Personal Perspective #3: Learning for Action's Sake
Gary Keller curated a list of The 6 Personal Perspectives needed to excel in any area of life. Dive into the meaning & significance of each, and how they can transform your personal & professional pursuits from the inside out.
The number of books that are read by an adult after they graduate college is a mere handful. For the majority of people, we get to a point where we're simply not looking to learn anymore.
We become a closed system, a closed mind.
There are lots of reasons for that. For one, it preserves energy within the system and it reduces complexity. So, if your goal is reduced complexity with increased energy and ease, then you can have that… at the expense of continuing to push the boundaries of your performance.
If what you're doing is good enough for you and you've got no problem, why continue to learn? Just operate within that system. But if you really want mastery, if you really want to be achieving the most success you can in any arena, then being learning-based is required.
That's a challenge when we have pre-built biases and generalizations about things (that are often wrong). It is a common, and often subconscious characteristic about humans that if we think we already know something, we become very closed off to hearing anything else about it.
Being truly learning-based means showing up with curiosity to each and every moment. It is understanding that there is always more to learn, and that there are always finer and finer distinctions to be made on how you can put your learning into action.
Making the distinction between learning for action’s sake and learning for learning’s sake is an important one to make. Someone who learns simply to learn might have two PhDs but still not be ready to go into the world and do anything with it. You're learning just to learn, but the learning never gets applied.
The problem with that is two-fold. One, if you can't apply the learning, how long do you retain it? And two, if you can't apply the learning, does it really matter?
There's an old Balinese saying that says, “Knowledge doesn't exist until it's in the muscle.”
You train very differently when you know there is a date where it will all be laid on the line. You work harder, you retain more, and you engage more meaningfully with the content because you know it matters.
Putting your learning to the test through action is the only way to gain feedback about how far you’ve grown and how far you still have to go. This practice of applying your knowledge over and over and over again in order to gain feedback is the path to achieve mastery in any area of life. As long as you're continuing to move forward, as long as you don't put the period at the end of what just happened, the feedback that you get is never one of failure, even if it involves disappointment. The feedback you receive is always meant to better inform your next attempt.
Let me end this with a few questions: What do you need to learn to help you more efficiently approach your goals? What have you learned already that you’re currently not putting into the muscle? And why?
- Joe
Joe Arroyo is the expert on recruiting, selecting, training, and retaining world-class talent. As CEO of Vision Architect and Convert, him & his team have been "building business by building people” since 2001.
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