How to become an autodidact

if you want to know how to become an autodidact I suggest you put a red pen behind your ear at all times h no I'm just kidding but I want you to keep that principle in mind because teaching yourself needs to be treated like an adventure like a game now I don't mean a game in terms of gamification or at least gamification is only one part of it I'm actually talking about Game Theory now what is Game Theory game theory is is creating a learning game that is so exciting that you want to come back

to play it again and again and again and you need to balance the frustration but always keep challenging yourself so that you grow now there's a resource that you can get it's called The self-education Blueprint more on how to get it later but please pay attention for now because this game theory principle is going to help you set up your Learning Journey in such a way that you literally not only want to keep going to despite challenges that will arise but you crave the continuation of your self-education journey and wow it is such a wonderful

thing to have this myself because no matter what obstacles arise and no matter how challenging certain aspects of my own learning choices might be I continue finding the inner resources that are needed to follow the path of the self-taught learner and we really need this these days because we are living in a world where self-determination focus and a deep understanding of memory is more and more important than ever before and as a result if you do like playing games if you can manage to teach yourself you'll not only have more time to play games if

that's what you like to do but you'll have the resources in order to do so so what we're going to talk about today anyone can pick up these skills even though traditional educational institutions have sadly made them harder to access and I find this really sad because I come from a traditional education background but we all need to keep up with the rapid pace of change nothing is forever and as a result autodidactic learning is becoming a greater and greater skill that is a a meta skill it really shows that not only can you learn

on your own but you can translate what you've learned on your own into assets that other people want to access so in terms of my own autodidacticism really it wasn't until after I graduated that I had to start teaching myself to start businesses to not only write multiple books that people actually wanted to read but also how to Market them and I learned a little bit about marketing when I played in bands and in a way I'm kind of a self-taught musician although not quite uh but I've learned so many things and I've learned a

lot of them on my own and I want to share today the best practices that I've found so so we're going to help you today together in our conversation take charge of your education settle in because you're going to master new skills so much faster all on your own and because definitions matter let's start by simply asking what the heck is an autodidact anyway well as far as I'm concerned an autodidact is anyone who takes steps to acquire an independent education in a topic or skill so independent what does that really mean well often people

think that autodidacts do this independently without the guidance of formal instructors but this belief is not strictly true so one example that I've learned a lot from is the author David Morel and you probably know one of his characters which is Rambo but one thing that really influenced me a lot is that Morel is known for his deep research and he goes really really detailed into the different skills that some of his characters need before he starts writing various novels and also he uses a very particular skill to write the novels in the first place

but one example of where he's guiding his own education but still using some formal external training is learning to fly a plane before writing the Shimmer he's also studied interrogation tactics how to establish a false identity and defensive driving and this makes him a great example of a modern polymath and an autodidact but he did hire instructors to help him learn these skills and that doesn't mean that he didn't teach himself it means that well the distinguishing factor is that he took the initiative and arranged The Learning Journey on his own so there's no formal

way to study all those skills there's no University of novelists who wants to actually learn to fly and become an interrogator and you know all these things that he's done so he informally crafted a lifelong Learning Journey and to do that people like Morel cultivate very very interesting polymathic personality traits and as many as possible and you don't have to be born with them you just have to know what they are and start cultivating them so in addition to this principle of taking charge of your Learning Journey and putting together your plan for how you're

going to access the best possible people to teach you an autodidact is someone who is flexible to the exact comms that are required in order for them to achieve their learning goals why do I harp upon this point well a lot of people will not submit themselves to disciplines they will say but I'm the exception to the rule I don't have to learn all of these exact steps in order to reach my goal no no no the autodidact is furiously curious about what those exact steps are and they surrender themselves to the rules that govern

the area right that means they're research focused in order to find the best sources of knowledge that they can surrender themselves to but we don't want to be surrendering ourselves to everything under the sun just because it looks good that's why autodidacts also really focus on their critical thinking skills they need to assess the reliability of their instructors and the information sources and then they also need to be devoted to developing a personal empowerment mindset because let's face it this stuff is hard right so we need to have some grit some mental strength we need

