Much is left out of the hard degrees of science and technology, of the stimuli offered by the libertarian arts and contemplation. From this place, I would like to express the deep need that moves me to write about the importance of self-education and how the ability to teach oneself becomes a tool of empowerment, beyond the specific skills that are developed, which, in turn, enhances the motivation and the exponential learning exercise of continuous personal development.

Throughout my professional career, I have met people who look down on working on the exploration and resolution of traumas, healing wounds of the past, and trying to understand the paradigms that move us and from which we establish all the links in our lives. Even today, where soft skills for interpersonal dynamics and leadership skills at work are revalued, only those topics that have been homologized to the business world are appreciated when the results obtained in good business style are quantitatively demonstrated.

Empowerment is important when an empowered employee produces more. Motivation is essential if the motivated employee is more efficient and, therefore, produces more. The very same welfare for being welfare produces profits. Companies with an “excellent work environment” label produce more because of the standard this gives them. If anything is clear, it is that nothing can be saved from corporatism, as Pixar well exposed in the Monsters Inc. movie, where energy is produced by capturing the fear of screams and the joy of laughter. Likewise, companies turn into currency the smiles of employees who are displayed on advertising posters, who pose right after tweeting “I said I was willing to work under pressure, not die for the company #PleaseSaveMe”.

Obviously, there are companies and people with a genuine interest in the comprehensive growth of their collaborators, and I hope that this number grows in an organic and continuous way. The need that moves me is not to attack corporatism, but to share my experience of self-education and empowerment, as a way of adding value to my text in the face of the overwhelming creative capacity of a writing app, because the only thing that technology cannot do (to date) is to live my own human experience through my own senses.

Let's talk, then, about self-teaching. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, self-taught is someone who has taught themselves a particular skill. From here begins my internal battle, in recognizing whether it is by oneself, or to oneself. By myself, I have achieved very little in life, and even less in this life bound to society. I must recognize that what I know, I have not learned empirically (which is what is based on experience), and this tends to be confused with self-taught because only my own human experience in this life belongs to me. What I have learned has been taught to me, and I have taught it to myself through the knowledge gathered from the experience of others. My own experience is born from the shared experience of others.

My passage through formal education and the reluctance to continue in certain environments has led me to a condition of learning to instruct myself with information that would have been previously selected and to which I had access, or through exhaustive searches and filters achieved from my capacity of discernment.

In my opinion, that is to be self-taught, in the current context, that person who has decided to teach themselves in any of the topics comprised in the infinity of information that is within our reach with any of the resources that are available at the time that they desire, because this self-taught condition requires the additional effort to prepare the information that will be taught with a methodology adapted by the same person who receives it, becoming then instructor and apprentice, teacher and disciple, until we are satisfied with what we have learned.

The self-taught person has chosen a path in the freedom of the apprehension of knowledge, of structuring their foundations, and delimiting themselves according to their own needs. The autodidact does not create. They do not invent through empiricism, nor through nothingness. The autodidact plays with the permutations of information and, once sifted, mixes and molds it until they reach their objective.

An easy example of this is learning a language. The person who wants to learn a language can go to an academy or school and enroll in a course, of X levels, of Y duration. They will go through the structure and curriculum that methodologically others have proven to be the most efficient for learning languages, achieving the desired results at the end of the designated time. The self-taught person chooses the method after setting an objective and gathers the necessary information according to the way they decided to learn. They do not invent a language, nor create the words from scratch (although in their search they could contribute some more). They always learn from the environment, from books, from videos, from people, and from situations.

Those people who are naturally more curious and/or creative are born with a self-taught condition, but they also become self-taught, and it is in this process that it becomes a tool, and yet another skill. On the way to becoming self-taught, other skills are developed that empower and strengthen personal esteem. The Oxford Dictionary defines to empower as 1) "make (someone) stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights"; and 2) "give (someone) the authority or power to do something.". All the knowledge we acquire gives us more strength and security.

When we speak about a technical subject and can solve problems effectively thanks to our knowledge, we feel empowered. These are moments that nourish us and can help us to work on strengthening our self-esteem. While confidence does not have to do exclusively with mastering the technique or being full of knowledge, it is helpful for our personal development to do so since the theory is on the surface, it is not hidden behind any ghost or hidden in the subconscious, so we can start with learning the theory while we discover what to do to reach that healthy self-esteem so longed for by many.

In turn, a person who works on their self-esteem can achieve greater motivation to continue cultivating their self-education, learn more skills, and master more techniques, which, as I mentioned before, will help strengthen their self-esteem, and so on and so forth. When in the business world professionals are asked to master several languages, to know how to use numerous specialized programs, to have hard skills and soft skills, it is because that is how we should ideally perform, considering that, according to the Britannica Dictionary, a professional is "someone who has a lot of experience or skill in a particular job or activity", and also "having or showing the skill, good judgment, and polite behavior that is expected from a person who is trained to do a job well", not one who has so many degrees issued by different places.

Is the self-taught person welcome in the business world? Is the empowered person conscientiously accepted at work? Both concepts lead us on different paths to deep questioning and full contemplation of our existence. You can't title an autodidact, you can't certify an empowered person. Although even I have tried to define it, in reality in this abstraction there are no valuations or homologations that can really corroborate conformity that all the requirements of the same condition are fulfilled.

The development is to integrate true professionals into the business world; self-taught, empowered, and any other person who is beyond the qualifications that define a position, although this represents a more arduous job by having to make thorough assessments every time we select staff and think of a position within our company or project. When in the work structure each member really feels motivated, we could appreciate professional growth that challenges the hierarchy, where there would be no room for authoritarianism or farce, but constant dialogue and proactive negotiations for continuous improvement and true success.