before. Great achievements demand time and effort. Understand that and you’ll do fine.

To know why I started this blog, you’ll have to hear my confession. But first, allow me to tell the story from the beginning.

“BBAs graduating from this program may be employed as IT designers, web application developers, IT consultants, programmers, et cetera, et cetera…”
— paraphrased from a university’s website

It was in February 2006 that I formed, based upon the description on their website (quoted above), my impression of the university program I applied for. It sounded pretty much like something that I might want to do for a living. So I was excited to go to school and begin my studies as I had always dreamed of studying IT since elementary school. But what actually followed didn’t connect with my expectations, and I really wondered if I had gone to the same institution where I had applied.

Most of our courses consisted of business management projects that were kinda relevant to IT, but didn’t quite succeed in teaching us how to become IT designers, web application developers, or programmers—contrary to the fancy program description. I became really skeptical about the whole institution, and wondered if I could ever find employment in the IT field with the tools I was introduced to in class.

Luckily, I soon found out that my school offered international exchange programs at universities in Japan, so I decided to make it my priority to travel to Japan as a student. (I guess I was at the same time trying to escape from my predicament.) I thought I would at least get something worth mentioning in my resumé if I completed parts of my degree overseas.

I was accepted to go to Japan, so I flew over to Osaka after the summer vacation and stayed there for two years. But during those two years, I developed a new outlook on work. It might have been due to the fact that I was exposed to a group of self-employed people who influenced me by giving me hope. Or reading Napoleon Hill’s inspirational Think and Grow Rich over the summer might have triggered me to shift towards entrepreneurship and freelancing. The leads didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was a new beginning.

But I didn’t want to quit school and become a full-time entrepreneur quite yet. First I wanted to complete the degree I had started working on, but my goal now was to grab the diploma and get out as fast as possible. I felt relieved, in a way. I realized that I didn’t have to rely on the school syllabus to get the necessary means to become a professional IT expert. I mean, would I really need to take a course on the SQL language to learn it? No. Or would I even need a diploma to start a career in IT?

A couple of years back, my answer to those questions would’ve been ‘yes’, but I noticed how foolish it would be to be controlled by those misconceptions. I had to accept the fact that the only one responsible for my future was myself—not my school, not my teachers, no one else. If I were to graduate as a BBA majoring in IT and didn’t get employed by any company, what would I do? Blame the school for it? Blame my teachers? The truth is, no diploma is going to get you a job if you don’t put yourself out there.

So I decided that if the school doesn’t want to provide the training, I will do the training myself. I will teach myself how to handle all the things required of an IT expert. If I want to work as a web developer, I will do whatever it takes to learn how to build websites with appropriate solutions such as PHP, SQL, and Adobe Illustrator. I would also study marketing, branding, social networking, and search engine optimization to find buyers and to establish myself as a web service provider.

Would I learn these things better during a 90-minute lecture while I’m dozing off half of the time? There is so much valuable material available on the Internet and in books. Many business gurus and entrepreneurs are also sharing their experiences on their blogs for free. If we want to learn how to use PHP, SQL, and Adobe Illustrator, we can anytime invest time in studying from a variety of free resources, such as online tutorials. The key is to be active with our pursuits, and not to wait for things to come to us. It takes more commitment and self-discipline to learn things by ourselves. But if we have a burning desire to accomplish something, and we draw a road map that takes us through the steps leading to our goal, we can do it. And I believe that we can do it more effectively than those who study in “better” institutions but have no clear purpose in their studies.

Self-Learner focuses on these aspects primarily. I’ve noticed that many other students in my school also suffer from the same negative emotions that I used to have a few years back. So I decided that I would share these ideas with people who are facing similar problems, and perhaps instill in them a feeling of confidence and purpose that will lead to success.

Let’s face it. Studying at school entails some pretty nasty things that we struggle so hard to avoid, but unless we throw in the towel and quit studying altogether, we should learn to accept them. Ready?

1. Tests and exams. They bug us because we are afraid of failure. But we can’t rid the world of exams, because the population is way too big to let everyone have their dream jobs, right? We have to earn our positions in the world, and the way to prove ourselves is most commonly through tests. I’m afraid they’re not going to disappear anytime soon.
2. Having to memorize data. If we study history or math, we come across dates and formulas that we have to remember in order to progress in our academic pursuits. The quadratic equation or the formulae of trigonometry may seem pointless, but they have been devised by intelligent minds to satisfy certain purposes. Schools wouldn’t teach them if students didn’t have any use for them in their lives. Most students don’t even know what they want to be when they grow up, so it’s the school’s purpose to provide the best means for students to pursue whatever goals they may set in the future.
3. Homework. Homework is not all about teachers and professors making their students’ lives miserable. We need to learn responsibility. We also need to learn how to manage time. We need to learn that learning doesn’t only happen in the classroom. And we need to learn to solve problems on our own.
4. Writing reports and essays. Writing, in most cases, requires some form of rational thinking. Writing reports and essays forces us to research various topics and find new information that will gain us knowledge. These papers also have to follow certain guidelines set by the teacher, which will make us work toward a certain goal. If we don’t learn how to write well-structured reports, we will be unable to effectively communicate important facts to our peers.
5. Reading books. Although books aren’t the only source of knowledge since we have access to other media, books still matter a lot. Books are conventionally treated as the most accepted source of authoritative information. It’s inevitable that if something has been legitimately published, read and reviewed by people, it is considered to be a more reliable reference than an etching on a bathroom wall, or an anonymous blog post.
6. Doing presentations. Most of us don’t become public speakers, but communicating our thoughts in conversation is an important skill to acquire. Having a limited amount of time on our hands forces us to focus on the essentials and deliver a succinct message. Presentations also teach us how to be systematic and how to plan our thoughts in a well-structured manner.
7. Deadlines. Deadlines are horrible. But I can’t stress enough the importance of learning how to use deadlines to our own advantage. Individuals who know how to schedule their projects are definitely more successful than those who go without planning. The ability to set deadlines and follow them is one of the key factors of success.

