Tag: learning

Getting started

You don’t have to know it all to get started, you just need to know what the next step is. If you wait until you have all of the information or until you know exactly how things will play out, you will be waiting forever. There is risk and uncertainty in everything we do in life. There is even risk and not taking action.

Determine where you are currently and where you think you want to be in the future. Once you have an end result in mind, then reverse engineer the next steps to get there. You don’t have to have everything planned out to a “T” to get started. Have a general guideline or a framework on how do you think it should look and what you need to do to get started. I guarantee that how do you think it looks and how it will eventually end up working is going to be at least a little different. But if you don’t do anything, if you wait for all the answers to come to you, if you wait for certainty, you’re going to miss your opportunity.

Education – it’s not just about schooling

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.” – Allan Bloom

Go to the light! Don’t stay hidden in the dark…

Consume new material, information, and ideas. Take time to think about what you just read and learned.

Go in with an open mind and your initial thoughts about a subject can change.

Process the information and put it to use. If you’re not educating yourself (in the form of experiencing new things, reading/watching/listening to new things, etc), you are keeping yourself ignorant. You are hiding in the dark.

Knowledge and ignorance

“The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.” John F. Kennedy

You don’t know what you don’t know. I used to think I was relatively smart, then I began reading more and realized that there is so much I don’t know.

We will never know everything. We can’t even know everything that we think we know, let alone use science, math, and other information/data to break through to understand new answers and technologies.

As long as you remain humble, keep an open mind, and always try to learn something new, you’ll be in a good spot. Don’t talk down to others because you think your idea of “the truth” is more complete than theirs. Over time, you’ll come to realize that your truth today is only a partial truth. It’s your truth, but then there is also the other person’s truth (their perspective of the same event/situation) and the objective truth (what happened, with no thoughts/opinions of why something was said/done, without assigning intent or judgment, etc). And what really plays with your mind is when you realize that your truth today gets twisted/altered so that when you look back at the event in five, ten, or twenty years, you have yet another version of the truth.

Reading vs doing and the 10,000 hour rule

I love the idea of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. Basically, if you want to “master” anything, you have to put in the work and deliberately practice for roughly 10,000 hours.

One way to accelerate that timeline without experiencing all of the setbacks is by reading where others have tried and failed, what they learned, what their best practices are, things to keep in mind, etc. That’s why reading is so important. Even though it’s not the same as doing (and you typically don’t retain as much reading about something versus doing it), you can still add to your skill set by learning as much through books when you are unable to learn by doing.

Whenever you have the means to do something though (whether that is not having time, money, or energy constraints), then do it. Make a plan and intentionally follow through with that plan. There is no substitute for doing. You can have a good understanding of a subject by reading about it, but if you never do it (and preferably teach it too), then you will never truly master it.

Failing as a way to move forward

Failing is learning. Do you think a professional golfer has never lost a golf ball, a basketball player hasn’t missed a shot, or a baseball player didn’t strike out to end the game? You will never be 100% successful in everything you try. Embrace failures. If you only attempt to do things you already know you can do, your improvement will be limited. It’s ok to fail! The key is to learn from those failures – to bounce back and try again! True winners don’t let failures keep them down.