I remember learning my addition and times tables in maths class when I was very young. We had the same teacher for every class.

It was very basic maths being taught to very young kids who were just beginning to grasp what numbers actually mean.

Our class would stand daily and recite our tables at the beginning of every maths class. Repeating the same tables over and over again until we could say them in our sleep. The information was necessary as the building blocks for all maths. I can still recall them today!

This is a basic skills and drills exercise with consistent repetition.

I did history throughout school and university. It was a great subject where I learned to connect the dots between the past present and future. It wasn’t always the case. I had always been taught history as though it was a story from the past, and all we needed to know was names and dates to pass an exam.

When I was about 17 and studying for our final exams, I had a teacher who made it clear that what we were learning about was not just an isolated point in history and that you could trace its origins through to past events, connect them to current events and use that knowledge to foreshadow the future.

I remember being amazed at how changes to society and the arts influenced political and historical events and how, in turn, those events informed societal revolutions and artistic innovations.

The information was initially being learned to pass an exam, but it instilled in me a lifelong love of history.

When I took over the job of editing content, I needed to learn how master the editing software as quickly as possible. I had done media production at college, but that was many years prior. It was a great start, but as I grew more experienced I wanted to do more interesting and innovative things.

Over time, I built up a great amount of expertise, tips and tricks from online resources; searching out ‘How To’ videos online; learning to do one thing at a time and becoming good at it; looking at what others had done similarly and adapting that to suit what I wanted to do. The learning was online and given by various different professionals in their field. It was self-directed and was done to find a real and practical solution to a definite problem.