Don't Stop Learning
Throughout your career, you will reach various plateaus where you feel like you've learned everything you need to learn. You know how to sell, how to code, how to make customers happy. It feels good.
Then something happens:
You may start to wonder if you've lost a step or reached a point of stagnation. Maybe it's time to start honing your skills or catching up with new thinking.
And you're probably right! As with most things, it takes a dramatic event to knock us out of our stasis and back into reality.
But I believe it's possible to avoid this shock by adopting a learning habit. Rather than waiting to find out what you don't know, seek it out on a regular basis. This has a direct application in work and life in general. In fact, the two feed off each other.
Adopting a habit of learning outside of work (how to fix your sink, foreign culture, the actual rules for playing Monopoly) gives your brain a framework and a desire to learn more at work (a coding language, customer psychology, the latest marketing trend).
In my experience, there are a few good ways to adopt a habit of learning.
Schedule it.
In Marketing at Integrify, we schedule a half-day every Friday to learn something new. It's usually a marketing-related topic but it could be anything tangentially related to what we do. The point is to get our brains firing and connecting sometimes disparate ideas.
For instance, learning to code with Python could stimulate an idea for automating an aspect of our Marketing, or a new feature for the product. Reading a book about psychology could result in a new approach for our email subject lines. You get the idea.
Force a topic.
I know very little about religions around the world. I've also never been particularly interested in the topic. However, I've committed to learning about a new religion every month. The history, the orthodoxy, the ceremonies, etc. Why? Because I might find something interesting or applicable in my own life.
But in the context of developing a learning habit, it helps me hone my learning approach. How do I plan, find, organize, and retain the information in the most fun and interesting way possible? This helps me develop a system for learning that I can repeat at home or at work.
Join groups.
There are so many niche social networks and discussion forums at this point that pretty much anything you want to learn more about has its own group. Craft beer fans use Untappd, LinkedIn Groups are for professionals, Behance is for creatives, Sermo is for medical professionals, and Ravelry is for knitters.
But those are just high-level examples. Are you specifically into Pu'er tea? Hand dryers around the world? Detailed flight data? Vehical Safety? Subscribe to Reddit, search for a "Subreddit" about your niche, and find out everything you could possibly want to know (and probably a few things you didn't).
The point of joining these groups is to go deeper on a topic while also discovering related topics that may interest you. I am, personally, very much into Pu'er tea after joining a Subreddit about Tea where it was discussed frequently. I then joined a Pu'er subreddit to geek out about it.
Connect what you learn to work.
I talked earlier about finding ways to apply new learnings to work. This can become an amazing source of new ideas in your job. Making these connections simply requires occasionally turning on a "mental monitor" that says "could this apply to some aspect of my work?"
“Originality often consists in linking up
ideas whose connection was
not previously suspected.”
W. I. B. Beveridge,
Recommended by LinkedIn
The Art of Scientific Investigation
For instance, you could be researching your family tree, learning about the connections between people in your life when you stop for a moment and think "Hm, how could this apply to my role in customer service?" This might lead you down a path of getting to know the companies you deal with most frequently better using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find the internal connections between your contacts.
Acknowledge your weaknesses
Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, we all need to address our weaknesses and come up with a plan for turning them into strengths (or at least not weaknesses).
Since we're not always the best judges of our own abilities this might be a good time to get some external feedback. Perform a 360 review with your team, ask a trusted colleague or mentor, or ask you boss what areas you could work on. Be humble and appreciative with whatever feedback you get, then get to planning.
There are many courses available online in your chosen field. Try LinkedIn Learning if you have access but there is no shortage of resources out there . You can also use Google to put together a bundle of articles and blog posts to read and take notes on a scheduled basis. Use bookmarks or whatever tool you think you'll actually enjoy returning to on a regular basis to organize the content.
Lastly
In closing, I am not endorsing thinking about work all the time here. That's an unhealthy way to live and will lead to burn out (been there). What I am advocating is to think about work sometimes when you're not working. Just like you may sometimes think about the rest of your life when you are working.
It might take some humility and introspection to begin this process of habitual learning but it's absolutely worth it.
Happy learning!