Learn or Die, is it Your Choice?
Forget the university and school crap.
When I was young I’d pick up a book like it was a disease. The paper, pressing against my skin demanding me to read it. No thanks! The books were awful. Like watching a black and white film.
My distain for reading and learning was huge. I was brainwashed. Brainwashed to put my own learning in the hands of my teachers.
The same is true for you. You're not learning every day because you’re lazy. Just like I was. You think teaching yourself is challenging. You rather teachers do it for you.
With the average student loan of $30,000 and $1.1 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, something isn’t right.
Talk about a pretty crappy return on investment.
Yes, I’m implying what the universities teach us is part of the problem, but the biggest problem is you. You leave learning and teaching to schools. You think because you have a degree you’ll be owed something in return.
I’m sorry but that’s far from the truth.
What you get is the value you create. It’s not about where you went to school or your past experience. It’s about the problems you’ve helped solve. It’s about results, not experiences.
What’s the value behind you?
If you don’t learn every day you’re setting yourself up for failure
I don’t care if your 1 or 100, it’s important to learn and keep your mind sharp, every day. If you don’t you’ll be plagued with mediocrity. It’s impossible to move forward without learning news skills, digging deep into industry trends and creating your own powerful solutions.
There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t learn:
- When I wake up in the morning, I read for 30min to an hour.
- On my 40min drive to work I listen to podcasts, eCourses, recorded seminars and sometimes eBooks.
- During the day, I follow industry trends and read what influencers write.
- On the way home, I repeat what I did on the way to work.
- Before I go to bed I continue to read for another 30 minutes.
I don’t make the excuse of I have an MBA to stop me from learning. And the same is true if you didn’t go to college. Oh well, I did’t go to college, I guess it’s just an hourly wage for me. Bullshit! Learning is an active participation. It doesn’t matter where you came from or what you’ve done in life.
Invest every day into your knowledge. Leave NOTHING to anybody else.
Your brain and your knowledge is your own intellectual property.
Learning is great, but applying it is just as important
It's the dreaming versus doing syndrome. Many of us dream, rather than do. We have the next greatest idea. An idea that will trump Facebook, yet we lack the ambition to get it done.
The same applies to learning. Learn, then do. Some will be bust but other will be great.
I often times overwhelm myself with trying new things, but take the minimum viable path. Take one nugget from what you’ve learned and start testing it. If it doesn’t work, move on. No harm, no foul.
Failure will peak it's head but life is about triumphs. You'll have far more failures, but the wins, those matter the most.
Learn, adapt and try new things. Don’t leave your own knowledge in the hands of someone else. It’s not good business.
