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“Learning Is An Endless Process That Can Never Be Institutionalized”
“Brainstorming Sessions are the syllabus creation plartform for learning.” “I No Longer Dispute The Fact that says, “Experience Is The Best Teacher.” it feels so great actually sharing with you! For the past three years right after my undergrad, I could not help my self but think of how I actually needed to do a Postgraduate Masters. In fact, I enrolled for one at my very undergrad university. But, I did not find what I wanted so I quit. All I wanted is skills that will guide my career path and purpose in life and school surely could not offer me that! I never believed in the common saying, “Experience is the best teacher…” until I painfully experienced it. I like terming it as a Life class. “Every single minute that passes has taught me that learning is an endless process that can never be institutionalized or paid for by cash alone but through many other ways.” Here are some of the processes I went through in my bid to learn.

Observation: Every thing you see has a meaning. There is that confusing theory I over heard one of my friends talk about, the abstract reality.” According to this theory, they question everything you see. What if what is see is not really what is present? What if what you do not see is actually there? Well, as insignificant as it sounds, this theory has taught me how to critically observe and try to explain, read or study what I see. In tern, I have come to learn a lot without even touching a thing. Through observation alone, I have learnt to cook really great food. Not to brag, but my food is really awesome.

Self Study-Reading And Tutorials: So after quitting my studies, i could not afford to pay for tuition for any short courses simply. As a result, I resorted to using yahoo answers, google and youtube tutorials. You will be shocked at how much you can learn from these. Reading blogs from people too gave me a lot of current knowledge and developed my skills. However, this was not enough to build on professional skills. Hence I decided to start buying books in my areas of interest… soon they became bulky. Left with few option, I chose to go digital and buy an e-book (e-electronic, softcopy) reader from Amazon-Kindle and I have never regretted! Core books have offered me a professional perspective with vital concepts to help in my skill development.

Failure: Like no other teacher, failure is the best compared to success. Bill gates put it well when he said, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” Having been a young achiever all through my life with a track record of only successes, I felt invisible to an extent that I stopped learning or evening practicing. Until I started testing failure for 2 years in a row… At my points of getting back on top, its the lessons I learnt through my failures that brought me back. So never despise failure, embrace it as a learning opportunity, however… don’t take pride in repeating the failure life class 😉 That way you become stupid, its a thin margin.

Hands-On Practice: It’s said what you do for 27 days becomes your habit and other scientist have proved that to achieve professionalism in your work, you have to practice for over 20,000 hours which is close to 5 years. Well, thats all good to know, however you and I may not have all those years to be professionals in what we do. But looking at the previous ways on how to learn as mentioned above, you discover that most of them come randomly. In my research, I landed on a video, a TEDTalks Podcast, and the TEDstar at the time mentioned, “…for you to master any skill, be it an art, career, talent, you name it. It took 20 hours of practice for your brain to perfect it. Thats 45minutes everyday if spread out in a month. At my work place, I have build experience, daily I have learnt what I can do well and what I cant do well. This gave me room to employ the above methods so as to improve my skills and at the same time develop new ones for new territories.

As much as I would love to share more, my time is up. However, I am not saying you should not go to school, as a matter of fact, I am now pursuing my Masters Degree. I am simply saying, “Learning is an endless process that can never be institutionalized or paid for by cash alone but by time, commitment and vigilance.” Commit to learn something new every single time. Drop those old perceptions about learning compared to age, circumstances, gender, culture, etc and get professional!! If you do this, opportunities will come knocking your way, you won’t even have room to accommodate all of them!

Please enrich this blog…add more methods which I know are many in the comment section, or just your comment. Like, share this post and Follow the Blog, thank you.

By Emmanuel Wabwire