If you want to learn something, you can find plenty of helpful tutorials online.

For example, I’ve got a friend who into knitting. She wanted to learn this new stitch or weave (or whatever they call them) so she just looked it up on YouTube.

If you want to learn Photoshop, there’s no shortage of tutorials, free and paid.

Most skills are like this. Figure out what out you want, find the best way to learn it, and get started.

Generally speaking, with skills (that aren’t part of our jobs) we have an outcome in mind. If you wanted to learn how to reproduce a certain photo effect, you’d know when you were finished.

Of course, you can still learn skills without knowing why you want to learn them. I’ve studied all kinds of different software, and software techniques just for the fun of learning them.  Sometimes I’ll figure out a way to use them, sometimes I won’t.

The process of learning, however, is enough to be an end in and of itself.

You might say there’s four quadrants of learning. You know what you want, and you know how to get there. 

You know what you want, and you don’t know how to get there.

You know how to get somewhere, but you aren’t sure want to go.

You don’t know where to go, and you wouldn’t know how to get there if you did!

Of course, this last one is kind of funny, especially when we consider that’s how plenty of us live our lives.

Sure, we somehow muddle through day by day. Sure we know we want something more. More money, more friends, more time off, more sex, etc.

But what specifically do we want, and how specifically we’ll get there is something we’d rather not think about.

At least today.

Maybe tomorrow. Or when we finally finish cleaning out our closet. Or maybe after…..

The problem is that by doing this, we run the risk of being near the end of our lives and thinking, “What happened?”

Imagine, now, if you can, you are now at the closing chapter of your life. And you are looking back at all your accomplishments.

What are you most proud of? What things were the most difficult to achieve, but the most rewarding when you achieved them?

What things do you wish you did more of? What things do you wish you did less of?

Now come back to the here and now, and imagine your life ahead of you.

What do you want to build? What would you like to accomplish?

Whatever quadrant you’re in now, you can easily shift to a more useful one.

As soon as you choose a specific desire, out there in the future, all you’ve got to do is get started in that direction.

You’ll figure out everything you need along the way.

These will help:

Mind Persuasion