Definition
VIA: Mastering new skills, topics, and bodies of knowledge, whether on one’s own or formally. Love of learning is related to curiosity, but it goes beyond it to describe the tendency to systematically add to what one knows, even when the knowledge is not immediately useful.
Wikipedia: Love of learning is classified as a strength of wisdom and knowledge in the VIA Classification of character strengths, describing a person’s positive orientation toward acquiring new skills and knowledge, whether in a class or on their own.
Cambridge Dictionary: A strong interest in gaining new knowledge and understanding, especially through study, reading, or experience.
Love of learning isn’t the same as being “good at school.” Plenty of people who love learning struggle in traditional classrooms, and plenty of people who get straight A’s are just good at following instructions, not necessarily hungry for knowledge. The strength is really about the feeling that shows up when a new idea clicks into place — the pull to know more once you’ve started, and the willingness to sit with something difficult because understanding it feels worth the effort.
A common misconception is that love of learning means loving school. It doesn’t. School is one delivery system for learning, and not always a great one. Some of history’s most voracious learners — self-taught engineers, writers, musicians — built their knowledge almost entirely outside formal institutions. What matters is the internal drive, not the setting.
Psychologists who study this strength also distinguish it from curiosity. Curiosity is the spark that makes you want to look something up; love of learning is what makes you keep going after the spark fades — reading the whole book, finishing the course, practicing the skill for months. It’s curiosity with follow-through.
Examples and Case Studies
Leonardo da Vinci filled thousands of notebook pages with studies of anatomy, engineering, water flow, and flight — most of which had no practical application to his painting career. He learned simply because he wanted to understand how things worked.
Marie Curie taught herself advanced mathematics and physics as a young woman in Poland, at a time when universities there were closed to women, attending an underground “Flying University” before she could ever enroll formally in Paris.
Malcolm X famously copied out an entire dictionary by hand while in prison, page by page, to expand his vocabulary and understanding of the world — an act of self-directed learning that reshaped the rest of his life.
Benjamin Franklin left school at age ten but became one of the most broadly self-educated people of his era, teaching himself science, languages, and politics through relentless independent reading and experimentation.
Serena Williams has spoken about continuing to study match footage and refine her technique well into the later stages of her career, treating mastery as something that’s never actually finished.
The Wright Brothers ran a bicycle shop with no formal engineering training, but taught themselves aerodynamics from scratch through obsessive reading, testing, and iteration — eventually solving powered flight before better-funded, more credentialed competitors.
Suggested Track
A love-of-learning track works best when it gives a teenager permission to follow their own curiosity rather than a fixed curriculum. One approach is a “deep dive” format: the student picks one topic that has nothing to do with school — a historical event, a scientific mystery, a skill like coding or lock-picking or animation — and spends four to six weeks going deeper into it than they’ve ever gone into anything, using books, videos, forums, and if possible a real conversation with someone who works in that field.
A second approach is a “learning log” format, where instead of one deep dive, the student commits to learning something new and small every single day for a month — a word, a fact, a skill rep — and keeps a running journal of what surprised them. This builds the habit of learning as a daily practice rather than a big occasional project.
A mentor or program coordinator running this track should resist the urge to grade or test the learning. The whole point of the strength is intrinsic motivation — learning because it’s satisfying, not because it will be assessed. The best outcome is a teenager who finishes the track wanting to start a new deep dive on their own.
Literature, Art and Media
Books:
- “Mindset” by Carol Dweck — the foundational book on growth mindset, showing why believing your abilities can develop is what makes learning feel possible rather than threatening.
- “Ultralearning” by Scott Young — a practical guide, aimed at ambitious self-teachers, on how to learn hard skills quickly and deeply outside the classroom.
- “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson — an engaging tour through science and history that models what it feels like to be endlessly curious about how the world works.
Visual Art:
- Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks (Codex Leicester and others) — pages of sketches, diagrams, and mirror-written notes that are themselves a visual record of a mind in the act of learning.
