Freedom To Learn And To Teach

This is Day 2 of Natalie Sisson's 10 Day Freedom Plan Blog Challenge, and it's a doozy. I thought it would be really hard to identify my main purpose in life after yesterday's blog post, but as it turns out the answer just leapt onto the paper as soon as I started typing. For me, the most cherished freedom is the freedom to learn and to teach.

Why learning?

I love to learn. Not just useful stuff, but whatever I find interesting. When I was a little boy, I fell in love with photography through reading my mother's National Geographic magazines. I spent hours just browsing through magazine after magazine looking at the photos. It taught me a lot about composition and lighting. It also taught me patience and persistence. You see, the magazines were in English, a language I had not yet mastered. But I read them anyway. Every word. And then someday something truly magical happened: I started to understand the words!

That raw way of learning by just getting started is still the way I like to learn best. I've tried it with everything, even with learning Russian, and in doing so have discovered a lot of effective and fun ways to learn. Nothing too special, mind you, as I would discover when I started to learn more about learning by reading books and following courses on didactics. But all of it because I chose to learn about it, not because I had to.

Why teaching?

The most effective and fun way to learn I've found is to teach. When I really wanted to get good at origami, I taught a class at my grade school. When I really needed to get good at some International Relations exams I kept failing, I started a company providing affordable crash courses for those exams. When I wanted to level-up in sketchnoting, I created a course to teach others how to do it.

Teaching for me is a way to really get to the bottom of a subject so as to be able to teach it to others. The fun thing is, most of the getting to the bottom of it happens during the teaching!

What about freedom?

Now the point of this blog post is not to convince you of anything. It's just to describe why for me the freedom I cherish most is the freedom to learn and to teach. The freedom part is crucial in this, as whenever someone else has wanted me to learn or teach something that I wasn't really interested in, I've suffered through it in stead of enjoying it.

So my essential WHY is to learn something I want to learn, through grokking it and teaching it to others, until my interest wanes and I start a new cycle of learning.

This blog post is in response to Natalie's 10 Day Freedom Plan Blog Challenge Day 2.