As you might know, I’m a big believer in self-education. I believe that everyone should embrace lifelong learning and that it’s important to have a knowledge advantage.
A big part of self-education is reading books. For that reason, I’m always eager to know what good books are out there.
So here is my question for you:
What are the best nonfiction books that you have read recently and why?
Please share your answer in the comments so that everyone can read it. Thanks!
You’re reading 5 Crucial Results of Self-Education, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Where do you get your education?
Teachers. College and university.If you stop there with the answer, your concept of getting educated is utterly wrong. Education is not something other people give to you. It’s something you earn by yourself. It’s all about how much will you invest in the process.
When you move away from the grades and degrees, what are you left with? Do you know enough about the world that surrounds you? Never! You never know enough!
The process of self-education continues throughout our entire life. In a way, learning is a goal that gives us direction and sense.
You’re still not convinced? We’ll list 5 great benefits you’ll get by staying committed to self-education.
Bill Gates got enough education, right? That didn’t stop him from learning. This is what he said in an interview for The New York Times, answering the question what role reading plays in his life “It is one of the chief ways that I learn, and has been since I was a kid. These days, I also get to visit interesting places, meet with scientists and watch a lot of lectures online. But reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding.”
Self-paced learning makes you proficient in any skill and profession. The more you do it, the better you become.
“When most people first take an online course, they get stuck,” – says Pimen Brown, a writer from AussieWritings.com. “They come to get help with different projects, and many give up somewhere along the way. It’s not time or skill they lack. It’s willpower. If they are persistent, however, they go through the course although they struggle with it. Then, they take another one. With time, learning becomes easy. They see it as a necessity and they are fully committed to it.”
Your willpower will grow as you push yourself to achieve the goals you set. Self-education helps you develop discipline and will. It builds a strong character.
When you’re committed to learning, you start taking online courses. The best platforms for online learning give you access to discussion forums related to the courses you take. There, you communicate with other people with similar interests and goals. Moreover, you connect with elite tutors.
If you start attending conferences and seminars related to your interest, you’ll develop even more connections. Self-education gives you an ability to choose a personal mentor, who will guide you towards progress.
Self-paced learning is not as easy as it seems. If you already have a job or you’re studying, it’s hard to fit this goal within your schedule. When you’re committed enough, however, you’ll find a way to compress more goals and responsibilities in a day. That’s called smart time management.
You’ll do that by achieving higher levels of focus. Here are three simple tips to help you with that:
So you got an MBA, but you don’t find yourself on that path? You were always interested in psychology and you’re sorry you didn’t get such a degree? Well, you can always learn the things you want to know. You don’t need to go to school for that. You don’t even have to pay for expensive courses; there are tons of resources that help you learn for free.
Once you know enough, you can get a certificate and combine the new interest with your old profession. Business psychology is a very attractive industry nowadays.
Whatever interest you focus on, it can take your career path in a better direction. All it takes is commitment and strong willpower. With that, everything is possible.
Although traditional college and university education is still important, we should never stay limited to it. As a deeply enthusiastic person, you’ll always keep learning. You’ll get tons of benefits along the way, but this is the most important one: you’ll become a more interesting person. The more you know, the more attractive you become.
You’ve read 5 Crucial Results of Self-Education, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
You’re reading 5 Crucial Results of Self-Education, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Where do you get your education?
Teachers. College and university.If you stop there with the answer, your concept of getting educated is utterly wrong. Education is not something other people give to you. It’s something you earn by yourself. It’s all about how much will you invest in the process.
When you move away from the grades and degrees, what are you left with? Do you know enough about the world that surrounds you? Never! You never know enough!
The process of self-education continues throughout our entire life. In a way, learning is a goal that gives us direction and sense.
You’re still not convinced? We’ll list 5 great benefits you’ll get by staying committed to self-education.
Bill Gates got enough education, right? That didn’t stop him from learning. This is what he said in an interview for The New York Times, answering the question what role reading plays in his life “It is one of the chief ways that I learn, and has been since I was a kid. These days, I also get to visit interesting places, meet with scientists and watch a lot of lectures online. But reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding.”
Self-paced learning makes you proficient in any skill and profession. The more you do it, the better you become.
