The term ‘life long learner’ is often bandied about in the further and higher education sectors. It is used to imply that we never stop learning but people seem to have distorted the meaning as far as I can see and used it to denote someone who does endless courses. Universities are hailed as the centres of learning and where boundaries are pushed but I’m not quite sure that is true either. If you read for a degree today you are invariably being taught by people who did their learning 20 plus years ago and they just reiterate what they learnt all that time ago.
So where does real learning happen?
- The Wright brothers learnt on a field in the USA and in a shed
- Columbus learnt on a ship
- Jensen Button learnt on a karting track
- Barrak Obama learnt on the streets
- Airline pilots learn to fly by flying a plane
- chefs learn by cooking
- chemists learn by experimenting
What is the common denominator in all of these examples – they learnt through practical experimentation.
Universities are centres of learning and the most important things that students learn are how to conduct research and experiment.
When you work in an area and feel secure start asking the question ‘what have I leant so far and what do i need to be learning now and over the next 3 months’?
Start experimenting – Start Learning
It is essential that we keep our eyes and is open. The reason people and the businesses they run fall behind is that we as individuals are not paying attention to the changes taking place.
Some dramatic and well known examples of disruptive change are:
- Who ever uses a cassette tape or a vinyl record today?
- Where are the typewriters of yesterday?
- Toyota and the Hybrid car
- the electric light displaced the gas or oil lamp
With regard to the changes around us – are we looking for them but not seeing them, are we reading about them but not understanding them, are we noticing them but refusing to listen to the lessons they give? Sure, you can trundle out hundreds of excuses about being too busy, under resourced or restricted by the management but in reality these all just excuses.
If you take repeated action that is not pushing you in the right direction and you are not using this feedback to infer how you may need to change, then this is not intelligent behavior. It has been referred to colloquially as the definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Not all feedback is good in the first instance. The faster you move through denial, to believing that all is rosy when it is actually not, and making some changes for the better. First you have to notice that all was not rosy.
The beauty of being a flip star is that you can always do the opposite of the what the world suggests – Google’s founders did this beautifully well – in truth they created an environment where change was seen as good. People say knowledge is power. Perhaps knowledge is not power. Maybe ignorance is David Grable, an author, speaks of the loss of ignorance with sadness:
“Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal; once it has been displaced by knowledge,
it can be hard to get back. After it’s gone, we are more apt to follow a well-worn path to find answers
than to exert our sense of what we didn’t know in order to present new options.
Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation. Solved problems tend to stay solved sometimes disastrously so.”
2000 years ago people “knew” the universe was created in the week. 1000 years ago humans “knew” the sun moved around earth. 500 years ago people “knew” the earth was flat. Imagine what you will know tomorrow? What knowledge or practices do you hold on to that are no longer empowering? What behavior that once drove your success do you and your team now need to unlearn?
Great leaders and managers must be prepared to make decisions about their business, and for that matter their lives. Often these decisions will be based as much on intuition and educated guesswork as on predictable data and knowledge. The flipstar makes the decision anyway. Why:
- decisions lead to actions. When you finally make up your mind about something, it usually leads to action. There is no need at this point to say why this is a good thing.
- Decisions creates momentum. The action that follows your decisions will give you the clarity that was preventing you from making a decision in the first place, and now you’re off on a positive upward spiral. Action leads to clarity, clarity leads to confidence, confidence leads to another decision and now the decision warrants action and so on.
- Decisions create confidence. The decision gives you not just a sense of confidence but also those around you. If you get your team or, if you’re a CEO your whole company moving in the right direction of your stated trajectory, you had better instil some confidence.
Decisions create that confidence.
Let me give you a simple but profound question. When will Apple cease to be a computer company that has an interest in music downloads to being exclusively a music and media company?
For a few weeks now I’ve been thinking about about wisdom and what it really means.
Many of the simple lessons that we learn as young adults and children make up the bulk of the wisdom passed down through the years. For example why did our mothers and grandmothers tell us they need to eat parsnips only when the first frosts come? Another example being feed a cold and starve a fever! How do you cook a chicken?
Continue Reading…
I’ve been in business for several years now and have the privilege of working alongside some of the brightest minds in business.These are people who have real experience of doing things that lead to success. I remember one lady Louise Fowler, who I worked with for 2 years and who to my knowledge built 2 £1/5 million businesses, who said “the fortune is in the follow-up” and it took me a while to really grasp what she meant. Follow-up is often talked about as part of the marketing process but in reality it is far more about building relationships and enabling people to trust you.
Follow-up can be broken down into two areas Active and Passive:
Active Follow-up might include:
- picking up the phone and calling a prospective customer/client and asking some very un-sales like questions like: “How are you doing”? If they’ve been on holiday ask them how the trip went. If you know that they had a daughter getting married ask how the wedding went. Don’t try to sell them anything – just ask them some open questions. Just find out what they like doing – kite surfing, flower arranging, extreme sports – just find out what they like doing. Continue Reading…
I’ve been a quiet fan of Seth Godin for a couple of years and a post that he made last week just struck me as profound. If I could only work with 10 people who would they be – who would I choose, who would join me. This post is all about working with people who we really appreciate and who we can have fun with – http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/first-ten-.html
“You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.
The timing means that the idea of a ‘launch’ and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave. Organize for it and spend money appropriately. The fact is, the curve of money spent (big hump, then it tails off) is precisely backwards to what you actually need.” Seth Godin