to be courageous and capable in many cases of withstanding isolation so I'm editing right now my Vitamin X SQL to Fly Boy the second memory detective novel I have to spend so much time on my own marking up the pages with this red pen and that is a kind of skill it's not just a mental strength characteristic but it's a choice to be isolated in order to achieve the goal and you might be thinking well what does editing have to do with teaching yourself well I have to teach teach myself what I got wrong and

it is a thing that is an educational Journey it really requires understanding what makes a story good and then understanding where I got it wrong and then you know ratcheting things up and this is where David Morel has a very very interesting concept that I use a lot when I write fiction he has a questioning process that I learned and it's just been essential and it's just basically you know something like if this was real what would happen and then why is this happening and always making sure that there's this justification for everything that's going

on and then of course Morel also has this famous habit of going out and studying things and learning and these characteristics are so important to me because I want to be autodidactic and that means I have to take more responsibility for my learning outcomes than a strict polymath might so when I wrote flyboy the first novel I taught myself so to speak how to be a detective and I took courses in forensics I took a course with a detective who taught about how guns are handled and you know did I get it perfect did I

get it right no but I crafted this journey and there's no formal institution that exists in order for me to bring these elements together and also I studied story Theory I used to be a film studies Professor but I knew how to go deeper on the topics of how plots are well structured and then there is the teaching yourself of what you wrote or whatever and what you forgot and then editing it so here's another characteristic that you want to be able to cultivate it is taking responsibility because when you craft your own Journey there's

not going to be a formal institution to blame right like morel's famous character or his most famous character Rambo he's in the jungle right there's a jungle out there and like Rambo you are on your own so with all that in mind let's talk about how to actually become an autodidact we now know some of the personality traits involved that you can call cultivate and practice so put that in your learning schedule and really work on those aspects of your personality maybe you're strong in some maybe you are weak in others but make a dedicated

practice of focusing on what is really required here what are those things and then fill those requirements by the way if you're new here this is Dr Anthony MeTV from magnetic memory method.com hit that Thumbs Up Get subscribed if you want more information like this and you know take responsibility for your own Journey sometimes people say oh I can't find all your stuff and I always say the headquarters is magnetic memory method and it's well structured over there and it is a little bit of a formal instruction offered by the institution of magnetic memory because

I used to be a university Professor so I tick that way but it's not really a formal institution as such the point is is you want to attend things and take responsibility for them that's how you start to become an autodidact and when I was a student I did this for many many years I completed a ba I completed an Ma I completed a second Ma I did a PhD and the journey was supplied for me so there's no real autodidacticism as such but if I have a benefit it is that I went through that

Journey so that's one of the things that you can look out for when you are starting to say Okay I want to learn to teach myself is am I learning from somebody who has a proven track record of being able to teach themselves and do they have both worlds do they have a formal education and do they have an informal education where you know for example in my memory detective novels like I literally went and learned Pathfinder which is a software that detectives actually use and my knowledge of this technology became good enough to pull

it off in in the novel and a detective who actually came to visit me in Australia said man how did you even know that this exists and you really described it quite well well that's because I took responsibility and I found the best information and all this requires is probing skills above and beyond just searching page one of the internet right you've got to go with more deeper and not with what an AI generator tells you and say oh well that's good enough so to put this as clearly as possible you take responsibility but you

also go Beyond look at others around you and see the poultry results they're getting but figure out what are those results and then analyze how you can go One Step Beyond and then what's the Step Beyond that and the Step Beyond that and the Step Beyond that and surrender yourself to taking that journey and if you want to accomplish massive goals Beware of the temptation to cheat Yourself by studying in Shallow ways you really need to dig deeper you need to know when you're in the shallow pool and you need to find out where that

deeper pool is and you need to get in there so there's a lot of steps that I can suggest the first major one in addition to what I've already been talking about is to make sure you know what it is to learn how to learn so this is a term that Barbara Oakley uses you know learn how to learn and she's quite successful at it and she's saying in my interpretation of everything I've learned from her is you're doing more than developing a discipline you're doing more than oh finding your inner curiosity and amping that

