How To Be A Lifelong Learner (even if you hated school)

Ev Chapman
December 26, 2022
2 min read

Most people stop learning when they finish school or university.

School gives structure to our learning for the first years of our life. But when we finish school, unless we continue to be intentional about learning & growth, we end up wandering through life, maybe reading a few books (if we're lucky).

But one of the best benefits of learning once you leave school is you get to construct the curriculum.

It's completely up to you & you don't have to endure any more boring subjects. You can follow your curiosities through life, lean into the subjects that really light you up and in theory - actually like learning. But it doesn't just happen. You have to create it.

How To Create An Intentional Learning Environment:

Choose Areas. Each year I like to choose a few areas that I'm interested in, need to learn about or things that just fuel my curiosity. Otherwise, I could go reading ALL the things and downloading ALL the books. So this just gives me some loose boundaries to explore.

Collect Sources. I have a huge list of sources I like to read from: Twitter, Medium, Substack, Glasp, Refind, and Kindle. Every day I choose something from these sources. I rarely read in linear order these days - I just choose what piques my interest.

Take Notes. Not just summaries, but take notes on what sparks you. What stands out on the page or the screen. Collect these up.

Use Those Notes As Thinking Prompts. My writing inbox practice is all about taking my notes & making sense of them. Take a few each day and muddle over them, write about them, and connect them to what you already know.

This is how you build an environment where you are constantly learning & building knowledge.

Liked thIS? Then You Might Like My SPARK Newsletter...

The Spark Newsletter:
Turn Your Personal Knowledge Into Powerful Ideas & Increase Your Income, Opportunities & Authority.

Join 1200+ readers of The Spark Newsletter each Sunday learning how to leverage personal knowledge into powerful ideas.
Or Keep Browsing More Posts Like This...

How to Find and Share Ideas No One Else Is Talking About

Three beliefs held me back from getting started sharing my ideas online. (And the simple shift I made to overcome them) ↓
Read post

Talk It Out: 3 Effective Ways to Capture Ideas with Your Voice

Capturing ideas might be one of the most important practices we can develop as humans. But is writing or typing the only way to capture those ideas? Think again...
Read post

The Unexpected Way to Gain Deep Insights from Social Media

Social media gets a bad wrap these days. And for some good reasons. It's easy to get caught up with the doomscrolling, letting it distract us, getting into arguments we shouldn't, helping us procrastinate, not doing good things for our mental health. And yet. It's still my biggest category of saved items in my knowledge library & serves me up a wealth of new ideas every single day.
Read post

3 Weird Things I Do to Stay Inspired Every Day

One weird habit has kept me consistently writing for the past four years.Before I was known as Ev Chapman, Prolific Creator. I was Ev Chapman, Wannabe creator.
Read post

4 Simple Steps to Make Your Notes More Useful In Real Life Projects

What if you didn't have to start each project with a blank page?
Read post

Forget Book Summaries: This Note-Taking Method Will Change How You Read Books

Unpopular Opinion: You don't need to create a book summary from your notes to make them useful. This isn't Miss Johnson's fifth grade class 🤓
Read post