“When most people first take an online course, they get stuck,” – says Pimen Brown, a writer from AussieWritings.com. “They come to get help with different projects, and many give up somewhere along the way. It’s not time or skill they lack. It’s willpower. If they are persistent, however, they go through the course although they struggle with it. Then, they take another one. With time, learning becomes easy. They see it as a necessity and they are fully committed to it.”
Your willpower will grow as you push yourself to achieve the goals you set. Self-education helps you develop discipline and will. It builds a strong character.
When you’re committed to learning, you start taking online courses. The best platforms for online learning give you access to discussion forums related to the courses you take. There, you communicate with other people with similar interests and goals. Moreover, you connect with elite tutors.
If you start attending conferences and seminars related to your interest, you’ll develop even more connections. Self-education gives you an ability to choose a personal mentor, who will guide you towards progress.
Self-paced learning is not as easy as it seems. If you already have a job or you’re studying, it’s hard to fit this goal within your schedule. When you’re committed enough, however, you’ll find a way to compress more goals and responsibilities in a day. That’s called smart time management.
You’ll do that by achieving higher levels of focus. Here are three simple tips to help you with that:
So you got an MBA, but you don’t find yourself on that path? You were always interested in psychology and you’re sorry you didn’t get such a degree? Well, you can always learn the things you want to know. You don’t need to go to school for that. You don’t even have to pay for expensive courses; there are tons of resources that help you learn for free.
Once you know enough, you can get a certificate and combine the new interest with your old profession. Business psychology is a very attractive industry nowadays.
Whatever interest you focus on, it can take your career path in a better direction. All it takes is commitment and strong willpower. With that, everything is possible.
Although traditional college and university education is still important, we should never stay limited to it. As a deeply enthusiastic person, you’ll always keep learning. You’ll get tons of benefits along the way, but this is the most important one: you’ll become a more interesting person. The more you know, the more attractive you become.
You’ve read 5 Crucial Results of Self-Education, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
One only has to look at an electoral map from the 2016 presidential contest to get the feeling that America’s cities are at odds with the rest of the country. Kim Phillips-Fein’s excellent new book, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics, vividly depicts a period when New York was seen — not always positively — as an archetypal example of urban liberalism. Much of the emergency that defined New York’s mid-1970s character revolved around debt, accounting practices, and municipal bonds, but in Phillips-Fein’s hands it is not only exciting but extremely relevant, too.
In 1975, the city teetered on the brink of financial collapse, with no one eager to come to its rescue. (The New York Daily News‘s legendary headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” succinctly captured the position of the executive branch.) Fear City begins by laying out how Gotham had reached this perilous point. New York, more than any other American city, Phillips-Fein writes, had “an unusually expansive and generous local welfare state”; in addition to a sprawling network of public schools, public libraries, and playgrounds, its activist public sector had helped create two dozen municipal hospitals, ample public housing, day care centers for low-income families, drug-treatment centers, an inexpensive subway system, free entry to world-class museums, a network of tuition-free colleges, and more.
Many saw the city’s “generosity” as the cause of its financial distress, but Phillips-Fein points to a wider range of political and social factors. Federal subsidies for homeownership and federal investment in highways facilitated the white middle class’s postwar exodus to the suburbs, which greatly reduced the city’s tax base. By the early ’70s, the local loss of manufacturing jobs plus a nationwide recession led to an increase in spending on welfare for the poor, who, in New York, were increasingly African American and Latino. Faced with the choice of cutting popular services, raising taxes, laying off city employees, or borrowing money, three successive mayors — Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, and Abe Beame — felt there was no choice but to keep borrowing, in the author’s words, “[displacing] the conflicts the city confronted in the present onto the future.”
That future arrived in 1975. Phillips-Fein, a professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the author of 2009’s Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal, describes the city’s nosedive in a fast-paced, gripping account. The first brush with bankruptcy came in April, but Governor Hugh Carey’s creation of the Municipal Assistance Corporation (MAC), which gave New York emergency state aid to repay creditors in exchange for control of the city’s financial management, pulled New York from the brink.