up you're doing more than having a proactive attitude and working on your mental strength you're also learning how to learn and that means you need to make your memory as sharp as possible you need to get your memory fit and devote yourself to learning the best possible memory techniques out there and not making it all just about pneumonics now when it comes to neonics my preferred stack of techniques is the Memory Palace technique everybody knows that I love this but it's not that I turn it into a hammer that beats every nail out there no

it is a tool in which every other memory technique can be used so inside there's the major system the Pao system the pegword system and then we use space repetition but this itself is embedded in a larger program based on the big five of learning so there's memorization Reading Writing speaking and listening and all these pneumonic devices you can add on mind mapping everything right but at the end of the day try try to work out a structured way that you use these techniques and by structure you can structure these things in many many different

ways in fact one of the challenges that you have is there's too many different ways to arrange things right so pick one surrender yourself to a period of time to master that particular structure and get it into your procedural memory so that you just sort of automatically tick that way and that way you'll never really miss a beat and if you do Miss A Beat you'll have the modesty to admit when you've made mistakes right and this is a really really important principle because mistakes will be made and we really want to make sure that

we understand that there's a number of tools and those tools not only have to be learned but they need to be structured other things you want to consider is note taking for example so I mentioned mind mapping I don't really think of that as a note-taking strategy and I don't use it that way but some people do and that could be perfect for you I like a combination of the settle casting technique and lightener boxes in combination with all tools of the Memory Palace technique so you know if you can't find those things shout out

in the comments I'll help you out with some links the huge thing really at the risk of being repetitious is that you've got to do it you've got to bring your own structure you have to take the responsibility you can't blame the people on the internet for not being clear enough their job is not to be clear all the time right it's your job to find the clarity okay next step make sure that you're engagement engine is on nobody else can switch it on for you now you might get a rise and excitement oh wow

this person is talking about a thing in a way I've never heard before and yes that can happen but you don't have to wait for that I've worked with so many one-on-one coaching clients over the years and they often talk about waiting to be inspired well those people don't have a learning problem they have a passion problem right so you don't just don't wait find the things that really get you going and then make sure that you're actually studying something you love so that it's easy to turn the engine on so focus on studying things

that are above the average thing that motivates everybody else so one of the things I have here in Vitamin X spoiler alert is that one of the characters says to the main detective whatever you do don't make this about money right because we're all tempted to do that and that's the number one way to suck the life and passion out of everything because there's responsibilities that come with all that sort of stuff unless that you're passion is finance and all that sort of stuff which is a different story right the point is is that I

myself have been in places in my life where I was deeply deflating my own interest I once almost entered a teaching certification program so that I could become a high school teacher to have a regular income to fulfill someone else's dream man am I ever glad that I dodged that bullet I mean I could use all these memory techniques all these learning techniques Reading Writing speaking listening all that sort of stuff but I would have wound up miserable right so I got myself out of that downward spiral and that's a longer story that we can

save for a different time but the the very brief version of it is that I wrote down a day after day after day a vision of my perfect present and I started to train my procedural memory to notice when I was trying to make someone else happy and instead of following my own dream turn on my own engine and then when I did that all of the massive tasks involved in learning how to publish oneself in learning how to get videos that people actually watch in order to get a podcast going on and on and

on and on it was so much easier right so it's something that you need to understand you need to understand your own motivators and make sure that you push to have as many reasons as possible because there are so many challenges to learn anything in depth right if you want to achieve your dreams you need to be able to know why you're doing it and have more than one reason why and if you can't get five reasons why you might consider that it's not worth pursuing in the first place now here's another thing that is

so important add a couple of additional words to the goals that you create for yourself so when I work one-on-one with clients they often describe really murky goals so they say I want to learn a language or I want to master a particular dance move I want to fly planes all right now those goals are cool they have a kind of clarity but really they just sound so vague right rather than focusing on the goals as such add these two words and then a bunch of other words so the two words the magic bean words

