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Aspects of your life in which you excel likely give you a healthy good feeling about yourself. What about items which you could improve? Are there things which in the past you mastered, but in which your knowledge and skills have gotten rusty or have been forgotten? Are there new skills and knowledge which you aspire to learn?

Relearning or learning new concepts and skills can, if successfully attempted, be similar to milestones marking how far you have come. And, to the extent that you have not yet reached or not yet regained your potential, do you sense that these aspects of your experience are more like millstones around your neck which tend to drag you down?

With the practical application of this Self-Education Manual being within your grasp, you have the opportunity to choose. Will you have milestones marking your progress toward what you want to become? Or will you have millstones pulling down your self-image?

The opportunity to make a difference is here. Will you choose milestones or millstones?

To illustrate, last week, while I was tutoring in a Texas junior high school, a student got to make that choice. While the student was being guided to solve problems of calculating the perimeters of several semicircles, I presented something straight out of the Self-Education Manual. I asked, “Would you like to know a way to go your whole life without ever again confusing the formula for area of a circle with the formula for circumference of a circle?” The student quickly said, “Yes.”

Whereupon, I explained the simple, but very memorable method to never again confuse pi r squared with two pi r. The student departed that day forever improved. At the end of this narrative are the raw Decision Tree study planning results as excerpted from the Self-Education Manual. They reveal the names of the several study methods which help.

What will it be for you? Milestones or millstones?

{(1) Yes, (2) No, (4) Yes, Interleaved Practice, (7) Yes, Practice Testing and Delayed Testing, (8) Learner-Generated Scenario, Take a break}