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"There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
Course ads, miraculous book recommendations, promises to learn a subject in a week.
They say that every day a rascal and a loser leave the house. When they meet, it's business. Perhaps you have already acted on different sides of this saying, but, today, our anxiety and fear of missing something (the already famous FOMO - fear of missing out) easily puts us as prey to an industry that promises us a capable development to accelerate our career (or some slogan like that).
This is no accident. The availability of content that the internet allows us to access is also the same that makes us realize how much knowledge has always been there and we never knew. If, on the one hand, this is charming and shows us how much we can learn what we want, on the other hand, it makes it very difficult to decide what is best for our development, whether to be a better person or a better professional.
Below are some possible explanations for this and what we can do to make learning a rich, effective process guided by what really moves us:
1. Development is not linear
Although most of us have had a linear education (division of classes by age and same content for everyone, for example), this reflects less and less reality. In practice, we learn Assuming that learning comes from different stimuli is fundamental.
Tips:
Worry less about "finishing" the books you read and more about taking what you want to learn from them and moving on. More important than posting how many books you've read in a year is knowing how much you've actually learned from them.
Pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree is great, but having a learning community that you identify with and share knowledge with is increasingly important. For example, Pedro Nascimento, Leonardo Gomes and I get together fortnightly on Wednesday nights just to talk about what we are learning about Stoicism from reading and from real life. I recommend.
2. Lots of content, little curation
How many books have you bought and never read? How many courses do you want to take and don't have time? All the anxiety these questions generate is no accident. The lack of content that used to kill us with thirst, now drowns us. Access to virtually infinite knowledge on the internet puts us in the paradox of constant choice that drains our energy and, in the end, we end up studying less.
Tips:
Prioritize what you want to learn and focus on one challenge at a time.
Have a good repository of readings to take care of intellectual anxiety. I'm a big fan of Pocket, an app where you save everything you're sent and then open it and see what's really important to read.
3. Accumulating knowledge is different from knowing how to use it
With volatility taking over the world, mastering a certain subject not only doesn't guarantee you adaptability in case of changes, but this knowledge, by itself, can block your desire to learn something new and open your mind to new ideas.
Tips:
Pick a few topics that are important to you and focus on them. You won't die if you don't read the book everyone else is reading. In fact, if everyone is reading it, it might not even be worth reading.
It is better to focus on creating a kind of authentic knowledge than to pasteurize it. When in doubt, read about what you like, regardless of the topics. Gradually, the dots connect and you develop something unique.
Knowledge is knowing something. Wisdom is knowing when and how to apply knowledge and understanding its long-term consequences.
Working with more than a hundred companies in human development projects, I gradually realized that the attempt to standardize corporate education and the anxiety that leads to the search for quick, cheap solutions and without considering the context of each person and culture makes with which, instead of solving the problem at hand (the development of people), it actually makes it even worse. Therefore, it is important to understand that the role of companies is more to help people get to know the library than to say which books should be read.
In the end, what matters is making development an active process ("I develop my talents from my purpose") rather than a passive one ("I develop what other people say I should develop"). This doesn't mean you shouldn't welcome feedback and views different from your own, but rather that your learning process is something no one can do for you.
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