“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Dr. Seuss

You pulled all nighters studying for your exams, submitted your final thesis and received your well-earned diploma. For some, graduation is when formal education ends. These are the folks who start working in their desired field, master the necessary skills and then find themselves ten years later to be completely obsolete and irrelevant to the needs and demands of their respective industry. But, not you! You understand the importance of expanding your mind. You understand that we passively learn new things every day, but that is not enough to get ahead. The most successful leaders dedicate time to learn. They actively seek out learning opportunities.

Take a moment to think about your dream job or the promotion you have been eyeing. What knowledge and skills do you need in order to obtain that position? You can learn applicable skills and information from books, journals, podcasts, blogs and seminars that will help you become an expert in your field.

Now there is another amazing resource available to help you stretch your brain:

Meet Coursera: Stanford, Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan-and a few others-have teamed up to create an online learning community that offers free online courses to the public.

There are a wide range of classes offered, such as humanities, medicine, business, and computer science. Check out their current course offerings here. In Fall 2012, Harvard and M.I.T. will also offer classes within their collaborative platform, edX. Have you been curious to learn more about computer science? Need to understand statistics better? Want to explore your creative side with poetry?

Henry Ford says it well, “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.” Cheers to staying mentally young forever.