The city was so deep in the red, however, that it was only a temporary fix, and by October New York was again unable to meet its debt obligations. Only the federal government, it seemed, could bail the city out this time, but President Ford, who blamed New York for its problems, was unmoved. Secretary of the Treasury William Simon, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Greenspan, and Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, together urged him to let the city default, believing that bankruptcy would not only teach New York a lesson but would send a strong warning to other cities about the perils of government spending. Politicians and bankers who favored helping the city worried that default would send a different kind of message — that the symbolism of a bankrupt New York City would set off a nationwide financial panic.
Phillips-Fein, putting archival sources like meeting minutes to dramatic use, reveals all the last-minute machinations to forestall disaster. At a White House meeting, an emotional Mayor Beame, pleading with the president for help, argued that European tourists, after all, weren’t coming to America to visit Detroit or Columbus; an indignant Ford reminded Beame that he himself was from Michigan, while even the vice president, New Yorker Nelson Rockefeller, quietly warned the mayor not to “get carried away.” Beame’s point, though clumsily made, resonates in Phillips-Fein’s account, as the author also suggests that the country owed something to its preeminent city. She notes, for instance, that New York had historically “offered a vast program of social benefits to African Americans, who had come north because they were fleeing the violence and exclusion of Jim Crow; in other words, the city had picked up the bill for the sins of the American South.”
New York’s black residents would be among those to suffer the most when the city was ultimately saved from bankruptcy for the second time. This time, Governor Carey pushed through a law allowing the city to pay only interest, not principal, to creditors for one year. The city’s finances were put under the control of a corporate-leaning Emergency Financial Control Board. When the state legislature also approved large tax hikes, Ford at last committed to a financial aid package for the city, claiming to be satisfied that the city and state had committed to a future of fiscal austerity.
Indeed it had. “Underneath all the technicalities of the refinancing agreements,” Phillips-Fein notes, “was a promise to fundamentally restructure how New York City worked — to drastically cut the budget and shift spending away from social services.” Garbage piled up in the streets after sanitation layoffs; public schools squeezed forty-five or fifty kids into classrooms at overcrowded, understaffed schools; the FDNY laid off hundreds even as fire deaths were on the rise. The book gets its title from “Welcome to Fear City,” a pamphlet created by police officers embittered by layoffs, warning visitors to New York to stay off the subway and avoid being on the streets after 6 p.m. Crime worsened and poverty deepened. (Meanwhile, art and music scenes thrived amid the squalor, and one wishes Phillips-Fein had paid more than glancing attention to that milieu.)
Underlying these immediate effects was a deeper transformation. The fiscal crisis “seemed to delegitimize an entire way of thinking about cities and what they might do for the people who live in them,” the author writes. New York committed, above all else, to making itself attractive to business and investors. In an allusion to the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Felix Rohatyn, the financier who’d chaired the MAC board, crowed, “This time around, New York City should look to Europe and say, ‘Give me your rich!’ ” Here are the roots of the city we have today, where extreme wealth and extreme poverty exist side by side. In one shift that now feels particularly portentous, in 1976 a government agency that had roots in low-income housing turned instead to commercial real estate, giving a sweetheart deal for a flashy midtown hotel to a brash young developer. Who was it? Here’s a hint: four decades later, during his campaign for president, he repeatedly said that minorities in cities were “living in hell.”
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2soBn2y
If there were just one Chinese in the world, he could be the lonely sage contemplating life and nature whom we come across on the misty mountains of Chinese scrolls. If there were two Chinese in the world, a man and a woman, lo, the family system is born. And if there were three Chinese, they would form a tight-knit, hierarchically organized bureaucracy. But how many Chinese would there have to be to generate a religion? It could be just one—that Daoist sage in the mountains—but in reality it takes a village, according to Ian Johnson in his wonderful new book, The Souls of China. Chinese religion, Johnson writes, had little to do with adherence to a particular faith.
The law professors Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker have written a revealing book about the history of the death penalty in the US and, in particular, the continued difficulties the Supreme Court has had in attempting to regulate capital punishment so that it conforms to constitutional standards. If I have a criticism of their otherwise trenchant account, it is of their failure to give more than passing attention to the moral outrage that provides much of the emotional support for the death penalty—outrage felt not only by the family and friends of a murder victim, but also by the many empathetic members of the public who, having learned the brutal facts of the murder, feel strongly that the murderer has forfeited his own right to live.
