Invest in Yourself - Learn to Power Search with Google

The best investment you can make is investing in yourself.

Growing up playing computer games I felt a disassociation between the gaming world and the achidemic world. Now, even though I don't have much time to sit around playing computer games (mobile gaming is my only consolation), I have started to see a corrilation between the two.

No matter what you do in life you can learn something from it. My favourite type of games are RPGs - role playing games. You have a character and must fulfil a story. You character always starts off weak, an you have to build him (or rarely her) up, allocating experience points to develope skills, plotting a knowledge destination through the skill tree.

Unfortunately, in real life, there is no set story to fulfil. If you don't know what your story is, you don't know which skill set is the best for achieving this goal. This is my current dilemma. As a teenager I decided I wanted to be an animator. I had one direction for my skill tree to go in, and after eight tough years in education and working in animation, I have decided that I don't want to be an animator anymore.

In a game this kind of decision is basically saying; "Game Over","New Game", "Select Character." In real life, I am the only character. In real life, most skill sets are not straight lines. What was a great skill to have in the past, may not be a great skill in the future, or even currently. All we can do is look at trends and guestimate.

So this is my guestimation for you.

The internet isn't going away anytime soon and either is Google, at least for a few years anway. Google has put up a free online course Power Searching with Google. (Registration ends July 16th)

Its a very short high quality course and you get a coveted certificate from Google at the end of it. I think it's a pretty safe and simple investment decision. I don't think I'm going to stop searching for things in Google any time soon so, the knowledge and future time and frustration saved is worth the time investment I'll be paying now. Also for people interested in having any kind of online business, I think this is a must do. I don't think that I need to explain Googles power on the web, so learning how Google search works is a must!