How to advance your career this month: Edutainment
If you can swap out only a small portion of your entertainment time for education time, you’ll exponentially increase your value as an employee, or as a freelancer in the open market.
Think of it this way: our skills and our knowledge are subject to inflation of information. Every year, technology makes our jobs easier, thousands of people gain the skills we already have, and the value of our knowledge diminishes. As industries grow, and information spreads, our professional skills decrease in value. year after year after year.
To make matters worse, technology allows complex businesses to run easier and cheaper. Most small to medium-sized businesses no longer have a need for an IT team, a manufacturing team, or even a warehouse. These things, along with hundreds of other roles, can be outsourced, or eliminated completely. In many companies, there simply aren’t any advancement opportunities because there aren’t as many roles as there used to be. This is why it’s so important to take our education into our own hands. With no ladder available to climb, the company has no benefit in teaching you new skills. It’s on you.
But information isn’t all bad. The digital age has ushered in the most accessible and robust form of education the world has ever seen. Free (or virtually free) education on hyper-specific topics that is truly entertaining. Some call this edutainment.
If you spend 15 minutes during lunchtime, five days a week, watching educational videos on a specific topic, that adds up fast. In four months, you’ll have spent an entire 24-hour period learning. In a year, you’ll have spent almost three whole days learning. This is the equivalent of about six college units. And if we’re honest about many of the college classes we took, and the conferences we attended, well…most of them were tough to pay attention to. Not a whole lot of learning happened.
By swapping only 15 minutes per day of entertainment time with edutainment time, we get the added benefit of a fresh mind each time we learn. We learn from creators and educators who are incentivized to put out the most relevant content they can. And with all this edutainment, those who take responsibility for their own higher learning can outpace information inflation. They can exponentially increase their value in the market place with a small time investment.
If you’re looking for free education, check out some of my favorite channels.
Productivity: Matt D’Avella
Video Editing: Jordan Orme
Personal Finance: Steve Antonioni
DIY Videography: Karen Cheng
Guerilla Video Production: Jeremiah Davis
Picking Locks: Lockpicking Lawyer (if all else fails)
