Entrepreneurs, by necessity, are crafty and resourceful. If a shortcut’s available, they’ll find it. If important knowledge is kept behind closed doors, they’ll get in. They also tend to be time-poor and, in the same breath, required to understand an enormous amount about a broad range of topics related to their business.
So, where do savvy entrepreneurs turn for quick-fire study? The answer is to Edtech and a few crafty tricks. In this article, you’ll discover five of the best learning hacks for entrepreneurs, along with the Edtech they require. Let’s dive straight in.
Audible
If you’ve hardly any time to quench your thirst for learning, then Audible is a must-have app for your mobile device. It currently has the world’s largest collection of audio books, including the top-rated books on business and entrepreneurship. Audible is an Amazon-owned app and, as we’ve come to expect from Amazon, there are always offers and discounts available. This enables buyers to enjoy competitive prices, along with some incredible features such as the ability to swap one audio book for another if it’s not what you were hoping, even after you pay for it. As well as offering the ability to stream the book on-the-go, there’s a download feature, so you can preserve your data usage and avoid going over your quota. The trick? Listen to your reading list in the car and while working out or cooking. Fill your spare time with the learning that you don’t have time for any other way.
Blinkist
When you scrape out all the unnecessary filler from non-fiction books and distil them down to reveal their most hard-hitting insights, you are left with a few gold nuggets of knowledge per volume. Who wants to go through the process of doing that for thousands of books, though? Well… the people at Blinkist. In other words, Blinkist is a time-saving app with key takeaways from non-fiction books that can be read, if the time allows, or simply listened to in the form of a 15-minute breakdown. Blinkist covers over 1,500 bestsellers, making it another industry30 leading app. However, its biggest selling point is that it enables you to absorb the key lessons from books (including those on entrepreneurship and business) without having to read the entire book. You can stay focused, learn fast and save a lot of time.
Oliver Braithwaite, founder of private tutoring Edtech company Stars & Catz, and author of the blog Edtech & Co, put it this way when I asked him what he thought about Blinkist:
“Remember that scene in the Matrix where Neo learns martial arts by being plugged into a computer and having data uploaded directly into his brain? Well, Blinkist is the closest thing we have to that at the moment. It basically allows you consume books at the rate of four per hour. That’s a pretty big increase in learning speed compared to the process of actually reading four books in their entirety.”
YouTube
You may have used Youtube before you even held a pen, but if you haven’t watched the full lectures on entrepreneurship and business, delivered by Professors and researchers from the world’s top Universities, then you haven’t put YouTube to use at all. The lectures are free and are not overly long. If you can find the time and patience, then YouTube will take care of the rest.
These videos are valuable because they can give you a free seat in a lecture theater at Harvard, Yale or many other top Universities, where you will hear insights that were traditionally accessible only to a select few. To make the search for such videos much easier, filter your search for videos longer than 20 minutes, mention the names of Universities one by one and include your desired field of study.
Once you’ve watched a few, you might find a specific professor who you wish to hear more from. Then you can search for their name and filter by videos greater than 20 minutes, to find many more lectures.
Edx
The process of learning to become a successful entrepreneur is much easier if it can be done step by step. For this reason alone, top Universities often provide online courses. If you can’t afford them, then Edx will provide you a solution by easily directing you to those which are provided free of charge. Edx was founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, but it now curates high-quality courses from many of the top Universities and learning institutions around the world. As mentioned, the courses themselves are free, but you will need to make a payment if you want to obtain a certificate upon successful completion of a course.
MIT OpenCourseWare
Let’s face it, the schedule needed for a Bachelor Degree is likely to clash with your already busy schedule. Still, there are times when you need the kind of information that only a well written, tertiary level course can provide. In these cases, MIT OpenCourseWare is an excellent option because you can learn at your own pace, or pick and choose only the modules you’re interested in. This website provides a long list of well-reputed courses on entrepreneurship and business that were actually taught at MIT. It’s an amazing opportunity to educate yourself for free as if you attended one of the world’s top Universities.
Conclusion
Whether you already are an entrepreneur or someone just starting out, the above edtech list will definitely help you keep a few steps ahead. There are more apps and websites that may benefit you, but these are the most popular and useful ones to date. If you haven’t tried them out yet, what are you waiting for? Turn your dreams into reality and let tomorrow be your day.