YOU MUST STOP LEARNING NOW!
Sounds outrageous, isn’t it? Where the whole world is talking about continuous learning, upskilling, and expanding your knowledge, why am I saying something so crazy?
I will explain this to you in a while, but before that let me ask you, how often do you up-skill yourself? How often do you learn something new, read a new book, participate in an educational webinar or lecture, and gain some new knowledge? I am assuming you do it quite often. Maybe you learn every day, every week, or every month. Whatever may be the frequency of your learning, keep that mind and read on.
Leaders are great learners
Like you, many leaders I work with have a great learning schedule too. They attend regular conferences, go through executive coaching, read the right books, go through upskilling training and more.
I was talking to a business leader the other day. He was proud to say how his company always put employees’ learning in the forefront and how he is using it for his benefit.
In the last five months, he has been through five different training programs and getting coached by a leadership coach. Also, he has read books like Ikigai, Start with WHY, Hyper Focus, Atomic Habits, Grit, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Habits of Happiness, and many others. It’s impressive to see the speed at which he is learning something new.
When I asked him how he is implementing his learnings to grow in his professional and personal life, he said, ‘I am thinking about it’. Five months of deep learning and reading is accumulating in his head for it to show results through his actions. Which he is yet to take.
I am part of a book club, and we review a minimum of 3-4 books every week. Each one of us read a book and share our thoughts around the same, allowing others to learn from that book quickly. One of the members of the book club has been planning to start a YouTube channel for his book reviews for four months now. He is yet to implement it.
Are all leaders’ great doers?
How often do you implement something that you learn for the betterment of your professional and personal life? Is the frequency the same as your learning frequency?
Let’s say you learn a new skill once a month. How often do you implement that same skill to your benefit? When I asked this question to leaders, I found the ratio of learning vs doing is 6:1. Which means if people learn six things, they will take action in only one thing among these six, in their workplace and life.
Wow, that’s a whopping five things remaining in their minds for it to get cluttered like this image.
You must be thinking what a waste of time, isn’t it? My question is, what’s the point of learning something new if you aren’t putting it to practice? What’s the benefit of having a skill that you have but don’t use?
Learn less do more
That’s why I say, learn less and do more. All successful leaders are amazing action takers apart from being great learners. Every setback leader is known for their skill of doing things differently. They experiment with their ways, they try out different things, and they learn what works through a trial and error.
What helps you snowball your growth is your speed of implementation and not your rate to acquire knowledge. In my favourite TEDx Talk, Stephen Duneier talks about the same thing, DOING THINGS regularly and relentlessly.
It’s those mundane, tedious actions that we take makes us achieve extraordinary things. What makes an ordinary leader remarkable is their ability to DO things regularly.
HENCE, STOP LEARNING AND START DOING MORE OFTEN.
