The Sunday Mail
Every teacher, parent, preacher, leader, elder or situation can easily take you to the river of learning and entertain you there for a while.
It is up to you to drink from the river and bath in its bountiful riches.
There is no shortage of what to learn, only a shortage of true thoughtful and reflective learners who want to be useful in life, not just impressive in society.
Anyone who has stopped learning should never be left wandering about unaccompanied in any seat of leadership or place where work is being done and life is being actively lived.
We live at a time of major and constant change.
In times of change, learners unlearn what no longer works, acquire new mental tools and grow, while those that have plateaued wither in despair.
Learn daily, in every way, at every place and at all times. What you learn is your true treasure and no one can take it away from you.
The future does not belong to the learned, it belongs to the learning and growing.
What things were is never what they will be. Stop frantically trying to recreate the future in the image of the past.
Learning is not a credential to show off, but a competence to apply.
The Learning Promise
I have always loved a dish of a special caterpillar that grows on Mopane trees, that we call amacimbi or madora.
Yet, looking at this or any other caterpillar there is nothing that gives you any clue or suggestion that it will one day be a beautiful butterfly. So it is with your life. Your current circumstances may not reflect your true beauty, glory or greatness.
Do not despair or lose heart, keep learning. Commit to learning and growing as a way of life and manner of being.
Learning does not come by chance, it is a process that you engage. Learning must be sought for and attended to with diligence and discipline. You can never be made smaller by learning, growing and developing. Your title deeds to the future is your passion for learning. Anything that enlarges your thinking capacity, enlarges your life.
Learning is your ticket to greatness. Promise yourself to learn daily and never stop learning. Your certificates should not extinguish your passion for learning, but spur you to hunger for more. Refuse to sleep with the same ignorance you woke up with. Refuse to coast along a history of learning, but no fresh insights and perspectives. Welcome each day as an opportunity to live, learn and lead.
The Learning Challenge
The key to learning is being willing to face the prospects of failure and endure the shame of defeat. Failing is the process of learning and growing. Learning breeds on the manure of failure.
True greatness is coasting from failure to failure without losing your passion to grow, hunger to learn and enthusiasm to pursue greatness. When you try something, you are bound to make mistakes. Do not despair if it fails to yield the results you intended. Whatever happens, always take some vital lessons from the experience. Never waste a crisis or lose your confidence because you failed. Anyone who has never made a mistake has likely also never made anything great. Be willing to try, try, and keep trying. Each try is a learning iteration. Each NO you get mean, “Next Opportunity.” Take bold actions and determined learning steps. You can never learn in repose. Get up and get doing. Learning is most intensive when you are most active.
The learning challenge is to keep the flame of inquiry burning. Learning must generate in you more questions than answers. Confront your learning with stubborn questions. The learning soul is never still or complacent. Be so uncomfortable with the present that you hunger to know and be more. Refuse to camp on the ideas of yesterday and moribund mental models.
The opportunities to learn are begging everywhere for inquiring and willing minds. Do not run away too fast from your problems, stay with them long enough to profit from them. Let your problems lead you to the dark chambers where you seek illumination through ardent learning.
March into the day, week, month or year with a clear learning agenda.
Walk into a bookshop, with learning questions, attend a conference pregnant with questions, surf the Internet with a gnawing quest to learn, meet a mentor with questions, approach God with questions. Unless you feel ignorant sometimes, you will foolishly think you have arrived. Do not dock too soon at the harbour of learning, because learning knows no harbour. Learning is a constant journey that begins but never ends. Learn diligently and grow daily.
The Learning Context
Albert Einstein once said: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Learning is an art that develops and grows as you learn. Never allow past academic records convince you to believe that you are stupid-and-good-for-nothing. Refuse to be arrested by history and limited by the negative opinions of other people.
You can start firing your engine today and become anything that you dare. Find your place in the sea of learning, navigate and grow there. Stop excusing yourself from learning by citing all the lazy excuses like age, money, children, sickness, time, economy and the like.
You are always the right age to learn that which you want to learn.
You cannot do everything and be everywhere. But there is something you do well. There is something that you really, really, really want to learn — learn that in a style that works best for you.
Find your circle of concern and focus on it. What do you enjoy? What are your dreams? What are your goals? What excites you when you learn?
What questions trouble you? What is required of you? The answer to these questions makes up your learning context. That context will not be the same for everyone. If you are a fish, learn how to be a fish and to swim and survive the turbulence of the waters. If you are a bird, be the best bird you can be, fly and perfect your song. There is always a place waiting for you in the universe of learning. There are teachers everywhere waiting for a ready and eager learner. There are books waiting for you to read them. Places waiting to open your perspective to life. The opportunities to learn are more than the number of people that are hungry enough to learn. Learning by compulsion is a waste of resources. It is like bathing with a raincoat on. Mind your context and grow within that context. It is not enough to count the issues in your learning context, what is important is to discern what counts. Learn in such a way that you make a difference where it counts the most.
The Learning Partnership
Learning is not a spectator sport, but an active pursuit. Learners usually find other learners. William Blake once said: “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn from the crow.” Who you learn with and from is important. Find kindred souls to learn together with, share material, discuss and flesh out ideas. Learning from tired, cynical people without a drive for life drains you. The company you keep determines the stimulation that you get. Keeping the company of people who have ceased to learn makes for frustrating conversations. Find a learning partnership to be part of. Travel to some exciting place. Join a book club, a discussion forum or community of practice and meet someone excited about growth and learning. Do not stay in a cheese-less situation and be content with barren ideas.
The Learning Application
The purpose of learning is not a mere accumulation of facts, principles, ideas and stories. The purpose of learning is not just entertainment but application. Learning is not so much how much you have committed to memory, but what you can apply. It is not how much you can recite but how much you can use. True learning is to have a fire always burning within you to bring positive change and some answers somewhere.
There are too many unanswered questions and unmanned problems. True learning is to explore and be seized with a desire to make a difference. It is to apply tools to a job, not just to gather tools to show off. True learning is to discover how much you do not know and be determined to learn, be useful and practical. It is knowing how and where to use the information you have received. True learning is a search for answers and a thirst for significance.
Apply yourself to problems and you show your learning. Run away from problems and you show your empty qualifications. The best classroom in the world is any arena that has problems that you do not know how to solve but are willing to challenge. Writing assignments is good practice but it is not the real assignment. The real assignment is solving real problems and supplying real answers to them.
Because problems are many, opportunities are abundant and begging for attention.
The Learning Investment
Invest in your learning and you will never regret. Invest in passive certificate accumulation and you will forever be blaming the education system for fooling you. Ben Franklin once said: “If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” No one can take away what you learn.
Do not substitute certificates for learning, experience for competence. The beautiful thing about the mind is that the more you apply yourself and invest in it the more its capacity to contain more. The best investment is to invest in your own greatness through learning.
Learning is not compulsory, so is survival. Learn how to learn and you will survive any challenge that comes along your path to greatness.
At the end of each day, always ask yourself: “What did I ask today?”
Milton Kamwendo is a cutting-edge international transformational and inspirational speaker, author and coach. He is a strategy, innovation, team-building and leadership consultant. His life purpose is to inspire people to be great. He can be reached at: [email protected] and on WhatsApp at: 0772422634
