Lifelong Learning: Why You Can’t Afford to Stop Learning

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Is your career going nowhere? Do you feel insecure about your job? Have you stopped learning after leaving school? Is learning new things a drag for you?

If you answer ‘yes’ to any of the questions above, then you may be in danger of being engulfed by the tsunami waves of change that has gathered even greater force in the last financial meltdown.

Look around you, are there dinosaurs in your midst? It’s not hard to spot them. These are people who have been at their job for a fairly long period of time, but yet still performing the same old job function with little variations. When they’re asked to do something that’s out of their daily routine, they’ll break out in a panic — as if someone has given them the mission to conquer Mount Everest. Their favorite line to use is “I don’t know” or “I can’t”. And if that doesn’t save them, they’ll concoct other lame excuses to wiggle their way out of more responsibilities.

Guess who will be the first to go when there’s a downsizing going on? The dinosaurs of course. Are you slowly evolving into a dinosaur? I hope not. In this article, I will share with you one way to make sure you’re constantly expanding your skills or knowledge, so that you don’t become an obsolete, a dinosaur.

And the answer is none other than lifelong learning.

What is Lifelong Learning?

What’s lifelong learning? It simply means continuous, self-directed and active learning beyond formal education.

For many people, learning stops the moment they step out of school and join the workforce. Free time after work is usually spent in a pub or in the mall, instead of being used to learn something that’s useful to one’s career or personal development.

Even when forced to attend training courses required by the job, many are actively disengaged from the learning process. They attend classes reluctantly and hardly take learning seriously. Information retention is, therefore, low and practically nothing is applied after training ends.

Some of the more motivated ones will spend time reading books and websites on personal development and self-improvement, but the effort is usually sporadic, disorganized and lacks a proper system to best retain useful information.

But, lifelong learning is different. It’s self-initiated and self-directed. A lifelong learner doesn’t need someone to tell him (or her) that knowledge is power. He doesn’t need someone to remind him that he needs to expose himself to useful and relevant information systematically. Because he knows there’s simply no one around to do that. It has to all come from himself.

So, someone who’s into lifelong learning actively seeks out every possible avenue that can satisfy his thirst for knowledge, even if that means paying out of his own pocket. He sees learning materials and training sessions as investments on himself. He understands that in this uncertain global market, investment in oneself is the safest and highest-yielding investment instruments available.

Barriers to Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learning probably sound like a terribly tedious thing that requires superhuman persistence. While some discipline and persistence are needed, no, you don’t have to be a superman or woman to be a lifelong learner. And who says learning has to be classroom-bound, one-way, dry and uninteresting? If these are your impressions of lifelong learning, then most likely you haven’t discover the right methods to make learning an exciting lifelong pursuit.

“But, I don’t have time to learn outside of work!”

“My work commitment leaves no room for me to attend any classes.”

“I want to spend my free time with my family.”

“My home is not conducive for learning.”

“My company hasn’t send me for any training courses for years!”

“I can’t afford to pay for those courses I’m interested in.”

These are probably some of the excuses reasons why you’ve stopped learning altogether. Instead of addressing them directly, let us do it another way. Let’s consider the possible consequences for not making active learning your lifelong habit.

• By not upgrading your existing skill set, you risk becoming an obsolete when your company or client switch to newer, cheaper technology or product.
• By not picking up seemingly unrelated skills, you’re a highly specialized professional who is in danger of losing your promotion opportunity or business to someone who’s more well-rounded and more at ease in unfamiliar settings.
• When you stopped learning, you gradually become fearful of new developments and changes because you can’t keep up with them. Before you know it, you’re already a museum piece which your company can’t wait to get rid of.
• By not ensuring the security of your job, or the success of your business, you risk losing the ability to support your loved ones who depend on you.
• By not learning outside of work, you have no chance to discover your passion or talent for something else, and end up stuck in a job which you don’t like.
• By not arming yourself with new knowledge and skills, you put yourself in a precarious position if your company or existing clients walk out on you tomorrow.
• By not engaging in continuous active learning, your brain would gradually shrink and degenerate over time, putting you at a greater risk of brain-wasting diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s when you grow old.

Can you still afford to stay complacent?

Contrary to the excuses concerns listed earlier, learning doesn’t have to be expensive, time-consuming or boring. Neither is it restricted to a classroom. What you really need is only thirty minutes to an hour a day, plus a few practical ways to make continuous learning a natural, enriching and fun part of your life.

By engaging in incremental, purposeful learning each day, even if it’s only thirty minutes a day, the cumulative effect you get in six months to a year can make a world of difference when compared to the average Joe out there who spends most of his leisure time watching TV or playing computer games. And you as a lifelong learner can still have time to play with your kids or indulge in your favorite games! Taking about having your cake and eating it too!

Learning Strategies Matter

Earlier, I’ve mentioned that many people who have been forced to attend courses at work usually don’t reap very much from the training they’ve attended. Why? Because they are lacking in one or more of these essential learning strategies:

1. Decide what to learn. The possible number of things we can learn is endless. But realistically, most of us can only learn one thing with any seriousness at any given time. So which subject matter do you start first? How do you choose one subject matter over the other? Choosing the right thing to learn not only maximizes your time, but also help you to achieve your goals in life faster.

2. Learn with a purpose. If you read a book or attend a class without any targets, most likely you will come out of it the way you’ve went in: emptiness. Without a purpose in mind, your brain will be less inclined to retain the information you’ve read or heard. And for your brain to remember anything, you must give it plenty of good reasons to do so.

3. Get the right attitude towards learning. Many of us carry the burden of our past that cripples our will for learning. Just because of the awful learning experiences we have had when we were young, or because we didn’t have a tertiary degree, or we didn’t graduate from an ivy league university, we feel that no matter how much self-learning we do, we will never be as successful as those ‘lucky ones’. That can’t be further from the truth. Though a good education may give someone a good start, it doesn’t guarantee success in life. Only through relentlessly learning and self-development, can we make our life the best it can be.

4. Boost your learning power. If you think the way you live has nothing to do with your learning capacity, think again. How we go about our daily lives, including what food we eat and how much sleep we get, has a long-term effect on our brain and determines how much information we can absorb. By making some tweaks to our everyday routine, we can easily boost our learning power and make learning almost effortless!

5. Make good use of learning tools. It’s no secret that the environment we find ourselves in affect the way we learn and process information. Some people can only learn in a quiet setting, while others learn better with some music in the background. But do you know that there are relatively inexpensive tools around that can greatly enhance your learning experience?

6. Use proven techniques to learn effectively. Do you still rely on wholesale memorization which you picked up during high school to remember things? Then, you’re missing out on many good, proven ways to learn, remember and retain information.

Besides writing articles on how to cool chronic inflammation in the body and how to meditate, I’m also passionate about lifelong learning and ways to enhance learning. So, I’ll be elaborating on each of the learning strategies in future articles. If you don’t want to miss any of them, remember to sign up for The Conscious Life Digest, or subscribe to our RSS feed.