As some of you may have noticed, I’m big on self-improvement. I’ve been known to joke that between my day job, sidelines and online classes I’m effectively a full-time student with two full-time jobs. My weeks are effectively 80-130 hours of work and classes.
How do I pull it off? The magic of multitasking. I spend a good chunk of my time at the day job listening to lectures. Then I do the classwork when I get home and on weekends.
I get my classes through Udemy. Most of what I’ve picked up has been solid, but there have been a couple of turkeys. It happens.
Before I was doing classes, it was audiobooks. Got the idea from a guy on YouTube, of all places. He did a series on how to get out of a dead-end job using nothing more than the internet and an MP3 player. Well, I already had the internet at home and an MP3 player full of music…
A bunch of services will give you access to more audiobooks than you’ll ever read. I’ve also heard there are ways to make MP3s from CDs, YouTube videos, etc.
The big thing is picking the right audiobooks. Here are some I recommend, in no particular order:
- The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Feriss. My only issues with this book are that the Grand Master Plan he lays out has “so you’re already making money hand over fist with the business you own” as step one, and most of his other ideas require the kind of office job where you can telecommute. Aside from that, there are some great ideas in there for how to focus on what’s important to you instead of just going along with how you’re “supposed to” live your life. It also includes a nice look at the 80/20 principle and its application.
- The 48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. While following these books to the letter would make you a psychopathic monster (Power more so than War), there are some solid ideas in them. They’re also full of interesting historical trivia and stories.
- The Big Three In Economics by Mark Skousen. Good explanations of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Keynes’s takes on economics. It isn’t a textbook, but it will also show you why people who can read laugh at Teabaggers and other far-right geniuses when they act like Keynes was half a step short of Mao.
- The Teaching Company has too many good lecture series to list here, but some of my favorites have been Philosophy As A Guide To Living, Strategic Thinking Skills, and The Art of War.
- Likewise with The Modern Scholar. I’ve listened to quite a few of their courses on mythology, psychology, and literature.
- Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out and How To Operate Your Brain by Timothy Leary.
- Pretty much anything else you can find on applied philosophy, critical thinking, sociology, history, and psychology.
I’d also recommend a selection of classic fiction. You can only listen to so many hours of lectures at a time before your brain goes numb.
Load up your phone or MP3 player, and whenever you can fire up the audiobooks. Obviously don’t do this while operating a forklift or working around dangerous machinery, but if you’re chained to a workbench like I usually am you’re good to go.
Now, you’re probably going to devote several times the actual runtime to each of these once you figure in distractions and the like. You’re also going to have to rewind quite a bit. But since you’re using time that would ordinarily have been wasted, this isn’t that bad of a tradeoff.
Because when all is said and done, the single most precious commodity you can get your hands on is time. Your boss is paying you for your labor, not your time. As long as you can hold up your end of the deal, your time still belongs to you. Don’t let them steal any more of it than you have to.