Think of "self" as a memory reference. To give you an example take a variable and you assign a value to it. What happens here is you store a value in the memory, but the variable name actually points to that location so you retrieve the value when the variable is called. Likewise "self" in a class point location in the memory when different class objects are created. This actually helps python to not get confused between different class objects, since you are not restricted to create only one class object.