It’s the day after Thanksgiving and most people are already starting to forget all about the fact that they were celebrating being thankful just the day before and now they are already moving to make their lives close to business as usual.

Today I am going to continue on with the theme of being grateful for something. Today I am grateful for all of the educational opportunities that exist around us. Regardless of how you like to educate yourself, there are plenty of ways that you can go about learning how to do things. I am going to go through some of the ways that you can get an education on things.

The easiest way you can get an education is through using sites like YouTube that will allow you to watch a video on basically any topic you can think of, and many of the channels provide excellent educational content that can be used to help understand things from art to calculus to farming to how to play an instrument. Videos exist for each of these things and can be a great way of dipping a toe into the water for exploring a subject. These videos are all free which lowers the barrier to entry even lower to accessing this great opportunity for education.

While you can learn a lot on YouTube, it can often be overwhelming with how much there is to learn on a subject and there are so many different people who all claim to be experts who all do it slightly differently that it can become confusing as to what the actual correct way to do something is. Also, it can be difficult to know what the next step in the learning process is since there is likely not as defined of a curriculum as there is in other forms of education.

Moving one step further up the ladder in terms of ease of education is the good old fashioned book. With a book you can follow the progression of thoughts and topics in a logical arrangement. Reading a book will definitely take a lot more time than watching a short video, but the amount of information that you can get out of a book is significantly higher than the amount of information that you can get out of a short video. Often times you can find books on a large variety of topics at the local library, so again there is no charge to you except for some of your time.

Some books you wont be able to find at the library, but they’ll exist at either a bookstore, or on Amazon. This can get a bit expensive, especially if you are anything like me, and you tend to buy a whole bunch of books when you go to the bookstore. They will also take up a bit of space on your already crowded bookshelf, so you have to decide if you want to just get rid of some books (hardly ever the right answer), if you just want to keep cramming them in, or if you have finally reached the place where you can buy another bookshelf.

Another possibility for learning is through the use of podcasts. I personally enjoy podcasts, and the ease with which I can learn new things while I am cooking, or cleaning, or driving, but Rachel can’t stand podcasts and quickly tunes them out. Obviously they are not for everyone, but there is a wealth of knowledge that exists if you enjoy getting your information while you do other things.

Continuing on with the list of available means of education are the online courses. These help to mix the good of videos and books. You are presented the information that you need in an organized manner, and it flows with a logical progression. Additionally, you have the ability to see someone and hear their voice as they teach. By having the information presented to you in a variety of ways it can help with the understanding of the information. These courses are often longer and of higher quality than many of the courses that you can find on YouTube.

Many of these courses also have a cost associated with them. Sometimes these courses are free, and sometimes they are paid courses. It all depends on what you are looking for. If you are just trying to get your feet wet with a topic, then it often helps to have a free or cheap course; however, as the difficulty of the information that you are trying to learn increases, you will find that often you will have to pay for courses to get the better content. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with either a paid or a free course, it really depends on you and what you want to get out of the course.

The most common type of education that exists is formal schooling where you go to class and have a teacher give a lecture while you frantically try to scribble down notes so as to not fall behind and be able to understand the material when it comes time for the test. This method of education will take the most time and the most money. Also, you don’t have the ability to skip through material that you don’t find relevant or interesting because it is going to be on the exam even though you will never see any of it again in your life.

While you can get a decent education from these options, the option I would tout as the best is experience. There is no better teacher than experience, and it can be gotten in lots of ways. Who would you rather have drive your car, someone who has only read books and watched videos of how to drive, but has never gotten behind the wheel of a car, or someone who learned to drive sitting on their father’s knee and has been driving for years even though there was no book knowledge? Obviously, you would rather have the person who has experience behind the wheel of a vehicle because he knows how to do things like how hard to press the gas or the brake to make it go or stop accordingly without making everything be super jerky.

Experience is something that can only occur as a result of time and effort, so you shouldn’t expect to be a master at it right away, but it is still the best way to learn something. Opportunities abound for someone to get a job, an internship, or even a trade school. Yes, the trade school will have some book time and is highly structured, it still provides the opportunity for hands on experience which can’t be overlooked.

There are clearly several different ways to get an education, so it only makes sense to be grateful for the opportunities that exist for education. It is through education that you can change who you are going to be, and it can open a whole new world of possibilities when you go from not knowing anything at all about something, to suddenly having at least scratched the surface of a new topic. You shouldn’t feel like you have to worry about finding just one way to make your education goals happen, feel free to mix and match these resources to find what you are looking for in terms of furthering your education.