Now and in the future lifelong learning is your greatest warrant for success. Learning something new every day has a whole range of benefits:
- It is healthy for your brain 🧠 as learning creates new neural connections between brain cells. This lowers your chances of getting Alzheimer and similar diseases later in life.
- It improves your creativity 🎨 as fresh input sparks new ideas and broadens your horizon for what is possible.
- It grows 🌱 you like nothing else does as gaining new skills and new knowledge challenges your comfort zone.
Lifelong learning is both a mindset and a modus operandi. It’s a way of being and a way of doing in order to develop yourself. If you want to reach your dreams and grow yourself you will need to engage in lifelong learning.
Lifelong Learning as a Mindset
Any experience you have and any challenge you go through can teach you something. Lifelong learning as a mindset is being able to see the opportunity in everything and being able to extract the lessons from whatever life throws at you. To develop this kind of mindset:
- keep a diary of lessons learned to help you focus on the learning
- practice gratitude when you’re facing challenges. It will automatically help you see the positive elements in your experiences and what you’ve learned through them
- view the people you meet as mentors and the interactions you have as mentor sessions. You can learn so much from people if you approach them from this perspective
If you are willing to learn, life offers you more than enough opportunities to do so. You just need to keep your eyes and your mind open to it.
Lifelong Learning as a Modus Operandi
Apart from seeing the lesson in every experience, you can also actively seek out learning experiences that expand your skills, challenge your comfort zone and give you new information. Activities you can engage in include:
- Reading books: Reading a little every day isn’t only extremely healthy, it’s also one of the easiest way to stumble upon new ideas, gain new knowledge and receive indirect mentoring. There are a billion cool books and authors just waiting to inspire you.
- Taking courses: Signing up for both online and offline courses is another great way to learn. There’s probably a course on any topic you can imagine. As long as you just put enough effort into it, learning this way can be a very efficient way to learn something new.
- Getting a mentor or a peer group: Learning from a master in his/her field or having a commitment group to keep you motivated and on track is a great way of learning that taps into the social aspect of the process. For more check out our Global Peer Mentorship.
- Traveling: Few things will help you gain new perspectives and insights into other world views as easily and thoroughly as traveling and actually experiencing different cultures. It’s so easy to get caught up in one’s own culture if you don’t travel and see more of the world.
- Practicing: Whether you’re learning a language, engaging in creative activities, or hoping to develop a new skill, daily practice is key. Nothing will more efficiently help you learn as simply taking action and doing stuff. That’s why we say #takeaction & #doepicshit.
Apart from traveling, you can engage in all of these are activities every single day. You don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but doing a little bit on a daily basis adds up and suddenly you’ve learned a lot more than you thought possible. One of our mentors, Dieter Kalt, always says: Just aim for improving by 1% every day. In a year’s time, you will have improved by quite a bit.
So what else is there to say than:
Commit yourself to lifelong learning. The most valuable asset you’ll ever have is your mind and what you put into it.
– Brian Tracy
