Are You a Learner?

When I first heard this question posed in its sarcastic context, I laughed until my jaw dropped but contrary to the popular contextual meaning – widely used in rhetorical terms to connote - ‘glaring naivety’, we can only do ourselves more good remaining students of Life. It might require a little or lot more work, we may always have to humbly accept our flaws and look for means to improve ourselves.
During Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University (in 2005), he said,”the minute I dropped out (of college), I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.”
Clearly, we see that  learning goes far beyond gunning for a degree or certification and the opportunity doesn’t always present itself in a shiny costume or in clear-cut terms; it goes without saying, to truly learn, you have to maximise every opportunity, take giant leaps into the unknown and grow as you make mistakes, learning every step of the way. It’s your first step to discovering who you really are, whether you find it fun or not.
Below are some tips that can make it useful and beneficial.

Identify areas you need to improve. Doing this helps define possible problem areas which figuratively arms you with the hook to fish out those specific activities that provide a high learning potential within your personal pool of activity. A simple example here is, say you have a downright problem with time-management, you’ve identified that it’s a problem and so begin to look out for pointers to the cause of the problem- you can tell if you are easily distracted or you say yes to everything such that you have too much workload on your shoulders, not only would this help you curb time-mismanagement; but it will also present you an opportunity to generally improve yourself, knowing how key time management is in every aspect of your life.

Prioritize and organise the identified areas. The next logical step after identifying the problem(s) is to draft out a scale of preference; you can’t solve your problems all at once, so it’s important you prioritise. Organising deals more with setting out timelines  to allow you effectively tackle these problems in a structured manner. The utmost goal is to ensure a progressive and continuous trend as far as learning is concerned.

Bring to life practical learning pointers. One sad truth about learning is that in most cases we hardly take full advantage of opportunities to apply most of the things we learn and even when we do, we rarely attribute actions we take to be  results of what we earlier learned. A good entrepreneur creates opportunities to practice most of what s/he has  learned.
There are a myriad of certifications and paper-work out there; most of which add value beyond giving our CVs or résumés a cosmetic touch up.
Practical pointers ensure you infuse what you learn to solve every day or work-related problems.

Keep track of moments you apply what you learn and take note of the result(s) to evaluate and re-evaluate; more like a performance appraisal.
It’s a waste of energy when we don’t practice what we’ve learnt and even more time-wasting when we can’t confidently point out areas of improvement aligning them with the things earlier learned.  It’s a profound stream of motivation when you pinpoint these moments.

Always be proud to be a learner. It pays.