A New Improved You . Ver 20.21
Be a Wise Guy
20 years back, if you wanted to learn something on your own (on the sly), in India — the options were:
- read a book; buy/subscribe a magazine
- watch Discovery Channel on cable (TV/Cable were mostly about entertainment) or switch on to a state run radio channel.
- go out — attend a seminar or get admitted to evening classes in an institute
- do a correspondence course
Number of websites were limited…bandwidth was iffy… modems were creaky and moody! If you are anywhere near 40 or above — you get the idea.
I am a teacher & this is my favorite topic for discussion. Today if you want to self learn, the options are mind boggling. Knowledge is available on tap. And it’s Freeee! If Da Vinci was alive, he would would have gone mad.
In cities today, when air is poisonous but bandwidth is healthy — you can :
- see a video on YouTube. (Hell, it has MIT professors on it!)
- stream knowledge channels on Amazon Prime
- listen to a podcast
- download a torrent (yes, that’s a moral quagmire…but still…wink/wink!)
- attend free webinars being advertised on Instagram/Facebook
- download Google Apps
- read Blogs
- download any book on Amazon or any websites like freepdfbook.com
- hire an online teacher
- join online courses like Coursera, edX
5 years ago, after working for 15 years in the corporate world selling insurance, trading accounts, savings accounts… ; when I decided to start teach Maths/Physics to high school kids; all the lessons that I had learnt during my engineering from two and half decade ago were as distant as Andromeda.
It’s only the free stuff available from the above sources that helped me, inch by inch, to relearn the fundamentals.
And this time, the learning was far more richer and juicer. I learnt about Calculus and Electrodynamics as well as about Newton and Maxwell by searching for their biographies on YouTube.
My experience this time is far more deeper —than what was more than two decades ago. (O! those green chalkboards and the semi-bored half sleeved professors. )
And this has helped me run my tutoring business confidently today.
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Don’t worry about what the political parties are fighting about and the celebrities are cooking/snorting — get busy getting wiser every day.
As I tell my kid —don’t let the TV get smarter than you are 😋
✽✿❁ Wish you a wiser new year, dear reader ✽✿❁
