Audiobooks-Your Best Tool for the Daily Commute
by Tristan Loo
The average daily commute to work and back home is one hour. That means on average you are spending 5 hours on the road a week. Or roughly 20 hours on the road a month. Or 240 hours on the road a year! What do a lot of us do while we are on the road? Most of us listen to music. Some start talking away on their cell-phones. Others feel the need to yell at every inept driver on the road. When you take into account that most university students spend roughly 250 hours a year in the classroom earning a degree, you can understand the true importance of those accumulated road hours. Commuting hours should never be wasted, but rather converted into value-producing time for personal and/or professional development.
Over the years, I have accumulated quite a collection of audiobooks and courses. I make sure that whenever I get into my vehicle for a drive that will last over 20 minutes, that I have an audiobook CD ready to play. Just think about it. In one daily commute, you can have the equivalent education of a university lecture right there in your car, without doing anything extra.
People are often surprised that I can speak in both Portuguese and Spanish and they ask me where I learned how to speak those languages. I tell them, "Inside my car." I simply listen to those foreign language courses everyday to and from work and having not added any extra things on my already busy schedule, I have self-taught myself two new languages.
Audiobooks will never replace the written word, but think of them as a time-efficiency tool. We all know that our value as employees and as people is often weighed heavily by the knowledge and skills we possess and therefore it becomes important for us to always increase our value by continuing to educate ourselves on subject matter that is applicable to our own lives. Audiobooks and courses provide a medium for you to accomplish this with little to no direct impact on your existing schedule. Now that i-pods are widespread, the ability to learn while on the go has never been simpler.
The audiobook industry publishes a lot of great titles out there for personal and professional development and I highly recommend that you convert those commuting hours into hours of significant value for your overall self-improvement. If you dedicate your commuting hours to learning something of value, then in a 30 year career, you can get the equivalent education of seven or eight PhDs without changing anything in your life. Take action on this today and go out and get your first audiobook and make it a regular commuting ritual.
Tristan Loo is the Founder of the Synergy Institute, a Personal Development Firm based out of San Diego County. Tristan is a former police officer, personal development coach, mediator, conflict negotiator, and author. Visit the Synergy Institute website at http://www.synergyinstituteonline.com
Article Source: Submit and Read Articles for FREE
Audio Languages News
Foreign languages: Start young, learn faster (The Record-Journal)
CHESHIRE - Lauren Villecco wasn't sure how many students to expect when she began her nonprofit foreign language program in September. She was looking for a minimum of four or five students, but 12 enrolled for first-level Spanish lessons.
Saugatuck Reflections (WestportNow)
Learn a New Language! With our audio self-study Cortina Method language courses. Act now - get a 5% DISCOUNT: use coupon code WN5 . Cortina Languages
Web languages go beyond English with Google (Deccan Herald)
Google workers in Bangalore worked on Indian language script. Google introduced news sites in four Indian languages and a transliteration tool for writing in five.
One Man's Quest To Help The World Learn (Forbes)
Eight hundred million people can't read. John Wood aims to change that.
Learning Haskell (O'Reilly Media)
Real World Haskell has revealed a huge gap in my experience with functional languages as well as presented me with an opportunity to make major strides towards growing as a programmer.
One Man's Quest To Help The World Learn (Forbes)
Eight hundred million people are illiterate. John Wood aims to change that.
National scholarship program offered to study abroad (The Mooresville Tribune)
Full Scholarship Program for High School Students Promotes Study of Strategic Languages Abroad.
English-only has its Latino supporters, too (The Tennessean)
Some immigrants say measure will help foreigners learn English quicker.
'Bachelor' recap: Jason survives hot dog test, Tooth Nazi and ballot box (Portsmouth Herald)
Single father Jason Mesnick, 32, is a mustard guy. We know because of Jillian, the “cute Canadian” on "The Bachelor," who believes you can learn a lot about a guy from what he puts on his hot dog. (Yes, the sexual innuendo was noted by all.)
Help your kids learn a foreign language (Lawrence Journal-World)
Sure, your little one can say “Hola” to Dora and “Ni hao” to Kai Lin, but where do you turn if you want to gain more exposure to a second language?