Before we talked about how freelancers communicate with customers and how to manage time while working, let's dive into the basic skill level of freelancing, and let's see how a freelancer can quickly develop self-learning skills.
In the third chapter, we will talk about various ways to improve your learning skills. Today's article focuses on the ability to acquire new concepts and expand your knowledge reserves, to turn knowledge into your competitive advantage and to be acutely aware of how learning can improve your personal quality of life comprehensively. Don't say much nonsense, let's get started.
If you are a freelancer, you should know how valuable soft skills are, especially in terms of learning skills. Now the world has been out of dependence on the university, the superstition of education, the rapid operation, if you refuse to learn new knowledge, technology, methods, you will soon be replaced by others. What we are talking about here is not whether you have the ability to recharge your studies, but how quickly and efficiently you can learn it, test it, and practice it.
When you are able to do all this, your chances of being replaced by others are greatly reduced, in other words, no one else will be able to catch up to your pace. So here I have to point out that the competition in the freelance labor market is not by setting an ultra-low price, or that you can decide whether or not your working hours are stretched, perhaps in the short run, but in the long run it will both ruin you and ruin your love for the job.
To use knowledge as a competitive advantage
In other words, if you are facing the competition, not at a very low price, long working hours to win, on the contrary, with a huge amount of knowledge reserves, experience, and professionalism to win, almost you have mastered the initiative. Because you have the core advantage, you can follow your own ideas to change the price of service providers, you can force yourself to work harder. These are things that anyone can do, and the ability to learn is not the case.
The acquisition of new knowledge and experience is not overnight can be done. This kind of self-investment requires you to pay a lot of personal time. Let's face it, they can't get into your brain like a copy sticker on a computer, you have to read, watch, and listen. And it's not over, the next step is to turn your knowledge into practice. Otherwise, everything you learn will soon lose its luster, which you may have experienced at school.
Based on your current industry, there are thousands of people who are jumping out of the starting line with you every day. Fortunately, although the base is so big, if you use the "really from the heart to learn" this standard to screen, almost the majority of people have been brushed down. What if we get another standard on top of this one? "Learning this thing has never stopped the moment, completed one more content worthy of our conquest?" "In this way, those who have just learned to stop before the people will be brushed down, and finally meet the two standards of people will be rare."
So the completion of the study plan, whether the standard is to be able to acquire knowledge, and the knowledge into a part of itself. In order to achieve a satisfactory result, you must put your knowledge into practice. Not only do you have to polish them regularly, but more importantly, they will become part of your body and no one can take them away. If your focus is on this, there are thousands of competitors who may have been reduced to a handful of individuals. Once you have completed self-study, you are no longer worried about whether the price fluctuations of freelancers in the market will affect your business, and you have jumped out of this ordeal.
or wide? or fine?
There is also a misguided thinking: Many people think you can only be a master in one field, and one cannot be proficient in many fields. This argument is often a defense of some of his actions, not truth.
It's a good idea to start a chapter in this truth. Here in order not to deviate from the subject, just to clarify this misunderstanding. In addition to people in the "fine" and "wide" on the non-black and white understanding, there are still the following misunderstanding
"Age" and "learning"
"Gee, I'm old enough to learn something new." "Have you heard this many times before?" he said. Do you say so yourself? This is the most unfortunate thing, when people feel that they are older than a certain age, they closed the door of self-learning knowledge. Frankly speaking, this sentence is somewhat reasonable. Scientific research has proved that: with the increase of age, people's memory capacity and other aspects of the emergence of a certain degree of degeneration, the older the greater the difficulty of learning new things will also improve. However, this is not inevitable.
In fact, we will slow down this decline in learning ability by following a series of steps described below. But first, let me give you two examples to prove that people's learning ability is not necessarily the decline with age. The first one is "neurons"; the second is "neural plasticity". How do these two things relate to your ability to learn? In short, neurons are a process of constantly producing new nerves in your brain, and "neural plasticity" means that the brain can change itself in order to adapt itself to the needs of the environment.
