self-education

Check out Deschooling Yourself – How to Recover from Traditional Schooling from Self Made Scholar. Awesome! And these quotes about self-education. My favorite:

“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”
- Jim Rohn

See, I've been feeling a bit aimless of late, having accomplished at good portion of my goal of creating passive income. I have a lot of free time. So I've noticed a few things happen:

1. I start feeling bored. Which I've learned is actually a thing our minds do to avoid feeling some unpleasant emotion.

Solution: feel your feelings. Look at the emotions you are avoiding.

2. I start feeling anxious. I have thoughts like "What am I doing with my life??". I start thinking I should really go back to school. Have a real career. Why am I just lazing about? I can't really be happy if I'm not doing something hard. You can't possibly be happy sitting around browsing Wikipedia articles, creating web sites for fun, writing blog entries, and going for walks. What are you producing?

Solution: recognize the social conditioning and reject it!

3. I start compulsively signing up for things that I later realize I don't really want to do. This seems to be a behavior that attempts to avoid dealing with (1) and (2).

Solution: get real quiet with myself and make sure I'm all on board with anything I agree to do.

So. All of which confirms that the greatest obstacle to my freedom and happiness is my mind. But I knew that already.

Meanwhile, I'm excited about the world of autodidacticism. Yes, there is a whole world of online resources etc.

Of course, mostly I'm excited about the idea of autodidacticism, and how to de-colonize my brain. Maybe I should make a website about that.

Tags: freedom, intrinsic motivation, learning, work