The Secret To Learning? Unlearn!

You’re a baby boomer with more time than money. You dream of being debt-free again, and financially robust. Throughout your life you followed trends – from jeans to long hair to disco to investing in the stock market – but  now you realize it’s not about trends and fashions anymore, it’s serious business. Your money is decreasing at the rate your predicted longevity is increasing. Every other day science is adding another five years to your predicted life span. You need to be making money again. Not just for a month or two, but for many years. But the landscape has changed. What you’ve learned is nearly worthless, and what you must learn seems like a mountain. You worry. You Can Do Better Than That!

Many of the things you now take for granted were once impossible. Luckily, your mind didn’t conceive of impossible back then. Learning – your very survival depended on it – occurred naturally rather than memorably. It’s what allowed you to upgrade yourself from the sippy cup to the cocktail glass.

Therein lies your answer to today’s challenges. Simply return to your roots. Reclaim your right and freedom to learn the way you were meant to, by trial and error, or as I like to call it, by the awesome power of zigzagging.

Learn From Kids. It’s Easy. You Once Were One Yourself.

The best minds for learning are the minds of children. When kids are beginners at anything they ask questions at the beginner level. They make mistakes – not deliberately, but naturally as part of the process. They don’t mind not knowing, they only mind not learning. Always looking for people who already know what they are in the process of learning, they spend time around them and ask them questions. Kids instinctively know there’s no need to (re-)invent the wheel each time a wheel is needed. If a child were to build a telescope, s/he would look for some with telescopes, hopefully someone who understands people love to learn much better than being taught. Kids, like grown-ups, can make much progress when mistakes are made, best in rapid succession. Kids just know, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well. Why, they even learn to dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music.

You don’t learn so that you can then do. That’s an anxiety reaction and an avoidance behavior. You can’t get wet from the word “water.” The doer alone learns. Birds are given wings by falling. You, too, learn by jumping, or you’ll never learn at all. Or worse, you’ll abandon your calling altogether. When you learn, if you “fail,” you cannot learn less.

Tagged as: action orientation, Baby Boomer, Comfort zone, Learning, Longevity, making money blogging, personal growth, Self Development, Success Strategies, Trial and Error