I've found that there is almost no limit to the amount of information you can find for free online, and a lot of courses, be it college or otherwise, are just people who condense and put that together in an organized form of teaching. Finding relevant information that can impact your life is the difficult part.
I've read many business and performance books that don't have specific relevance to my life right now, being only 17. This is good and bad, bad because you have to do all the work to improve yourself and you may waste time working on things that don't help. Good because you can go much farther and faster than through courses, plus all the knowledge you gained that wasn't relevant to you now maybe, later on, thus being an investment.
Because of this, I've had to change my mindset on learning from others and actually test out the advice given and see if it works for me. I also realized that a lot of the greater performance books have very similar information between them, and the key thing that makes one stand out from another is primarily how they deliver it. This doesn't mean that one book is "better" than another, but might connect better with certain people over others.
Takeaway:
- Knowledge is everywhere and free
- Teaching yourself takes a lot of work
- Not everything is relevant, and that's okay
- you learn much more on your own, and stuff that doesn't apply now will later
- Performance same general concepts, one might connect over another