Learning can be like a vacation

When was the last time that you went on a vacation? What are the steps that you took before you left?

Most of us when we normally go on a vacation, we first decide where we want to go, we check the travel advice and advisories, we book our flight, we take care of our health, we research the destination, we pick what is our must do, we plan our itinerary and finally we book our accommodation and leaving for our vacation.

The steps may change from person to person and the ?destination, however the above is just an outline of what we normally do when we go on a vacation.This will be customized to suit each person depending on where he or she wants to go.

Learning can be similar!

When we decide to learn, we first are to decide where we are to go. What is our objective of learning, what is it we want to achieve, is it a skill like public speaking, writing, learning music or something else we might be interested.

When we go on a vacation, we check the travel advice.In learning we are to check out the books, online courses, could be contacting our mentors, or some one else who could give us advice.

We then book our flight when going on a vacation.In learning, this could mean checking which books to buy which fulfill our aim of learning the skill,or enrolling for online course or joining a public speaking course or a music class or something else we may choose.

Health is next.This is the most important as unless we are in the best of health it will ruin our vacation, similarly it will affect our ability to learn and achieve what we want to achieve

Next is the research part, which in the case of a vacation will be the destination.In learning it will be researching the topic by reading the books, studying more on the topic and going deep until we learn what we can.

After we research, we focus on the must do.As everything thing we read and learn on online courses may not be possible to immediately apply in our lives. Similarly, when going?on a vacation it is not possible to see everything in the place ?where we decide to go. We focus on the place we want to see which is what we do when we want to learn a skill.

We then plan our itinerary in a vacation.Similarly, in learning, we plan the steps we require to take to?get to our destination, of say, learning music, which is so to say our itinerary in learning music!

Finally, it is booking the accommodation and leaving for our vacation which can be compared to actually following through by applying what we learn in our lives.If we learn music, it could be actually performing live in a concert, if we learn public speaking it could be actually speaking on stage and in writing it could be actually writing what we want to write!

As on a vacation each is to customize their learning.The book “The first 20 Hours” How to learn anything Fast by Josh Kaufman is a good book which gives a good insight on learning anything we want to learn in the fastest way possible.

Important is that it is only when learning ?is treated as fun and like a vacation will we be inspired to be life long learners!