Neurons can make your brain produce new nerves to connect things in the brain, and you can imagine that every nerve is a signal tower that transmits information from one place to another. The more connections you have in your brain, the faster it can process the information and retrieve it faster. Simply put, neurons can improve your learning efficiency, and "neural plasticity" has a greater significance, which means that your brain can contribute to change according to different behaviors, circumstances, thoughts and emotions.
The current scientific research has shown that if your brain suffers from some trauma, it can actually respond by producing some of its own qualitative changes. These changes, ranging from small to large, reshape the entire structure of the brain, such as the responsibility for certain functions moving from one area of the brain to another.
Okay, bad?
People have always felt that both "neuronal regeneration" and "the adaptive environment of the brain" appear in childhood. Recent research has shown that these two roles are always present in your life. This brings us two conclusions, one is good and the other is bad. The good news is that you can stay in your long doctor and even improve your ability to learn, and the bad news is, of course, bad news for a certain part of the world that completely shatters your excuses for stopping progress.
"Too old to learn!" "This sentence is no longer tenable. Researchers also found that "neuronal regeneration" can be used to treat "Alzheimer's disease." Constantly give your big head to challenge, learn new things, expand your horizons, can reduce the degradation of learning ability, even can bring reversal! So even if you reach the age of 50, 60, learning can still make your life a different luster.
In fact, it boils down to the question of whether you are willing to devote your time to learning voluntarily and spontaneously. As with other things like weight loss, it's all about yourself and your will, whether you can make a decision and hold on to it. The benefits will be far more than your costs, are you willing to do so?
Let's assume that you are willing to restart your study now, assuming that you are different from those who have left the institution to stop learning the program, assuming you have the motivation to learn throughout your life and nothing to do with school, then where do you start?
The first thing that can improve your learning skills is the 80/20 rule, which is not related to your current study habits. That is to say, 20% of the inputs can produce 80% of the output, which may differ in reality, but the point is that often very small factors can make a very respectable result.
In order to explain this truth better, let's give some examples. As a freelancer, you'll find that the largest proportion of your income comes from a handful of customers, and if you're a web designer, you'll find that 5% of the files actually make up almost 90% of the site's content.
So, if this principle is applied to self-learning, it means that most of the knowledge can be obtained through a very small number of resources. In fact, that's why freshman and sophomore are learning things (I dropped out of school when I was a junior). I didn't follow the standard way of listening to my teacher in class every day, but I kept practicing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and other business skills in my dorm room. I actually appeared in class with only one scene to cope with the exams.
In order to be able to pass the exam smoothly, I will take 5 days to 6 days ahead of time, threw myself in the exam, I will be the most important content of the textbook out, the original one year learned things compressed to one weeks, the original two hundred or three hundred pages of the textbook was I compressed into a few A4 paper. I will get 70 points to 80 points for each test result. For a one-week surprise review, the results are pretty good, right?
I suggest that you also consider the 80/20 rule, which means that when you face the voluminous learning materials, first sit down and spend a few minutes to find out the most important content, I believe that in most of the materials in the market, only 20% to 30% of the content is fresh, the other is to fill the word, You already know. Therefore, you can achieve the maximum benefit in the shortest time.
You don't need a book to read from the beginning to the end, you don't need to read all the books in this field! Just focus on the most important!
The first step is to design a system for your own reading. The system must have a list of books first, and then you have to have some general impressions of the books, that is, what the cover content and catalogue are all about. Then, give each book a focus, the secondary content. If you can complete this step, you can actually skip certain chapters in a selective way.
As you read the highlights, you will find that the author often likes to point out what the idea is before the beginning of the first paragraph, and then make a summary at the end of the paragraph. In a sense, the beginning and end of each paragraph can form a summary under the book. This will help you to play the role of speed reading.
Standing on the shoulders of giants
Next, to improve your learning skills, is to have the content of the learning material and you know a lot of things to build up the relationship, so that your brain does not have to design a new network from scratch, but on the basis of the original knowledge of the continuous embellish on it, so that you read these books for the first time, Will recall more of the content.
