Becoming Lifelong Learners
I joined an Instagram live last week with Adam Grant and Brene Brown. I love watching these two thinkers interact. At one point, Brene said something to the effect of “the greatest shame trigger at work right now is the desire to remain relevant.” Adam responded with how this is true and that if we rely on our expertise to carry us through in today’s age, we will easily be irrelevant. He recommended instead that in today’s shifting society, the key to success will be our ability to learn and adapt.
He posted the following on his social media feeds:
“In your career, the most valuable currency is not how much you know. It’s how well you learn. In a stable world, success depended on building expertise. In a changing world, it hinges on evolving expertise. Potential is no longer defined by ability. It’s a function of agility.”
You can check out the entirety of their conversation here: https://www.instagram.com/p/C2iTzPOPpar/
Being a lifelong learning has been a priority for me for my entire life. Considering I’m the daughter of an educational philosopher, this makes a lot of sense. I have a pivotal memory of coming home from elementary school one day and shouting, “I hate school and I hate learning!” My dad stopped me right there and said, “That’s not true. You don’t hate learning. You love learning. I’ve watched how much you light up when you learn about something you care about.” He then went on to explain to me that I was in a system that was set up to make me believe that I hated learning. Between the tests, assignments, and comparisons, it was going to be hard to remember that I love learning despite it all. He issued me a challenge right then and there to make sure that I never let anyone or anything destroy that love. I took his message to heart. He’s told me since that I’ve even taken it more to heart than he expected. You see, anytime I’ve found a class or topic boring, I have intentionally tried to reframe my approach to it. If the topic itself was not inspiring anything in me, I would look to the teacher and say to myself that this teacher thought it was important enough for me to know and therefore there must be something worth learning in it.
This mindset has served me well. Not only have I done well in school over the years, but I have been able to find gems of discovery in any role or assignment I’ve been given. Additionally, I’ve been able to look at my experiences and situations and discover growth opportunities in everything I’ve been through. “What can I learn from this?” has become my favorite coping mechanism. I have found that the joy of learning can be so satisfying that I am often surprised when recognition comes. I’m not trying to learn or perform well for any type of external reward or achievement. I’ve actually found that when I get too focused on the measurements of learning, such as grades or teacher approval, I will be met with stress and pressure that actually hurts my ability to learn since I close myself off to insight in my strive for perfection. This is why the drive for learning itself is everything to me.
Additionally, I found early on that one of the other biggest detriments to my learning was believing I was smart. You see, if I believe that I am smart, I don’t need to work hard to learn or grow – it should just come naturally to me. I had many “smart” friends in high school. They seemed to hardly need to expend any effort in our classes in order to get excellent grades or have wise insights. I remember feeling inferior more than once because of the hours it would take me to grasp the concepts they seemed to just know automatically. I had one friend score a whole 10 points higher than me on the ACT, for instance, and she said she had only taken that one ACT prep class that was “a waste of her time.” I, on the other hand, had taken several prep classes and completed an entire ACT prep workbook. I was just grateful my score was high enough to qualify me for the school of my choice – even if it was just barely. In college, things changed. I had built a habit of study that prepared me for the more rigorous academic pursuits I was now involved in while some of those same friends were caught unawares by how much more demanding the learning load was. I believe it was these habits as well as a desire to learn outside of school that led me to completing my undergrad as the Valedictorian of the Sociology department. I still don’t think I’m smart. I make many mistakes. (You have no idea how much I fret over typos and grammar errors in these posts alone!) I do know, however that I’m a freakin’ hard worker and that there are opportunities to learn everywhere.
I think some of my biggest insights have come through a method that was taught by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a 19th-century educational theorist and considered by many to be the grandfather of the kindergarten. He used to take his students out into the woods and pick out something like a tree. He would then say, “What does this teach us?” The students would then provide the knowledge they would study. The topics they discovered varied widely. Each of us has our own experiences and perspectives. These points of view can gift ourselves and others with incredible lessons from even the most mundane objects and experiences. Our capability to learn will expand as we open our minds to the possibility of everything being a teacher. All we need to do is make sure we’ve tuned our actions to constantly asking and seeking that knowledge. Every time I ask, “what have I learned from this?” I’m surprised and expanded by the answers.