“It is better to know how to learn than to know.” – Dr. Seuss

At no point in history were you more capable of teaching yourself anything than today.

Picking up new skills has become as easy as firing up Google, doing some research, practicing in the right ways, and pushing yourself through the plateaus. But despite this incredible access to information, few people take full advantage of the opportunity they have for self-directed learning.

We’re stuck in the myth that to learn something you need to be educated on it when you’re perfectly able to educate yourself. It’s no longer necessary to get a college degree to be qualified to do something, and while big, old companies haven’t realized that yet, it’s common wisdom in smaller, more forward-thinking startups. Plenty of successful people today got where they are today by teaching themselves the skills, and there’s no reason you can’t do the same.

Self-education can free you from a job you hate, from a college major you aren’t excited about, and it will be a core skill for the 21st century. Your ability to respond to changes in the landscape of work and technology will be dictated by how skilled of a self-educator you are. How well you can take full advantage of the information available to you to grow your skillset.

I started studying how to learn outside a classroom around my sophomore year of college and primarily focused it to marketing and writing. Over the years of teaching myself new things, and now interviewing other people who have done the same, I’ve honed in on a method for educating yourself on anything.

If you follow this process, there’s no reason you can’t take yourself from novice to expert in any skill or topic without a college’s help. It starts with rethinking how we actually learn.