Monthly Membership

As a college student, I am not always enthusiastic about “memberships.” The main reason being that the price often outweighs the benefits. As a visual designer, however, I understand than in order to standout in my career I need to develop both my conceptual and technical skills. Consequently, I recently decided to join Lynda.com and pay the $25 monthly membership fee. This site offers a virtual video library of over 1,200 educational, how-to videos. In addition, it gives nonmembers the option to make a one-time purchase for the DVD version of a particular tutorial.  In my case, I often chose to obtain the DVD than actually commit to a membership.

Around mid September I received an email from Lynda.com offering a 7-day trial with access to the complete training library. Since I had several of the DVDs, I generated a hypothesis about the quality of this offer, that it must be useful and convenient. Then, I sought exposure to evidence to confirm my hypothesis by queuing all kinds of tutorials. The obvious step was to watch the videos whose topics ranged from business, web development, photography, etc. In actuality, I was in the process of encoding the evidence to assess if this membership would be useful and convenient.  After the seven days I integrated the evidence with my existing knowledge about Lynda.com. Since I really enjoyed the flexibility and quality, I concluded that the membership fee would also be worth it. This is my third month as a member, and fortunately I have not experienced post-decision dissonance. 
This experienced allowed me to be more motivated to learn; and the information I acquired will be more vivid and therefore easier to remember in the future.