“The beauty you see in me is a reflection of you” – Rumi
When I was younger, I often questioned why people did not treat me nicely. I would doubt why they did not communicate with me, even though I was such an interesting and well-versed person.
Probably, I thought, because they are not at my level of education and are just interested in simple things.
Later on, I wondered why men aren’t courting me or showing signs of attention, even though I always acted as a very nice and loving person and tried to always look good. Later, in business, I was also perplexed why clients were not choosing me among others. That is even though I always communicated professionally and did my best to understand their needs.
In situations like these, I was tempted to think that the people around me were wrong, that they did not understand the depth of my nature, the value of my presence or the accuracy of my offers. Though, while such thoughts helped me to feel better, they did not make the people around me nicer.
Until one day, I realized the secret which fixed all the “wrong” people and made them very “right”.
The secret is very simple:
I am responsible for everything that is happening in my life. I am responsible for creating the way other people treat me. And I came to realize that the way I acted in the past, even though it seemed right for me, was not a “winning strategy”. It was simply not the right way!
Here are some of the things that helped me learn how to deal with people.
I was always smart and the people around me just didn’t have the opportunity to show they were actually smart, too. The lesson for me was to learn how to be “unsmart” or “foolish”.
I learned to show my vulnerability, ask for advice and reach out for help and support as often as I could. Being able to be smart and unsmart at the same time is such a beautiful combination. It allows me to pour my knowledge when others need it or to empty myself for receiving new knowledge when I need it.
What was I doing wrong by being loving? What could be better and more desired by men than that? Why were men still treating me bad?
For sure, something was wrong with them. At least, that’s what I thought to myself. Mistake!
Intelligence is a lot like love. If you are always full of it, then the people around you wouldn’t have a chance to add to it and this makes them very confused. The real winning strategy here is to be attentive whether the love you give is accepted and well perceived.
If you come to the point when you give so much out of your full heart but you receive no response, then it’s a clear indicator to switch off your flow.
For example, every time you think of sending another love message to your partner, send it to yourself and show love to yourself. Every time you want to suggest something fun and entertaining, suggest it to yourself and do this exclusively for yourself.
Do not be afraid to lose your partners. It is just not possible to not love a person who loves and respects herself/himself. The quality of your partners will go up.
Start with making small experiments with this new strategy. Building up this balance between loving your partner and loving yourself is a jewel addition that can promote self-development. I guarantee you will love the effects.
Why would people not want to work with me? Again, it is not about me being cool, but about how they feel next to me. I realized my strong stand made them feel threatened, low and tightened. I also realized that professional business is not only about the uniqueness and greatness of my product, but about whether people feel comfortable, appreciated, respected, fulfilled and honored next to me.
I learned that maximizing professionalism and maximizing empathy and care go hand in hand.
This is how I approach “inconvenient” people now:
See Also: How To Develop Empathy By Understanding Subjective Hardship
The bottom line is simple:
I came to realize that those people who seemed nasty or “bad” to me came to my life as teachers.
They taught me things I once considered wrong or inappropriate. However, looking more deeply into the issue, I found some brilliant lessons that helped me learn to love myself as well as others. Those lessons helped me give freedom to others and to set the rules, to know how to let go and to appreciate what I have. I also learned to keep my mind flexible and open.
I understood that when I got irritated about someone, that was exactly the opportunity for me to identify and correct my rigid beliefs. Enlightening these “gray” areas of my mind helped me to gain more clarity about all the situations of my life and to become much happier and reasonable.
When life teaches you through other people, do your best to understand the lessons it presents and work on achieving that perfect balance in your personality. Thank these people for making you more aware, skilled, and happy.
People are not bad. All people are, in fact, good. Each of us is born from a divine sparkle and everyone has some goodness. You just have to know how to deal with people and how to bring out the best in them.
See Also: 12 Stressful Things To Let Go Of If You Want To Live A Calm Life
The post How To Deal With People: Little-Known Secrets To Make People Like You appeared first on Dumb Little Man.
Sig Nordal 