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Getting motivated and sticking with it are actually easier for independent learners than for many classroom students. You’re going to be working on something you’re passionate or curious about, something you feel strongly that you need to know. You are going to have autonomy over what you’re learning and how you’re learning it.

Community

The most significant factor in staying motivated and learning effectively is participation in learning communities of any size. A ready-made community is one of the few advantages of formal school, but you’ve seen in the interviews here that it’s also an easy thing to get access to without school. You can track down existing communities of learners, or start your own. One good strategy is to search for email lists related to the subject you’re interested in. Additionally, you can ask friends to join you in your learning project or to refer you to other people interested in the same area. Start a reading or skill-learning group for people who want to learn what you’re learning or find one. Attend classes or open workspace sessions at a local hackerspace. Ask friends who might know of a group of students working on an extracurricular project and offer to help out. One great independent learning secret is that people I interviewed who liked college usually said that one of the best parts was their extracurricular collaborations — so you can join in on those without paying tuition.

Community is also important to your learning because your community gives you feedback on what you are making and thinking about. Discussion, disagreement, debate, critique, suggestions, corrections, and reinforcement all contribute to making sure you’re improving your skills and knowledge. These activities hold you to a community standard of rigorous thought or qual- ity of creative work.

You can use a learning community to give yourself nonarbitrary account- ability to the pace of your learning and the depth of your learning. Nonarbitrary means the deadline exists for a consequential reason, usually because it has an effect on others if you don’t meet it. For instance, a deadline that’s tied to a specific amount of time you have to finish something, like time off from work. In that case, telling other people what you’re setting out to accomplish can help hold you to your plans. Another effective deadline strategy is a deadline that is set so that a group can accomplish something together (such as reading a

book by a certain date); this is a community responsibility, and it’s easier to hold yourself to than a randomly chosen deadline, whether it’s from a syllabus or from a personal schedule. Yes, you could read that book next month instead of now, but if your friends are expecting you to lead a discussion on it, you’re more likely to do it now, to keep your learning in the present rather than in a hypothetical future. Simply declaring your intentions to others is another way of holding yourself accountable.

Learning within a community is a collective activity. You collaborate, share, teach, and learn. It’s important to be a community member who contrib- utes — community is a two-way street. Offering to teach others something you already know is the best way to join or initiate a learning community. You’re introducing yourself as a positive contributor as well as an eager learner.

Keeping track of what you learn and internalizing knowledge

Research shows that people who have autonomy over their learning and learn new things in concrete contexts have stronger retention of what they’ve learned. So you’ve already got a leg up on this as an independent learner. Keeping track and internalizing what you learn is another area in which you’ll need to explore options and figure out what works best for you. Some people take copious notes, both systematically and unsystematically. They use notebooks, index cards, or programs such as Evernote and Scriv- ener. Others teach their new skills or knowledge in an informal context. For many people, simply the act of discussing what they’ve learned in con- versation is all they need to make it stick. Writing summaries or reflections about your learning and sharing them with others is also a great strategy, particularly if you are involved in or looking for a community of learners. If you are making a project, you may find that the project itself and the failed attempts by which you’ve figured out how to make it are a clear and useful record of what you’ve learned. Some learners collect scraps and make doo- dles of what they’re learning.

Some of the people I spoke with reported that they are not very good at keeping notes or records on what they’re learning, but that contextual learning is how they internalize and hold on to what they’ve learned.

If you’re eager to find a written strategy for recording what you’ve learned, check out the

Resources

181 how to be an Independent learner

Getting help

Your community is going to be your first stop for getting help when you get stuck or are confused. This could be your in-person community or online communi- ties you’re part of, whether it’s your social network or a relatively anonymous helping community such as Stack Overflow. Start asking around if you need help; chances are that if nobody knows the answer, at least one person will be able to refer you to someone with the ability to help you. Online help forums for specific skills and areas of knowledge are plentiful, and practicing the ability to find your own answers by asking others and seeing what others have already asked and answered is a skill independent learners develop. These skills are also a significant advantage in the world of work.

You might think that access to professors and experts is an exclusive priv- ilege of being a registered student, but this is far from the truth. Independent learners frequently get in touch with experts who are more than willing to help them or discuss their ideas and knowledge.

You’re likely to get a better response if you make sure to clearly express both your enthusiasm for the subject and the fact that you’ve done some “home- work” already. Most of these people are willing to be generous, but they’re also busy. Here are some tips for reaching out:

■ Read their work or look at their projects before you write to them.

■ Ask specific and detailed questions that are relatively brief. Don’t ask ques- tions that can be answered by a thorough Google search.

■ Give positive feedback; briefly tell them what excites you about their work or the ways in which it has influenced you. If you want to find out about their other work, make sure you’ve already used the standard tools and give them a sense of the work you know about. If they have a large body of work, it’s okay to ask them where you should look next given your particular interests. ■ Expect relatively brief responses and only ask follow-on questions if you’re

invited to.