Success Skill #2

What is the best investment you can make? Relentless learning is an essential success skill that pays exponential dividends.
Just as money multiplies when you put it in the bank, learning compounds when you put it in your head!  (Although at the current interest rates, compounding isn’t all that great!) Money invested in your development pays off in spades. We believe in this so passionately that we invest over 10% of our annual income in learning.
“The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest.”  ~ Richard Hamming
Some ideas to amp up your learning:

• Be Intentional – decide what topics you need to learn more about. To get the greatest advantage, learning shouldn’t be haphazard or random. Determine where you need to focus and then invest in your learning. Whether this is books, articles, people or courses, you are in charge of the learning in your life.
• Learn Life Lessons – you are in a laboratory of learning. You don’t have to attend a class to learn. If you take time to observe and reflect you will learn great lessons from your daily experiences.
• Learn From Others – whether it’s a mentor, a coach or a great friend, engage others to help you learn and improve. Do an “informational interview” in which you ask questions of someone with greater knowledge or experience than you. It doesn’t have to be a business topic. We had an extraordinary time with a fly fishing guide at Homewaters where we learned all about fishing and heard stories about the American Presidents who fished there.
• MOOC – take advantage of online learning. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC); is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. Examples include:
  • edX – Online free courses from MITx, HarvardX, BerkeleyX, UTx and many other universities.
  • Coursera broaden your knowledge with their wide-ranging catalog of free courses, from music to computer science.
  • The Great Courses  – While it’s not a MOOC, we enjoy the Great Courses, especially the wine course!

Our mentor Alan Weiss advocates the 1% solution, “if you improve by 1% a day in 70 days you are twice as good.” A little learning every day will exponentially increase your success. Relentless learning is a critical success skill we recommend you add to your repertoire.