3 Ways To Fail Using Online Courses
This seems very out of character for us to be writing about. The Life Edge’s sole purpose as a search engine is to allow users to find online courses. The reason that we are writing this article is that we are in a unique position.
Through our interactions with course creators and users, we have been able to compile a list of practices that lead to one’s success or failure with online programs. Rather than bore you with a list of, “best practices to get the most out of your online course,” we prefer to address this using a process called inversion thinking.
Inversion thinking is looking at a problem from a different perspective. Rather than trying to think of the solution, think about the failures that can happen and then work backward from there in order to avoid them. This style of thinking was first considered by great stoic philosophers such as Seneca and Epictetus. More recently, Tim Ferris and Charlie Munger have revealed that inversion thinking has contributed to their success.
This leads us to the 3 best ways to fail using online courses.
- Choose the wrong instructor with a difficult teaching style
- Choose the wrong course or program
- Don’t commit to learning or acting on the knowledge and skills shared in the program
If you follow this list of practices you will ensure that you do not achieve your desired goals. To remove any confusion, let’s break these down a little bit further.
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Incompatibility
The first and best way to set yourself up for failure when taking an online course is a poor choice of instructor and teaching style.
This means finding a course creator that annoys you. Someone that would make it extremely difficult for you to spend hours listening to them. Make sure that everything about them bugs you, maybe their voice or the speed at which they communicate. You want to find an instructor that offers the biggest distraction possible to your being able to learn.
Next, make sure their teaching style is the opposite of your learning style. If you are a visual learner then find someone who only teaches through the use of text and audio. You would not want any visuals in their teachings to make it easy for you to learn anything.
See to it that the way you learn and the way they teach is as misaligned as possible.
The best part about this section is a lot of courses make this easy for you to know right away that you are not a good fit. Many course creators offer a free masterclass or a trial program. Others often allow you to take a free portion of their course before purchasing the whole program. Remember to use these freebies to assess your compatibility with the instructor and their teaching style, then choose the one that is the worst match.
Half-heartedness
The third and most guaranteed way to ensure that you do not succeed by taking an online course is to not put any effort into learning the knowledge and skills taught.
This is the most insidious form of obstruction to your learning journey. That is because at this point you are letting yourself down. There is nothing left except to do the work and go through the program.
To avoid doing the work you must become a professional saboteur and stand in your own way. Start by not committing to completing the course. (Read our post on The Power Of Commitment and then do the opposite of what it says.) Make every excuse possible to stay busy doing other things.
Next, be sure to not set aside any time to get through the course.
When the thoughts start to creep in that you should invest time into this program for which you have already paid, start creating an escape route. Begin to feed into your own insecurities and doubt. Tell yourself you don’t have time, you will start tomorrow, or the best one, you’re not good enough. What were you thinking that you could even do something like this?
If for some reason you do find yourself perusing the online program, create some distractions. Turn your phone notifications on loud, play some obnoxious music or try and get lost in some cat videos on YouTube. Undermine yourself in the best way possible by creating an environment that is not suited for learning.
Now What
This does not sum up all the ways to fail but it is the 3 best ways to fail using an online course. Remember, you need to choose an annoying instructor with a poor teaching style, avoid researching the best program for your needs and refrain from committing to your success. This is the only way that you can positively know you will not gain anything from taking an online program.
This was a very cheeky way of covering this topic but there is a good reason.
A lot of times we read through the lists of best practices and they try to execute them. We start out with good intentions but can find ourselves caught up in the same traps that have always held us back. That is where the inversion thinking comes in.
When we take time to think and read or verbalize the ways that we could possibly fail at reaching our goal, we trigger our reticular activating system or RAS. The RAS is the part of the brain that recognizes things once you consciously think or verbalize them.
The best example of this would be the moment you decide which car you want to buy, a Tesla. The next day on your drive to work you notice 20 Tesla cars. Previously before your decision, you never noticed them at all. This is because your RAS has been triggered to notice Tesla cars based on your previous conscious thought about Teslas.
With inversion thinking, we can use the RAS to benefit us. By taking the time to think through all the ways that we can fail at a given goal or task, in this case, online courses, we can use our RAS as guide rails. If for whatever reason we find ourselves acting in one of these ways that we know is leading to failure, the RAS will trigger conscious thought back to the list of ways to fail and cause the mental red flag to go up.
From here we can pause, right the ship, and move forward to success.
Reflection
The main purpose of this post was to offer up the best practices for success with online learning but from a new perspective.
To get the most out of an online course or coaching program simply do the opposite of everything stated in this article.
Cheers