We’re at an interesting point in history right now. If you’re reading this, chances are you literally have the ability to learn from the most talented and best individuals, in just about any subject, for free. You can go on Project Gutenberg and literally read the writings of Julius Ceasar, Benjamin Franklin, and thousands of others. You can jump on amazon and with two clicks and a few dollars read the autobiographies of titans of industry.
Last month I found a free online course called Interactive Game Programming on Coursera and literally spent a few hours learning how to make simple games that would have blown the minds off of people 40 years ago. A year or two ago I heard that every 48 hours the amount of information in the world grows by an amount greater than the sum of all the information on the planet prior to 2001. I think Sergey Brin said this, but don’t hold me to it as I can’t find a source now. You can follow the guy who brought back the electric car, builds amazing rockets, started a super successful solar company, and cofounded PayPal on Twitter!
Take advantage of it. Most people get home from a long day, tun on the TV, and watch a healthy mix of 50% advertising and 50% reruns. If they’re lucky they might catch a brand new episode of some show that isn’t even that good. When the average American watches 34 hours of television per week it really doesn’t take that much effort to get ahead of the pack.
Nice post Brett. I wholeheartedly agree with you, it’s amazing what we can learn these days for free or for just a few bucks. Have you ever heard of lynda.com? They’re an amazing website for learning anything related to computers, programming, and so on. It’s not free, but the quality of the instructional videos is stunning.
Anyway, so many things to learn, I feel sometimes it’s hard to focus on just a few. The challenge in the future will be mono-tasking. You gotta learn how to focus with all what’s available at our fingertips.