Renew Your Appetite For Learning

If your love of learning was stolen from you in early schooling, it is time to take it back.

Consider yourself one of a few students arriving early for a first class, eager to learn. The teacher / facilitator asks, "where are the other students?" Trying to be helpful and having just entered you respond "most seem to be down the hall waiting for the bell."

The teacher looks at you and obviously annoyed asks "well why aren't you getting them like I asked?" Even as you head to the hall on her implication you think silently" I did not hear you ask for action, I just heard you ask for information."

You now have a huffy teacher and a class where an eager early arriver has learned not to volunteer a response. All of this occurs before the first class starts.

When the teacher later complains about how dull the class is, not responding instantly to her questions, you just listen. What will you do if she directs the question at you "Why are you not contributing to class?"

• Do you shrug your shoulders and remain mute

• Do you respond "Because you ask questions and expect us to guess correctly if it is a question or some unstated demand?

• Do you explain that communications requires two parties, sender and receiver, both of which are prone to error. This requires a non-defensive mental posture allowing verification and adjustment if communications are to remain effective.

Or are you more likely to wish it was break time, knowing there is no escape from answering the question in a way that will annoy an already aggressive defender of her personal authority. The teacher already "knows" the problem or she wouldn't ask.

She thinks everybody is too slow to follow her directions. She does not even consider that her directions might be vague and her short follow up responses condescending. The most outspoken, precise, and valuable student contributors are also those quickest to learn; you have learned that it is painful to contribute to this class.

Let's consider the alternative. You have just discovered hang gliding, and you love it. You read books and magazines, you bookmark good hang gliding blogs, and you hang out with experienced hang gliders; listening intently and asking questions. This is natural learning.

The types of books you read may quickly expand as your knowledge of the field expands. You study engineering, aeronautics, fabric types and dyes, geography, and emergency medical procedures. You are quickly becoming a renaissance person, your ever expanding knowledge keeps pulling you into new fields of endeavor and contemplation.

You specific passion guides you to explore diverse knowledge, and because learning is driven by your own desire, you retain this knowledge.

Of even greater significance is the probability your passion of the moment will lead you to your life's passion as you explore new areas of knowledge. In our example you might discover you love emergency medicine, particularly relating to sports.

You have discovered self-directed, interest-based learning; the most efficient learning is always student initiated.

From what you now understand of yourself you can consider becoming a sports trainer, an EMT, and perhaps an emergency room nurse or doctor. As you read and talk to those in the field you will find other options.

Options you would probably never find sitting in a class room. Now you can add specific classes if they will help define your new sports medicine goals or move you toward goal completion.

Find a passion and drill into it with reading and inter-personal research. You may just find your life's passion - the one that will provide meaning to your life. You can live your own life;

or you could just survive formal school and take the first reasonable job offered

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BFU -- Accept No Substitutes

Actually there are no reasonable substitutes.

BFU is student-directed learning, the most efficient route to wisdom and understanding.

BFU is just a tool, a catalyst to empower your desire to achieve meaning in life. Self-directed, interest-based learning can profoundly enable excellence.

The substitutes you are offered against directing your own learning are the Frankenthoughts of industrial age formal schools. To discern their value to your life's passions consider their dominate marketing claims.

• "You need to do well in grade school so you can do well in high school."

• "You need to do well in high school so you can go to college."

• "You need to do well in college so you can start a good career."

Is that how you want to invest your life? Getting through college to get a job? Then getting through jobs to get retirement? Have you asked yourself about the difference between "what should I be doing?" and "what in my heart do I want to do?"

Think of all the professional careers that are now being lost to technology or lower cost providers. I recently had an initial consultation with a specialist physician on the phone. I was at his office, he could have been half a world away.

How long before they do surgery remotely, or by robot? The technology already exists or can be created by entrepreneurs. All that stops it are regulatory hurdles local doctors have captive bureaucrats draft to protect their home turf. No other profession seems to have this level of protection from competition, it won't last forever.

Decades of your life can be spent entering a career with all the promise of buggy whip specialist. Your school is not likely to tell you to quit studying a soon to be obsolete field; segmenting and dispensing knowledge is the only business they know (besides asking for more money).

You can not make a diminishing career option more valuable - the longer you stay with it the more you lose and the harder it will be to leave. You need to chart your own course and start a new journey.

What has no substitute is making yourself more valuable.

• Become a life long learner - because you have re-discovered how to love learning.

• Learn how to quit - if you are in a hole, stop digging - if the boat is sinking, get off.

• Commit - to an adaptive general life view, determined to remain flexible within it.

Everyone has a different idea of what you should do. Ultimately you will decide on your own success in life. I can't picture you saying "My life has been a success because I always conformed to others expectations."

Become a jack of all trades, and a master of one. Which one? By becoming a generalist first you increase your odds of finding that one passion that will ignite your quest for mastery.

BFU is student directed learning for visionaries and entrepreneurs.

The only satisfying success will be one you define, the only route is to self-direct your own life.

Your knowledge of an alternative to a life molded by others offers you choice. If BFU represents your journey from self discovery to self determination how could there be an acceptable substitute?

You may as well register for BFU - at no charge - right now. If you chose the satisfaction of pursuing wisdom and understanding on your own terms, you have accepted the BFU concept for which there is no substitute.


Live Your Own Life!

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