and they truly are magical actually there's very few magic beans that actually work but these two words are truly the beans that will get you up the beant stock so that so what happens is learning a new language becomes learning Spanish so that I can speak with my partner's family learning German so I have a chance at getting a job in heidleberg right like really get super specific with that chain that links things together the goal plus the outcome so that it seems like a really small thing to add but I found that time and

time again it makes the next steps so much easier much more focused and then it makes it easier to execute the plan because you're going to be able to remind yourself I am doing this so that this can be the outcome now you might be saying well this is repetitive isn't that the same as having five reasons why yes and no it's a little bit more it's actually creating a mental image of the outcome so that this is what's going to happen it doesn't necessarily have to be connected to the why this is the thing

we want right so yes it's a little bit the same but not quite so really add those two words and add them just generally in life they're very powerful now I talk a lot about learning methods but I suggest that you also research many other learning methods and try to find their flaws that sounds kind of negative right but always try to find the flaws you know I love when people say hey Anthony what about this memory technique The Memory Palace isn't that going to lead me into just memorizing lists and then I have to

recite those list in linear order now they're they're doing good thinking there but that's actually not what happens The Memory Palace has flaws but that's not it right but if you start asking what are the flaws and what are the flaws in particular context well then you can still use the techniques but avoid some of the problems you know my bookish learning goals lend themselves to memory techniques and the way that I use them and I don't get into problems of having to recall things in list form right right but would I use the Memory

Palace to study carpentry or Plumbing I really don't have any idea if I would use memory palaces or optimize flashcards or any of the things that I use right maybe I would maybe I wouldn't but if that's where you're going then you want to make sure that you research the methods that people use to learn those topics and then if you're going to take advice on how to learn those things choose a learning Guru who's actually accomplished what you want to achieve in that field that way your modeling the research and learning methods used by

successful people but not without your critical thinking hat on you've said what is the flaw here and you work it out you figure it out you may even be able to remove that flaw and then wind up teaching other people this is what the magnetic memory method has been about I found a flaw in how the Memory Palace technique is taught typically do I solve it for every person under the sun no but I solved it for myself and it's helped so many people and just didn't in general try to find failures to study you

know I think a lot about running a Kickstarter campaign for my forthcoming memory detective Junior series and I don't know if I'll do it or not but my research involves not just looking at the successes on the kickstarter platform I look at the failures and research them as intensely as possible I research what not to do as much as I do research what to do and I do that in life in general I read a lot of biographies because people will tell you man I wish that I wouldn't have done that and you can just

see or you can maybe they don't have that Insight but you could say that is a turning point where that person could have gone a different way could have avoided that mistake and then you have greater Insight in your life to avoid those mistakes as well so really really think where's the flaw where's the flaw what's the flaw find the flaw people I'm telling you if you gamify the finding of flaws you're going to have so much more fun as you teach yourself about the nature of what it is to be flawed in the first

place the next thing I suggest is that you become very very good at planning and coming up with a learning goal is definitely important but planning how you will execute it is another and no one can see the future at least no one that I'm aware of so planning is something that a lot of people really don't want to do because there's so many unknown unknowns and there's a risk in the time that you will spend in planning and you also have the risk that you'll miss important things however this is precisely why I treat

planning as a skill unto itself and one that needs to be practiced over and over and over again so that I'm skilled at rapidly drafting new plans so we just simply accept that plans will need redrawing and release ourselves to Simply doing our best with each and every plan knowing that we're going to continually plan and replan and develop a procedural memory around the process of planning and there's a study that demonstrates just how valuable strong planning skills are they directly determine your ability to complete your goals and I again like try to be flexible

to the change but the value of planning and learning to plan and planning to plan in the future is huge in your adventure as an autodidact the next thing you really want to focus on is being able to remind yourself of your commitment and focus on your commitment here's an interesting Mantra that I find so so valuable in this regard stop stopping this helps me focus on what matters which is to continue moving forward I often have another one that I use action reveals what stasis conceals now I use memory techniques to memorize these handy

