Today I wanted to write about how we can never truly stop learning because events in our lives never stop teaching us! I’d like to look at what lessons life provides and how they might cross over into business.
First of all, if you think that you know everything you need to know – about your family, your business, your friends, then you’re kidding yourself. You can always learn more day by day from those around you – from your peers, your customers, your suppliers, your team and from loved ones, so while you may not be studying for something specific at the moment, continue the learning mindset.
Lessons from life – fostering the learning mindset
Read a book as often as you can, listen to an audio as often as you can, tune into some podcasts that add value for you either individually or for the business, but life never stops teaching, you just have to be open to the lessons.
In previous articles I’ve talked about looking for the ‘learn in business’ from an outcome, from customer or worker behaviour, or something that we feel we did wrong, or failed at.
Sometimes as business owners we can be too quick to firefight and move on without taking the proper time to really understand the lessons, and as entrepreneurs we can be too focused on perfection which is actually a form of procrastination. Don’t wait for something to be perfect before you implement it – you might never get there! Instead, do it, learn from it, and do it better next time.
And life outside of our business will sometimes teach us some really difficult lessons, but often it will also show us the way forward.
Lessons I’ve learned in life and how they cross over into business
One thing I’ve learned, and I think most people know is that it’s not always easy to accept a lesson and make a change. Sometimes your health, your happiness or income will show you something is wrong before you start paying attention…
So, these are simple, yet hard to learn lessons from life to give you a headstart:
- Prioritise your health and wellbeing
- Not everyone is going to like you, and you won’t like everyone
- Pace yourself
- There’s no shame in not knowing
- You can’t always get what you want
- Things don’t always come easy
- Pace yourself
- Be imaginative
- Be kind
- Retain a sense of honour and responsibility
- You can’t please all of the people all of the time
- You have the power to influence other people’s feelings and mood.
To truly never stop learning, we just have to decide how we react to the outcomes – whether we’d do it again whether to tweak it or never repeat it…
So, today’s message is never stop being open to learning because life will never stop teaching!