If you hear the word “self-study” during a lecture at a university, I bet you get a dizzy spell. What a nasty word it is as it makes everybody feel bad. Could it have the opposite effect though? It could, no doubt.

Self-study is a process of learning that involves studying without supervision or attendance in a classroom. It can be conducted within the scope of an academic course, of your own free will to improve your grades, or it can also be enjoyable pastime. Usually, the methods that we use while studying at our own pace are more interesting, varied, and creative than the ones we use in a regular school.

Moreover, the all-time growing interest towards being successful and prominent, which presupposes being one of the smart ones, too, requires enrolling in self-study courses, watching supplementary videos and reading extra articles or books. As probably all of you know, there are such resources as TED Talks, Coursera, Edex that are pioneers in the contemporary world of self-education. All of the resources mentioned are well-structured, they cover many fields from self-motivation and time management to statistical database building and cybernetics. Of course, there are some language and teaching courses, too. So, whether you want to study the difference between the definite and the indefinite articles in general, or if you are eager to find out the details of why we say “a Rockefeller” and “a Porsche” and, more than that, why Mary becomes “the Mary”  and the sun turns into “a sun”, self-study is just what you need.

Turning back to the title, what does self-paced education have to do with millionaires? Well, lives of many of them are closely connected with what we are discussing here. Let’s take, for instance, the personality of Jobs, the Steve Jobs we all know. He is one of the greatest examples showing the essence and the benefits of self-education. In his famous Stanford speech, around the third minute of the speech,  Jobs talks about dropping-out the university and dropping-in the courses he really loved. In short, we would never have the same Apple devices if Steve Jobs hadn’t enrolled in a self-study calligraphy course. This distinguished man built the Apple Empire relying on self-study only  as he dropped out of Reed College almost at once.

So, I believe that the best advice is to listen to what your heart wants and to follow its urges because you never know when you will connect your own dots.

Originally published: http://yae33.blogspot.com/2015/11/self-study-or-how-to-become-millionaire.html