DO MORE: 21 Free Powerful eBooks for Entrepreneurs, Plus Something Extra!

Very few things have as much impact on your capacity to succeed as an entrepreneur like learning does.

From my over 10 years personal study of entrepreneurship and successful entrepreneurs, plus my 8 years personal experience as an entrepreneur, besides passion and purpose, one other common denominator I found across board is this; voracious learning.

Self Education For Entrepreneurs

All education is self-education.  Period.  It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in a college classroom or a coffee shop.  We don’t learn anything we don’t want to learn.

Those people who take the time and initiative to pursue knowledge on their own are the only ones who earn a real education in this world.

Take a look at any widely acclaimed scholar, entrepreneur or historical figure you can think of.  Formal education or not, you’ll find that he or she is a product of continuous self-education.

– Marc Chernoff from 12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free

But there’s a world of difference between learning and voracious learning, the difference lies in the word; voracious. Some people learn when they can or when work or life demands that they do, this is not something they do perpetually.

This is not the same for entrepreneurs. The word voracious means to be very hungry for something. To be especially eager for an activity. It can be likened to anything, food, sex, alcohol, etc. But for entrepreneurs, it is learning.

Entrepreneurs are very hungry for knowledge. It’s not something they can live without, they constantly seek out more and more things to learn not just about business, but also about life. They are uncontrollably searching for more knowledge. For entrepreneurs, voracious learning is self education.

The reason for this is not so obvious to the ordinary person, but successful entrepreneurs have realized that the power to continuously do more in life and in business lies in knowledge. The more they learn, the more they increase their capacity to do more.

Successful entrepreneurs keep on learning because they want to keep on challenging themselves to do more. And without the right knowledge, their capacity to do more is limited.

 

DO MORE: 21 Free Powerful eBooks for Entrepreneurs,

Plus Something Extra!

To equip you to learn more of the right stuffs to increase your capacity to do more as an entrepreneur, here is an awesome list of 21 powerful eBooks for entrepreneurs thoughtfully compiled by the unusual founders of Clothed In Scarlet.

It features such powerful eBooks as;

• 50 Ways to Plan for Small Business Success
• Creating an Entrepreneurial Mindset
• The Happy Startup
• 3 Steps to Brand Clarity
• 279 Days to Overnight Success
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Personal Finance
• Creative Entrepreneurship

Head over there now and grab all of them, click here!

 

Now here’s the something extra…

I was one of the few Young African Leaders nominated for interview out of the 50 thousand applications for President Obama’s YALI Washington Fellow Initiative.

After the interviews, unfortunately, I didn’t make the final list of 500 Young African Leaders going for the Washington Fellow program this year from mid June to August, 2014.

But I got something extremely valuable from the interview I did on March 17, 2014 at the US Consulate General, Lagos. One of the panel interviewers shared with me an incredible list of Open Educational Resources (OER) that offers tremendous learning opportunities for any one who is a voracious learner.

Here are some examples of OER Hubs

The following sites offer great, centralized locations to search and grab a variety of open educational resources;

• OER Commons

• Connexxions

• Saylor

• Hewlett Foundation

• UNESCO OER

• UK OER

• More resources on OER

Also included in the paper she shared with me were some additional list of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), a subset of OER. MOOC is a model for delivering free learning content online to any person who wants to take a course, with no limit on attendance!

 

Here are some examples of MOOCs;

• edX

• Udacity

• Coursera

• Academic Earth

• Open Education Database

 

Your Turn

There’s this particular course on Entrepreneurship from MIT that I am taking and also retaking, I want you to NOT only check it out, but I want you to register and take the course, like thrice. Awesome stuff!

Also, as always, this unusual article is not an end in itself, there’s room for improvement and that where you come in. Kindly share with us in the comment section below your own additional list of awesome eBooks on entrepreneurship and the links to where we can get them.

I am counting on you!