little inspirational phrases so that they're easy to draw upon when times get tough but how do you actually stop the habit of stopping or giving up on your goals well here are some suggestions the first thing is to make sure that you're in control of your dopamine or that you have some influence over it because you literally can reset your dopamine so to speak that's not exactly the most accurate way of saying what happens but you can do it I have a training on this channel all about dopamine resetting and I use these techniques often

and they really really help the other thing is you got to maintain a good diet and physical fitness take care of your sleep all of these things are super important there are memory friendly foods that you can explore Focus Friendly Foods and it really doesn't take that much exercise to keep your body and your mind energized understanding that your mind tends to throw up mental objections that weaken you when your body is out of shape so I attended a live Tony Robbins event one time and I witnessed firsthand both his tremendous self-directed learning skills and

his consistent abundance of energy it was amazing to see that actually play out it's not just for the the cameras right and it comes from crafting a strong body so that the mind can be as strong as possible and you don't have to go all the way down the rabbit hole of certain people who are super healthy and all that sort of stuff but just understand that there's a mindbody connection and the healthier your body is the clearer and more focused in mind you will be and with that in mind let's talk a little bit

about some autodidacts that you probably should know about if you don't know already because they're really interesting examples of people who have taught themselves various skills so the first one I would mention is Leonardo Da Vinci and you know it's true that da Vinci had teachers he studied under other people but he also learned a lot of things on his own like he taught himself through experimentation through observation he kept detailed notebooks and his learning spanned multiple fields from science and engineering to Art and anatomy and the detail that he brought to Concepts like the

flying machine this influenced and inspired others to realize the airplanes we see in the sky on a daily basis I would also mention my colleague in memory Lyn Kelly so she has like myself a scholarly background but she took it upon herself to learn a completely new field she presented her findings in the knowledge Gene which has so many cool words related to genetics and various conditions how did she learn so much about genetics so quickly well as the author of memory Memory Craft and the memory code she just simply Drew upon the memory techniques

that she taught herself to use so she's using her memory to write incredible books and then she's using her memory to research the information that goes into these books she's performed impressively at memory competitions and like several other memory Champions she's used her memory skills to help her teach herself languages so that's a great example of an autodidact and you know just not that you don't have to have a formal background or that that somehow prevents you from teaching yourself the point is is that the formal institutions don't often exist for what we're trying to

do and you know there's many many more intriguing self-taught people that you can check out on the magnetic memory method blog if you want to go over there and look for autodidact and read the printed version or the written version of this video but I want to encourage you to start your autodidactic journey now and make self-taught learning a massive part of your life keep asking those why questions as you take up new projects focus on a major topic set proper goals and plans around it and test do I have the existing competence for this

this will help you plan better because maybe you have to actually have a different goal so that you can have an actual outcome and this is how you'll start to take the steps that are needed towards meaning and Mastery and if you want more help then the self-education blueprint is new you can get it at magnetic method.com which is a handy acronym for self-education blueprint it's going to teach you how to build a personalized learning framework with even more tips than what we discussed today in fact there's a whole additional video training that comes with

this very valuable PDF download checklist and even better in this video I give you more examples that deepen what we've talked about today this video is called the autodidact advantage and wow it is going to be amazing for those of you who want a more granular walkr of the things we've talked about today and the steps that you can follow when you have the self-education blueprint and the best part is is that it's free and it will help you stop aimlessly jumping from topic to topic because you will finally have created a structured road map

for Mastery because let's face it nothing is more valuable than retaining the knowledge you encounter in this difficult world and that is valuable because those who seek deeper understanding they become the leaders that Inspire others to seek deeper understanding too and remember it get it so deeply embedded into their memory that there's no better word other than that they now have a magnetic memory and learning on your own I believe is the most empowering way to learn and you know hey if you prefer to stick around you don't want the self-education blueprint but you would

like like another video from me somewhere here on the screen will appear a very powerful training that I think you'll find useful that goes deeper into the Memory Palace technique and the differences in how I teach this technique I believe and I hear this from people all the time are profound because it gives you the granular details so thanks again for hitting that thumbs up for being subscribed and until we have a chance to meet again get that self-education blueprint and watch how to use the Memory Palace technique for studying next