Growth
Be better every day than you were the day before. Experiment, learn new things, try things out.
If your education ended with school, you're losing at life. With the right drive and discipline, you can learn most technical skills in two years.
Find a mentor, look up career roadmaps and get going. Even if nothing comes of it, you'll learn new skills, and along the way you might meet interesting people. The things you do will lead you to the next ones.
How it's done
A great example is Madzia, who first decided to switch to remote work, and then turned her career completely upside down and switched to IT, significantly increasing her income.
It took:
- investing in courses
- clocking a ton of butt-hours in front of a computer
- learning very specific technical skills
- showing those skills off in portfolio projects
- polishing her English
- juggling all of it with a demanding full-time job
It wasn't easy. It meant sitting at it for 10 hours, sometimes more, to learn as much as possible as fast as possible.
Then she had to deal with a lot of rejections and spend many months fine-tuning how she went through recruitment.
But all that effort shows that anything is possible, and if someone wants something badly enough, they'll get there in the end.
Learning effectively
Nobody taught us how to learn effectively. School, whose whole purpose is teaching, completely skipped the question of how to take in new information efficiently so that it stays with us longer.
My problem with reading books is that if I don't put at least one thing into practice right away, it means I haven't learned anything. In a few months I won't remember most of what I read anyway. You can treat that kind of reading as pure entertainment, because it won't serve any other purpose.
That's exactly why, when I read about something interesting, I immediately try to explain it to someone, so I organize the information and form new connections in my brain. It also works as a metric for how much I've remembered.
Richard Feynman said that if you want to master something, start teaching it. The more you teach, the better you learn. Teaching is a powerful tool for learning.
Try explaining a topic to an 8-year-old by simplifying it and using analogies, and you'll quickly find out where the gaps in your knowledge are.
You can also write a note or a post right after you learn something, or even start a blog with reviews.
It'll help you understand the topic better and make the knowledge stick, and in the future you'll be able to come back to it easily and remind yourself what a given book was about.