As a result, your existing knowledge network will weave more and more large and richer, and you will learn new content faster and quicker.
Let's say that you are a person who wants to make a contribution in many areas, so you first have to pick a few of your favorite skills, and how can you not be too stressed out to cope? My advice is to make a learning plan for yourself and then switch between multiple skills in an orderly fashion. There are several benefits to doing so:
First of all, it can get your brain to rest. The longer you learn a thing, the more tired your brain is, the more tired it is, the longer it takes to process information, and the more you feel about it; second, every time you switch to a new learning material, you will face it with a new look, and learning efficiency restarts.
We usually have this kind of feeling, some books just start to turn on when everyone is interesting, but gradually this interest slipped away. At this moment, often you have three options: the first, to overcome this weariness, raw hard to chew the book to read it; the second, you put the book completely behind the head, vowed never to look again, but if the disappearance of such interest is only a temporary phenomenon? So there's a third option, you can put this book aside, read something else, and then wait until your interest comes back and continue to learn.
What is the conclusion? The conclusion is: think about how you studied at school, and how to arrange a timetable for you to learn in a progressive way. You should keep a certain degree of jumping, which is not to say that you need to change a book every 5 minutes. Your brain also needs plenty of time to get into it, and frequent switching jumps can make your brain more quickly fatigued. My advice is best to keep your study time at least 25 minutes or so.
Personally, my favorite length of study is one hours. At some point, if the learning material can still hold my attention, then the time will be extended to 2 hours. Then, I will simply relax, and the time to relax depends on the time of the previous mental concentration. It has a minimum of 5 minutes and a maximum of 20 minutes. After a short break, I will change to other subjects to study.
The importance of sleep
If there is one thing that can destroy your study plan and improve your learning effect, it must be "sleep" undoubtedly. Sleep has a direct relationship with memory.
The good sleep here is not only the amount of assurance, but also quality standards.
In order to maximize the value of your sleep, you need to do it from both sides. Only then will your soft skills be as sharp as a knife. I was lucky to fall asleep very fast and sleep for 8 hours.
It's easy to extend your sleep time, but how do you improve your sleep quality? First of all, do not take any caffeine in the afternoon, I mean, once you drink coffee, your body takes 6 hours to digest, even if 6 hours pass, it will still affect your hormones and the ability to sleep fast, but you are unconsciously unaware of it; 2nd, Don't use any electronic screen when you go to bed, you have to set this rule for yourself.
Finally, you need to adjust your biological clock so that it becomes regular. Perhaps this is more important than the previous two points.
Let's play a game.
Finally, the way to improve learning ability: is to let yourself play some games, do not treat the game as a scourge, whether it is mobile games, tablet computer games or computer games, it can play a very positive role in the brain. It improves your brain capacity, the number of neurons in your brain, and your attention, concentration, and response time can be significantly improved.
More importantly, you can transform what you do into one of the most thrilling games, and you are always looking for ways to win the game. For example, after reading each book give yourself some reward points, when your points accumulated to how much, you can give yourself a reward. In fact, it is no different from the experience in the game, not only to assess your current progress, but more importantly, to keep you at the beginning of the heart of the attempt.
Try to set up a small rest station on your way forward, so that your body and stress can cope with great pressure. The last caveat is: Don't play too much, indulge in forgetting yourself more important things.
The final conclusion:
We are now completing the third part of the Freelancer's 7 essential skills. Let us summarize: when the self-study is not too late, you can achieve in many areas of mastery of the skills of the state, the use of 80/20 of the law, to ensure a multiplier effect; To switch between multiple areas, so that they can maintain a high concentration and efficiency, adequate sleep is essential, and finally, Do not underestimate the magic of the game, you can use it to relax the mind, improve the ability of the brain, but also the real learning work as a game, give yourself sufficient motivation. Next, in the fourth chapter, we will see how the sales capacity of freelancers should be developed.
Three of the seven soft skills necessary to become a top freelancer: the way to self-recharge
