What does it take to be a life long learner?
Have you ever heard that phrase, “be a life long learner?” I first heard it when I worked at Motorola. During those days they had an initiative they called Motorola University, or Motorola-U. The big idea was to level up everyone, not just the executives through continuous learning. They achieved this (or didn’t) by mandating 40 hours of training every year. I discovered, much to my delight, I could do my coworkers a “favor” by taking their training slots for them. Our manager didn’t mind because the company tracked the training at the department level, not per individual. So as long as my boss turned in 200 hours of training for his five people, everyone was happy.
I don’t think I wracked up 200 hours in a single year, but I know I hit at least three week long training programs during one stretch - it was like having a month off of work. I have no idea how effective it was, but I had a great time. When I went to Rainbow, and later THQ, I was too busy to learn. And I am not sure THQ believed in learning anything, from anyone, about anything. I mean, they went bankrupt after all. Not the usual, merger and aquisition that many companies go through, but the “hard out.” The kind where the managers and board all agree there is nothing here worth salvaging. There might be a lot of angst about Elon Musk owning Twitter/X, but they not only
wanted to tell it to him, they forced him to buy through litigation. In contrast, despite having a catalog of hundreds of titles and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, everyone at THQ just walked away.
By the time I returned to Disney, I once again got to participate in some incredible corporate training programs. However, when I left Disney to focus on GameTruck full time, I discovered that my self education went back to zero. Does that sound familiar to you? After college, I learned when my employers cared enough to “make” me learn, but when they didn’t, I didn’t. Looking back on that, I have to say that was a stupid decision. There are so many tools I have now that could have helped so much during those difficult years of leading from the tips of my skis.
Yeah, I was definitely moving fast, off balance, and more often than not, down hill.
Auto-U
In 2012 I reached point in my life where I realized something needed to change, but I did not know what. GameTruck on paper was doing great, but I was not making any money and I was miserable. I knew I needed to learn more about selling, so I turned to the one guy I had heard of at Toast Masters, “Zig Ziggler.” I forget how I got the first recording of one of his talks, but somewhere in there he talked about auto-u. If you listen to an audio cassette in your car every day, it will feel like you have earned a degree after a year. During the time I came across the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, and he suggested I tune out of social media, and stop watching the news. Only listen to music you like and choose to read content that does one of two things and hopefully both. It either improves your mood, or teaches you something. I suppose inspirational content falls in the improves your mood category, but it also can teach you something.
So I started with Ted Talks. They were available on my iPhone. Right away I felt a tremendous difference in my own personal energy and outlook. Instead of reading the latest outrage, I would hear from smart people, solving hard problems, and working dilligently to make the world a better place. If you wanted to believe the world could be better, Ted Talks were a great place to start. They were short, less than twenty minutes, and in many cases ground breaking. As I understand Simon Sinek, and Brené Brown got their start on Ted Talks. From there, I wanted to know more. I soon discovered many Ted Speakers had audiobooks as well. But Audio books are expensive… unless, you have an Audible Subscription. Subscribing to Audible was easy enough. And with the Cookie Dog joining the family I had the perfect habit stack:
- Walking the dog. This get’s me moving, exercise is good for you mood.
- Listening to Something Smart: So not only was I moving in nature, I also listened to audio books.
Walking Cookie it put me in nature. Soft fascinations, green spaces, and forest bathing are all good for the soul. But the audiobooks gave me a much larger source of content than the Ted Talks. 20 minute talks are fine for a while, but there comes a point where I felt like I was revisiting the same topics. But I wanted to know more about the talks that interested me most. Just when I thought I hit the end of my rope with Ted Talks, Audible stepped up and sent me in a new direction. I discovered most of my favorite speakers also had audio books. I was hooked.
I could walk the pooch, and listen to new ideas. Suddenly, it was like being in (a one sided) conversation with a really smart person who started to share secrets with me. Is started with the old stand by motivational speaking books, like Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Wayne Dwire texts, but I rapidly spread out into more interesting topics, by Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Pink. The book that changed my life was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. It was the first book that really taught me about mindfulness and the power of present moment awareness. Once I could get to calm, I could think better. When I could think better, I could make better decisions. When I made better decisions, I got better outcomes.
I was hooked.
I started to listen to more, and more audio books. This lasted for years. Then, in about 2015, after almost half a decade of listening to audiobooks I started to notice something strange. I started to hear the same stories being repeated. Malcolm Gladwell’s mention of the 10,000 hour rule started to pop up, or the story of the Pottery Class, and then later the Photography Class. (google them, they’re good.) But I could not remember where I had heard of them before. Then it started to dawn on me, as I read books about cleaning and organization like Andrew J. Mellon’s Unstuff Your Life1, I applied some of what I learned, but I struggled to stay with it. So then I tried to read and apply, Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. I made a little progress, but was unable to sustain it. For me the most promising book, but most difficult to apply was David Allens Getting Things Done. The only real tool from that book which has stayed with me is his One Calendar Rule. I have one, calendar. Not a separate work one, and a separate social one, and a separate personal one. I have one calendar that is the source of truth for my commitments. And in truth, this idea, of having what coders call one source of truth, has spread to my current best thinking. I want to only remember one thing, where to find everything.
But I digress. Very often, I would try something, have a small amount of success, but then forget it when I read the next book. I think they call this “catastrophic forgetting” in the world of artificial intelligence. That is where you forget something you already knew, when you learn something knew. I was not building upon my self lead education the way I had in college, I was white washing the last thing I read with a new book to be hyped about. Sadly, this is a stereo type for many visionary entrepreneurs. Always chasing the next exciting idea, they torment their teams with their latest book and then forget all about it, just as their dilligent, contientous, stable teams start to digest what the boss told them. Just as they start to figure it out, the mad scientist comes in with the new savior of the company and throws out everything they have done to replace it with something else.
Going back to Motorola, I believe this was part of their downfall. Every year or so they would introduce a major initiative, something that would “save the company.” This was likely an over-reaction to the success of rolling out six sigma, that truly did revolutionize the entire company, but the year they rolled out Individual Dignity Entitlement without replacing the previous years demand for random drug testing put them in a Dilbert Cartoon. And I was bringing that into my personal life.
This left me with the big question. How the heck could I learn, in a way, that actually improved my life? Simply consuming copious amounts of content had to lead to some improvement, but instead of gaining momentum, I felt like I was thrashing. I pour my energy into “self improvement”, only to end up like I was failing.
But, I could not give up. I decided, there had to be better thinking, about better thinking. Why I thought that, I don’t know, but I’m glad I did, because that idea was what lead me to where I am today.
- This turned into an interesting exploration for me, because I asked ChatGPT to find the author by his book’s catch phrase only to discover that Mr. Mellon “borrowed” the work of Julie Morgenstern who wrote Organizing from the Inside Out nearly a decade earlier. And this perfectly illustrates the difficulty I started to have. Who said what? and who gets credit for what? ↩