A Perpetual Yearning for Learning

Keep a learning mindset for life; to be more successful, happier and live longer.

“There’s only one thing I’m good at. Fortunately, it is learning.” - James Carter

This is the first article in a newsletter to support people in developing themselves, their leadership capabilities and in creating long term success. We start with the most important dimension. As long as you can learn, you can develop proficiency in other capabilities, and achieve long term success.

An old dog learning new tricks

A few months ago I started a new twelve month learning experience; The Self-Mastery programme from Shi Heng Yi and Shaolin Temple Europe. It is an excellent learning experience, carefully designed and packed full of insightful learning blending theory and practice across a range of topics from Kung Fu to breath work to meditation. A guy in his late forties learning Kung Fu? Yes, my daughters mock me but I’m very happy I am investing my time in learning this, and a lot more besides. After three months I am in better shape than I have been for a long while, and I am really enjoying all aspects of the programme, including insights on learning how to build a world class online learning experience. What I am learning is keeping me healthier, and the process of learning is keeping my brain healthier too. This also extends past the Self-Mastery programme.

I am an avid life learner, and constantly strive to learn new things and improve. As well as learning Kung Fu and Self Mastery, I am also regularly learning new models and tools to support my leadership and consulting day job, technical skills and coding languages to build products (and also just for fun), and I’m also learning to play the guitar and make music. I’m not trying to show off here - I’m still rubbish at many things, particularly playing guitar. “Where do you find the time?” is a common phrase touted. A better question yielding more insightful answers to this is “Why do you prioritise this time?”

When you understand the value of learning, and the value you can create for yourself and others by investing in developing your learning skills, it becomes much easier to prioritise time for it. 

A learning mindset is the key to long term success, and also hiring

The most important thing to cultivate if you want to be successful long term is a learning mindset. There are learnings to be gained from almost any situation, and many more from failure and setbacks than there are from success. The key is to have a mindset that makes you open to learning from the situation, and being able to apply this learning to change the way you operate in the future to take advantage of the learning. 

When hiring, an open learning mindset is the first thing I assess candidates for. I would choose to hire someone with an open learning mindset and 20% of the necessary experience and skills for the role over someone else with a closed mindset and 80% of the skills and experience any day of the week. I have hired the less experienced open learner many times in the past, and always been very happy with the results. The latter are stuck with their 80% of knowledge, which soon becomes out of date and less relevant because they are closed to learning. The former is open to learning the other 80%, and very able to learn this quickly and effectively because of this valuable mindset. They are also open to learning far more than this, and so many of these hires throughout my career have gone on to become very successful rising stars and grown to be much more impactful for the role originally hired for.

Learn, to be happy

Learning creates happiness too. There is a palpable sense of accomplishment when you increase your knowledge, proficiency and skills in a subject that is of value to you. This principle is designed into and exploited by the most successful computer games of our time where skills, villages and character development are rewarded, and it is this that keeps people hooked. There is also the long term happiness you get through success and achievement, earned through hard work, which is also fundamentally supported by the effort you put into developing your capabilities along the journey.

Learn, to be healthy

Learning something like Kung Fu has obvious physical health benefits, but more and more studies are finding that the activity of learning in general can be incredibly healthy for the mind. Our understanding of neuroplasticity has come a long way in the last few decades, and where once we thought that brains started to decay from our 18th birthday, it is now clear that learning is a great way to keep the brain healthy and maintain and enhance cognitive function at any age. My octogenarian neighbour delights in learning complex languages, and I can clearly see the benefit this has had to help her maintain her mental faculties. Just as we are now advised to pump iron through retirement for physical health, it can be very beneficial to exercise our learning muscles to keep the brain healthy too.

Learn by sharing

You can learn in so many different ways, and you tend to learn differently at different stages of competence in your development towards mastery of a given context. As you get more expert in a particular topic, a significant action that helps you further develop your mastery is through sharing your knowledge and by teaching this to others. There are some leadership topics that I have taught and led more than fifty sessions for groups of developing leaders in different stages of their careers. This may sound like Groundhog Day, but I learn something new or gain new insights into the area each time I do it, and I really value each session for the learning experience it also provides me. I have also learned to design this into the shape of the session itself. The learning for participants is greatly enhanced when they get some time to teach each other on this topic from different perspectives, and it often works out that in a given cohort people will have strengths in different areas, so everyone is able to learn from others and also learn through sharing their insights on their strengths with others.

You must unlearn what you have learned

He may be green and annoying (how did it take him so long to realise that Palpatine was a sith?!), but Yoda was very right about this one. An active part of learning on the path to mastery is to unlearn things that are no longer useful or helpful. The world is constantly changing and we are developing deeper insights into things, and creating new and more effective methods. If you cannot shed your old ways of thinking, doing and assumptions you have made which turn out to be incorrect (or even just no longer relevant), you are limiting your development and your success. This holds true for any domain or industry, and even more so for domains such as Technology, where the rate of change is truly staggering. 

Just like deciduous trees, we need to drop our old leaves so we have the space and energy to grow new fresh leaves of knowledge, skills and even beliefs. We programme our own beliefs at a fairly early age, and without taking the time to identify, review and drop the beliefs that are no longer true or helping us, we can be navigating life using a very out of date map. Even the great Yoda himself could have saved the galaxy a lot of pain and conflict if he had reviewed his assumptions and beliefs about Senator Palpatine, and viewed his actions with less bias. 

Learning is the foundation

It was an easy choice to cover Learning as the first article topic as I see it as the most fundamental dimension to creating long term success. 

In future articles in the Leadership, Learning and Life newsletter series, we will explore more dimensions of the leadership layers model; a personal development model I have created to help people develop themselves and their success over time and over their career, and how I also categorise all the models, frameworks, tools and exercises we use in leadership and people development. 

The Learning dimension sits outside the pillars as a ‘meta’ dimension on the model. It covers your ability to learn and unlearn skills and behaviours, and covers everything from having a receptive mindset and being open to learning new things to the specific skills and methods you use to find and practise new and ‘upgrade’ your existing skills and behaviours.

Action Learning for Learning

Learning without doing is largely wasted. For the vast majority of people, if you don’t put into practice something you have learned soon after learning it, then the memory of it will quickly fade. You can significantly increase the value of the time you spend learning by taking immediate action and putting the new skills, behaviours or knowledge you have just learned directly to use. This is a key part of an effective learning process. 

For this reason I am going to include a few reflective questions in each article, to enable you to explore your current capability and knowledge in each dimension, and look at where you might use some of the principles or tools shared, or when you might plan some practical personal development in that dimension to develop your skills. Here are a few for the Learning dimension:

• How much time (in an average week, month or year) do you typically spend on learning new knowledge, skills or behaviours? How much time would you ideally like to devote to learning?

• What are you currently learning? What is the purpose of learning this, how is it going, do you enjoy it, and how do you practise and cement the knowledge or skills?

• What would you like to learn next? What really interests you and you would like to get better at, and what would it really benefit you if you could do it better and more effectively? The intersection of these two answers would be a great area of learning to prioritise.

Summary

Learning is a fundamental capability and skill that enables the growth and development of all other dimensions of your capability and success. It is hugely valuable and yet frequently under-valued, neglected and under-prioritised. How do you prioritise and create time for learning, choose what to learn, and make this learning effective? Please comment insights and advice for others below; by sharing this advice you will be helping others and extending your learning too.

This content by James Carter is licensed under CC BY 4.0