LEARNING THROUGH ACTION

Let's face it, you can read up and study a subject all you want, and you can learn a great deal, but eventually you'll come to a stand still in your learning process unless you start to APPLY what you have learned.

Say you've been studying gardening. You may have necessary growing season, seed depth at planting, and preferred lighting of every plant memorized, but that still won't net you any tomatoes.

There comes a point when your learning will only advance when you take ACTION!

When you start applying your education to actual doing, you begin to develop another critical learning tool. Experience. The immediate benefit, of course, is that you'll start to see things you've learned play out right in front of you. You won't have to accept that learning on faith anymore. Through experience, you gain a knowledge for yourself.

Experience undoubtedly leads to mistakes, but even they are great for learning. Keep track of how you do things so that when mistakes do happen you'll have some information ready to help you analyze them. Often, analyzing what went wrong leads to new ideas of how to make things work better.

ADVANCED LEARNING

By now you've covered basics in your chosen field and you've started to apply what you have learned into action. You've got some experience of your own now, and you are learning from your mistakes.

How then do you advance further?

Obviously, if you've been in contact with an expert you can still gain from that contact, but you've also developed another important resource at this point as well. Yourself.

If world still depended on knowledge of first generations of man, you would not be reading this today. Obviously then, it is possible to create new ideas and advance into new ground based on basics of education that you already possess.

This is creativity.

They key to creativity is to constantly be thinking of ways to improve. Look for holes or rough spots in a process, then think of how you can fill them or smooth them out. Look also at best points and discern what element makes it best. Can that element then be used in entire process?

Asking questions of both others with knowledge and experience and yourself can lead to answers that further your education. Talk things out with someone you respect or learned from in past. Always maintain a relationship with those you've determined to be good resources.