But Did You Learn?

The major task of our growing-up years is learning. Learning how to be a human being, learning how to tie our shoes, learning how to read, to speak a language, to do fractions, and maybe how to bake a cake. It is the work of our childhood, our teen years, and our early adulthood, to learn full-time. No one is paying us to learn, but it’s our job, and we do it.

Then we move into adulthood, and we (hopefully) get a job that entails learning more about how things work and how our skills can benefit the company and the world and we put those learnings to the test, doing our work, and continuing to push and evolve our way of working as we learn more about how to do things more effectively, expanding our impact on the world around us. We add hobbies and families and we learn those new things, and our brain adds those to the database: skills acquired!

And then one day, many of us wake up and we think we know everything there is to know, and we don’t need to learn anything else. We have spent our life consuming and adding and processing and we’ve got it, we don’t need to add any more learning to the mix. So we go about our daily work and tasks and we do our things well, because we know them well and we are good at them.

Until something breaks. The client is unhappy. The product stops working. The technology isn’t keeping up. Your skills fall short. You’re bored. And there is a moment that we falter, because it’s supposed to work, it has always worked! And then we keep going, doing the things that we have always done, because those things have always worked and this exception doesn’t need to stop us. We know how this business or this world works, we’ve got this.

But you missed it! The moment of pause. It was important, and you saw it, and you ignored it and kept going. That moment of pause was a signal—there is something to be learned! A flag, planted in the side of the road, waving wildly, if just for a moment.

What you missed was the opportunity for growth and continued success. Because that moment was an indication that doing the same thing you’ve been doing didn’t work for this one moment. And if you take the time to find out why, you can learn more—and you can upgrade your thoughts, your work, and your outcomes to prevent those bumps in the road in the future—and maybe even grow and expand into new possibilities as the world around you changes.

Learning is a challenge for many of us, we want to be seen as competent and capable and coming across as a learner or incompetent in anything hurts our pride and our idea of ourselves. Going from being unconsciously competent in “all the things” to consciously incompetent in something is a step down, in our minds, and we hate it, it makes us uncomfortable in so many ways. But the only way forward is through, as they say, and the only way forward to continued success and growth is through the pause to learn. Ask yourself the hard questions, “Why didn’t this work?” “Why was the customer disappointed?” “How can I do this better next time” “What do I want to be doing instead and what change does that require for me?” and really work to understand the answers—and then apply them to change your processes so it doesn’t happen next time, or you add an additional skill or capacity to your skillset.

In a world that won’t wait for us to keep up, it’s imperative that the learning mindset comes with us, even into old age. Brain health relies on us to keep changing and evolving and growing, but also, our lives and careers and the world would be much more boring if we weren’t constantly learning. Time to put down the pride, and learn something new, even if that thing is intimidating to start. Onward to learning all the things!