This is a guest post written by Scott Young. You can check out his website here.

In an increasingly global economy, the explosion of the internet and the rising cost of formal education I believe self-education is going to become tomorrow’s norm. When jobs can be easily outsourced across the world and complete career changes are common, it is going to be up to you to educate yourself.

Self-education can take a variety of forms. It can be skill based, as in the person who teaches herself how to paint. It can be information based, as in the person who takes the time to understand world affairs. Often it is somewhere between the two, from learning how to run a business, do your own taxes or program a computer.

Regular education is too slow to rely on entirely. Universities, colleges and even job-training can provide some of the basics, but they simply aren’t enough. It can take half a decade to accumulate knowledge for a degree that is going to be outdated in a few years. Worse, formal education accumulates a lot of unnecessary knowledge, that isn’t practical.

I believe there are networking and other benefits from formal education, but I think you are probably kidding yourself if you believe that is enough to survive in today’s world. You are going to have to master the ability to teach yourself, because by the time you wait for someone else to it is going to be after you lose a job, business opportunity or promotion.

Tips for Self-Education

I’ve taught myself a lot of things including, computer programming, writing and running business activities. Teaching yourself has many advantages over formal education in speed and flexibility, but it can be a difficult process to adopt if you are used to receiving instructions. Here are a couple strategies I have found for educating myself:

Set Unreasonable Goals

It is unreasonable to set a goal that you have no idea how to accomplish. Those are exactly the goals you have to set. Self-education works best when it is a practical necessity towards a greater goal or drive. If you want to run a website, this goal will give you the urge to learn how to do it.

If you want to be good at something, I suggest you start by tackling projects you don’t know how to do. Small projects that are outside your expertise provide the basis from where you can learn. Formal education has it backwards, you don’t learn something to use it later, you learn something to use it now.

Build a Reference Base

Although self-education is primarily a “learn it as you need it” endeavor, it helps to have a base of information at your disposal. Buy books and reference material that you can call up when you need more information about a subject.

When learning web programming, I started by trying to program and design a few simple pages. I only learned what I needed to learn to accomplish my goals. But when I would get stuck with a problem I could return to my reference books and reread the basics and details to solve my problem.

Once again this is an inverted process for formal education which gets you to read the textbooks and then do the test. Self-education causes you to do the task and read the textbook when you need to. Operating on a small base of knowledge may be a little daunting at first, but you will improve your abilities much faster.

Use Instruction as a Backup

There are times when self-education is going to break down and you need some actual instruction. I use instruction as a back-up rather than a main tool, but it is still good to have mentors to advise you. I have dozens of people I can ask advice from when running my personal development website, ranging from writing to technical questions.

Forums are a good way to start building contacts you can use for help in an area. Try to form deeper connections with different people so that you can get a better quality of advice. In any of my attempts at self-education I always found a few people who could give me instruction when things went awry.

Life University

Teaching yourself may be a bit daunting, but I believe it is going to become an inevitability in our changing world. Enroll yourself in life university where you are professor and student. Set those unreasonable goals and teach yourself the skills you need to succeed.

About the Author:

Scott Young runs a popular personal development website (subscribe here). Some of his most popular articles include: Double Your Reading Rate, How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying and Habitual Mastery. You can get his free e-book on Holistic Learning here.