Podcasts:
- “Hidden Brain” — explores the psychology behind curiosity, habit, and how people make sense of new information.
TED Lectures:
- The power of believing that you can improve — Carol Dweck. Explains the mindset research that underpins why some people keep learning through failure and others give up.
- Do schools kill creativity? — Sir Ken Robinson. A classic talk on how formal schooling can sometimes work against natural curiosity and love of learning.
Movies:
- Good Will Hunting (1997) — a self-taught genius who reads and absorbs knowledge voraciously outside any formal institution, and has to reconcile that love of learning with the rest of his life.
- The Theory of Everything (2014) — a biopic of Stephen Hawking that captures the obsessive drive to understand the universe even in the face of enormous personal difficulty.
- Hidden Figures (2016) — three women who taught themselves and each other advanced mathematics and engineering, often without institutional support, to help send astronauts into space.
Mentors
To be completed by program coordinator.
Events
Science and ideas festivals such as National Science Week events run in schools, museums, and community centres across Australia each August give teenagers a chance to attend talks, workshops, and hands-on demonstrations built entirely around the joy of finding things out.
TEDx events held in Australian cities and regional towns throughout the year are open to the public and specifically built around short talks on ideas worth spreading — a low-commitment way to sample a huge range of topics in one sitting.
Places
Local and State Libraries — modern libraries are often more than a collection of books, embracing collections of a range of media types and providing lovely spaces to get lost in learning.
Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre (Canberra) — an entire building designed around hands-on experimentation, ideal for teenagers who learn best by doing rather than reading.
Local university open days — most Australian universities run open days where anyone can sit in on real lectures, talk to academics, and explore labs, offering a genuine taste of a subject before committing to study it.
Experiences
Try a free online course in something completely outside your usual interests through a platform like edX or Coursera, and see whether the unfamiliarity itself is energising rather than intimidating.
Visit a museum or gallery alone, without a class or a checklist, and let yourself linger on whatever actually interests you rather than moving through it in order.
Ask a family member or family friend who works in a field you know nothing about if you can shadow them for a day or simply ask them questions over a meal about how their work actually functions.
Start teaching yourself a skill entirely from free resources — an instrument, a language, a coding language — and track how far you get in a month with no formal instruction at all.
Join or start a small reading or discussion group with friends around a topic none of you have studied before, so the learning happens through conversation rather than solo effort.
Challenges
The 30-Day Rabbit Hole
- Pick one question you’ve always wondered about but never looked into properly (e.g. “How does the immune system actually work?” or “Why did the Roman Empire fall?”).
- Spend 20–30 minutes a day for 30 days researching it, using a mix of articles, videos, and at least one full book or long-form piece.
- Keep a simple notebook of what you learn each day, including anything that surprised you or contradicted what you thought you knew.
- At the end of the month, explain what you learned to a friend or family member in five minutes, without notes.
Teach It Back
- Choose a topic you already know reasonably well from school or a hobby.
- Prepare a 10-minute explanation of it simple enough for a 10-year-old to understand.
- Deliver it to an actual younger sibling, cousin, or family friend, and let them ask questions.
- Write down any question they asked that you couldn’t answer well — that gap is your next thing to learn.
The Stranger’s Expertise
- Identify someone in your life (a relative, neighbour, family friend) who has deep knowledge in a field you know nothing about — plumbing, accounting, beekeeping, whatever it is.
- Prepare five genuine questions about their field in advance.
- Interview them for 20–30 minutes, taking notes as if you were a journalist.
- Write a short summary of the three most interesting things you learned and why they surprised you.
One Skill, No Teacher
- Pick a concrete skill you can learn primarily from free online resources (a card trick, a cooking technique, basic photo editing, a short piece of music).
- Give yourself two weeks and at least 5 practice sessions to get reasonably good at it, using only self-directed resources — no classes, no tutors.
- Record a short video or photo of your progress at the start and the end.
- Reflect in a few sentences on what was hardest about learning without a teacher guiding you step by step.