To be self-taught, is to know in vain. To be self-educated, is to know that you are a student of your community. Self-interested education is the bridge between exploration, awareness, and consistency. Most of your RuneScape journey and real life experiences, is just an ongoing series of trial and error.
In this chapter, I want to address the fallacy around the concept of being self-taught, and the consequences for relying on it. Self-teaching is a weird philosophy, because it naturally wires your brain to stay in survival mode. An issue comes up, you respond to it incorrectly and so you try something, hell, anything else as an immediate backup plan. Does that sound like a good strategy to execute repeatedly, especially in critical moments when the stakes are high? Perhaps it was in the Stone Age, but maybe not so much anymore.
If trial and error only teaches you to do something else, then it’s almost impossible to have structure or a process in your life when it comes to problem solving. Your life becomes a gamble, a roll of the dice, a lottery ticket, and you attribute all of your success to luck. Something to note about video games, is that there is usually only a finite number of ways to get to the next level. Video games require you to have a process for progressing through the stages from beginning to end. Gambling does not require you to have a logical process, as chance determines a success or failure result, end of story.
When you’re in a cycle of guessing and throwing paint at the wall to see what sticks, it’s difficult to keep track of your actions. Imagine repeating a failing action every few tries, because you can’t remember if it had worked or not. This is what I call non-functional multi-tasking, by mixing new trials with old ones that have previously failed. Multi-tasking isn’t impossible, but it isn’t always practical – especially when it obscures and clouds processes.
Collaborative education is the pattern of questioning, hypothesizing, and validating actions to refine our awareness and decision-making processes. Usually you will follow a tightly documented process from someone (teacher, friend, aspirational figure) and evaluate it. Scientific method-like questions that may help you throughout the affairs of self-education are as follows:
- Is there a better way to complete this process? (relative, subjective, and fact-based)
- What do I hope to achieve? (relative, subjective, and fact-based)
- What happens after modifying steps? Can I still get the same or better results consistently? (fact-based)
- Has this new process transformed to serve me better? (relative, subjective, and fact-based)
The reason we ask questions like the above, is to multiply the value our actions can create. To know if there’s a better process, collaborate often. To know what you hope to achieve, self-reflect. To know what happens after a change, don’t fail to measure, but measure well. To know what serves you, make the most of what you have patience for.
Change for the sake of change, is typically the result of self-teaching. Change because you must, change because someone or something has influenced you, change because your goals have shifted, change because differences are something to be loved rather than feared. When you collaborate, perspectives and approaches differ. If you are to teach yourself anything, teach yourself to be a mirror for others – so that they may be a mirror for you.
Your community will likely have tried and failed at many things, and also documented the steps to recreate success consistently. Leverage the knowledge of those that came before you, and build upon working processes when possible. Planned consistency and collaboration is the foundation of lightning fast development.