I'm taking a marketing class right now through the local Small Business Development Center, and I've been taking a small Business Management course through most of the year. I'm also taking Jason's Strategic Sorcery course, and of course I'm also educating myself at my own pace with a variety books I'm reading and exercises I'm trying. I'm a life long learner and its something I apply as much to my magical work as to anything else. Every book I read, every experience I have, or class I take all has the potential to offer something that not only improves my business or life, but also inspires my magical practice.
Whether its formal education or educate yourself, the real value of continuing to learn is that it challenges you to grow as a person. I the variety of topics I can learn about fascinating and I know that I'll never learn everything, but I know learning as much as I can inspires me and excites me. There's a thrill I feel when I'm learning something or trying something out, the thrill of being alive, the thrill of the moment.
It's easy to get pigeonholed into one subject or area of interest, but the peril is that you become myopic in your perspective. I'd have never discovered the joys of experimenting with magic if I just continued to read books on magic. It was reading books about a variety of subjects that really made me wonder if I could apply magic to those subjects and vise versa. The joy in doing something unconventional, just to see what would happen, that became the overriding focus of my magical work and its still there to this day. I couldn't have discovered that if I hadn't diversified my interests and started learning whatever I could about any and everything.
I can't say that I've always been able to apply everything I've learned, but I'd like to think that my unusual perspectives are cultivated by the choice to learn any and everything, regardless of how relevant it seems to be. Sometimes it doesn't seem relevant, but then at some point it becomes relevant. I figure with magic, especially if you want to manifest specific results, its good to have a foundation to draw on that can inform the magical process you are using to manifest that result.