How to Continually Sharpen Your Skills

How to Continually Sharpen Your Skills Freelance Switch: "Whether it’s 30 minutes a day, or an hour a week, it’s important that you set aside a regular block of time to learn about your profession."

I know I am constantly learning about what I do and what I want to do. Spending on books is one of the few things we don't hold too much back on. It only has to wait until the ones we have have been read which is nicely self-limiting, but at 2000 wpm it doesn't take all that long to read a book anyway.

I was wondering what others had to say about how much you should spend on self-improvement and so after some searching hit on this guideline.

"Invest three percent of your income in yourself (self-development) in order to guarantee your future."
-- Brian Tracy, Author

Brian Tracy is a motivational and business speaker and writer, he studies successful people and explains how they did it. So I think his guideline sounded pretty good. I ran some quick numbers to see how much that would turn out to be. If you're making $30,000/yr you should spend about $900/yr making sure you are getting better at what you are doing.

We've been stretching that by going to the library or buying books cheaply on the net rather then full price at a local store. But really I don't think I've spent that much on self-improvement and that needs to change.