money for nothin, learn for free

Free education

Podcasts, blogs, YouTube, reddit, Facebook, google. These names can mean a thousand words, but I think the least likely word would be “education” or even “learning”. Why is that? The internet is only 10616 days old and in those days, thousands of years of humanity’s collective knowledge has been uploaded there for free. 10616 days…what have you done to take advantage of this time?

We all love the internet, and I could argue that a large percentage of us hated school. Well, times have changed, you don’t need to go to school to do a course on something you’re interested about anymore. If you love the internet then learning what you want to on the internet will be even more exciting and possibly much less expensive. I want to educate myself on a lot of things but I am a stinge, a serious cheapskate, with a desire to learn as much as I can, especially learning it on my own. Well all of this is possible, there are hundreds of sites and forums filled with fantastic selfless people sharing and building a community of whatever they are interested in, creating and helping a community of beginner’s and experts on any topic. There is so much opportunity around every corner, all given for free right in front of your computer.

So how do you access all this education? Easy, and we all know the answer…google it. But in all seriousness some of the best ways to educate yourself on any subject you’d like are: following pages on Facebook, following experts or even beginners of your same interest on twitter, subreddits, YouTube. Almost anywhere you go you can find what you’re looking for. Think of all these websites as virtual mentors, passing down knowledge to whoever is willing to listen.
Where to find the information is not the point of this post, you can have fun finding it yourself. The point im trying to make is to give you inspiration to follow whatever interest you have burning within you and take advantage of all the free information that some awesome people have decided to share for free. Use this time in history to be one of the people who used the power of the internet to become their very own experts in whatever they liked.
I believe that if you want to learn something, you should surround yourself in that subject as much as possible. It’s no wonder the best way to learn a new language is by surrounding yourself with people who speak the language. If you want to learn about stocks for example, then follow as many people who talk about stocks on twitter, join multiple stocks Facebook pages, ask questions- join the community. You’ll wake up with stock info and answers to your questions on your phone each morning. And by the end of all that following, you’ll be surrounded by stock information and without knowing it you will be educating yourself without even trying.
Before I go, id like to leave a quote that inspires me;
“I have never let schooling interfere with my education”- Mark Twain.