Here’s a false belief many students seem to have:

“I can’t be a software developer because my school doesn’t teach computer programming.”

I was talking to a friend of mine recently, and we came across the topic of education and careers. I asked him what he wanted to become after graduating from college. Well, after admitting that he hadn’t really put any serious thought into what would happen after school, he said that the bad reputation of his school, and the insight and technical skills his school fails to provide wouldn’t allow him to have high standards in job-hunting. He believes that his institution is primarily responsible for landing him a job. This is a negative belief every student should stamp out.

Your school isn’t responsible for your future

Institutions often provide a set of career descriptions that apply to the programs they offer. They tell you that if you complete this IT program, you will be working in the position of an IT consultant, software designer, or online entrepreneur. This persuades us to believe that once we take the path, we won’t be able to influence our future careers anymore in case we happen to desire to change our occupation.

But in reality, taking that path won’t secure any of the aforementioned positions either. If we go to school and don’t put any effort into learning anything, we won’t be able to work as consultants, designers or entrepreneurs, because we haven’t internalized anything. We might’ve completed all the assignments and papers required for earning the degree, but in truth, we haven’t learned anything that we can apply under real circumstances. We have no expertise.

I bump into these personality types pretty often on campus. They always complain how incompetent they are because our school hasn’t taught them anything. This is what I heard recently: “How are they expecting us to do this online store project when they haven’t taught us how to query data from a MySQL server with PHP?” Well, allow me to ask this: “What do you do if you want to ski, but have never skied before?”

The learner decides what to learn

If you’ve never skied and want to ski, you learn it—one way or another. You either get yourself a pair of skis and hit the slopes, or you sign up for a skiing class. The choice is yours. No higher being will come down to shepherd you to learn the skill.

The same applies to school. Our professors aren’t responsible for providing us with all the means to tackle our projects. We aren’t toddlers, nor are the teachers our parents. We have to make decisions by ourselves if we want to accomplish something. And if we want to accomplish something, we have to allocate the time it takes to accomplish it.

No school is perfect. One school might have a curriculum better suited for you while another would drive you insane. If you’re comfortable with your school, you should stick with it, because otherwise you’d waste the next ten years looking for “something better”. And if the school doesn’t offer a well-rounded curriculum for your needs, you should find a way to individually supplement your education with the things you want to learn and use in the future.

…than going to school, signing up for classes, or paying lavishly for private lessons. If you prefer to figure things out by yourself, studying can be made much more comfortable, effective, and rewarding than sitting in dull classes from 8:15 till 16:00. Let me tell you why…

1. You can choose what to study

When you are your own teacher, you are also the one who decides what to study. Functioning as your own teacher of course makes yourself responsible for creating your own syllabus, but with this freedom you can choose to focus on something specific, and eliminate all unnecessary things.

If you decide to study, say, web design, you can choose which areas to include in your syllabus. If you are particularly interested in creating vector graphics with Illustrator, you can focus on Illustrator and omit Photoshop and other tools. Or you can learn HTML and CSS without wasting time on programs such as Dreamweaver. This approach will not only save you time but also narrow down the list of things needed to learn the skill (web design) by keeping you focused on the essentials.

If you think you’re missing something, you can always supplement the things you already have with appropriate additions. And if something seems unnecessary, you have the freedom to drop it at will. Again, you’re focusing on the essentials. You will be constantly reviewing your syllabus, so it always remain fresh.

2. You don’t have to waste time on compulsory subjects

Students constantly complain about this—and rightly so. High school and university programs are filled with compulsory subjects that are more of a nuisance to students than of true value. And I believe the benefits gained from taking compulsory subjects is entirely subjective, and depends on the individual student. Let your study plan tell you what you should learn. Allow yourself to be confident about your decisions. Institutions shouldn’t be treated as the only authority for creating well-rounded syllabi.

For example, most people probably think that physics is strongly connected with mathematics. I mean, something like F=ma is exactly that, mathematics. But instead of studying math as a subject of its own, we could focus on physics and only study math when needed.

The same thing goes with computer programming. Math may condition our “mathematical faculties” to operate more logically, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Having studied programming at university, I can say that while math is relevant to computer programming, it isn’t absolutely necessary. So if I were to learn programming, I would first examine what I want to accomplish with it. If I want to specialize in creating online shopping carts with PHP, I would definitely eliminate math from my list. I just don’t need to waste time on it. I can instead invest that time and effort in programming practical applications.

3. You don’t have to get up early in the morning

Not having to wake up at 7:05 on cold, rainy mornings sounds awesome. You can just get up, take a hot shower, brew a cup of coffee, and go to your studies. Here we’re assuming, of course, that nothing else is hindering you from sleeping in and going out in the morning (if you work in the evening shift, or work from home).

4. You can design your own schedule

If you have a good study plan, you can also make an effective and comfortable schedule for yourself. You don’t have to deal with idle hours between classes, because you can allocate the appropriate amount of time to each task in your study plan, and time them according to your own daily schedule.

5. You don’t have to take tests

You don’t have to prove yourself with tests when the examiner is you. If you are planning to acquire professional skills, your employer or customer will be your examiner. So when you’re studying on your own with a strong purpose, you won’t be needing any exams because you are in control of your own progress and objectives.