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LifeLong Learning

An attitude to learn new things keeps the excitement alive in one’s life. Learning new languages, new subjects, and new field of knowledge, new hobbies or even learning new things in your field of study or work. Lifelong learning attitude keeps a child in you alive, a child who is curious, who is amazed at the beauty of things that he is seeing for the first time. 

We get so busy in our day to day occupation and get so tied up to our routine that without realizing we are transformed to a component of a huge machine, doing the same thing day in day out. Spend our lives living like a robot or a zombie. In this mechanical race, we almost never realize that we are depriving ourselves from amazing potential to learn things beyond our survival requirement, an ability which only humans have.
 

Allow yourself to look around, extract time from your daily perfunctory routine, discover the hobbies and your interests which you jettisoned while running break neck to catch the train of career and employment. The bad news is that you missed out a lot due this mad race, and the good news it you can still catch up with it any time when you decide to do it.

In fact it’s not at all difficult, because learning is a natural instinct in living organisms that includes human beings. Learning is vital for survival. There is “Lifelong learning” software program loaded in our hardware, but this software has the ability to run at different levels. Most of us scale it down to the level of minimum learning mode, so we learn only those things which are utmost importance but then we undermine the special ability that only human beings have, learning things which go beyond their basic requirement of survival. The things like poetry, music, arts, painting, photography or philanthropy.

According to famous author and speaker Mr. Brian Tracy, there are three kinds of learning they are maintenance learning, growth learning and shock learning.

Maintenance Learning: refers to you keeping current with your field, this keeps you on pace and prevents you from falling behind. It is the minimum that one has to do keep oneself up-to-date and stay relevant. This is just like light exercise, 10 minutes brisk walk, which will keep you at a particular level of fitness, and would just keep you in shape, but not increase your level of fitness or improve your condition in any way. Maintenance learning is when your “Lifelong learning” software is running at the scaled down minimum level.

Growth Learning: is the kind of learning that adds knowledge and skills to your repertoire that you did not have before. Growth learning helps you expand your mind. You are acquiring information that you didn’t have that enables you to do things that you could not do previously. The desire for growth learning has its trigger, its switch inside you, you have to find that and switch it on, you will be amazed at the possibilities of new things that you could accomplish and improved quality of work which you delivered. Growth learning adds on to your skill, personality, knowledge and contributes to the wisdom. It energizes the circuitry in your brain, it impels your mind to think possibilities, think out of the box and innovate.

Shock Learning: Unlike growth learning which has got its trigger situated inside you, and is only a decision away, Shock learning is beyond your control, shock learning is an opportunity which comes up with unexpected successes and unexpected failures; it comes up when something happens which is beyond or contradictory to the expectation from an action or decision. This shock gives you an insight that may impel you to change your concept, idea, philosophy, belief and course of action completely.  


The response to this “Shock” is based on your attitude, whether you chose to learn and unlearn and modify your course of action, or start looking for excuses and defenses. And that attitude is dependent on whether you have turned your “Growth Learning” switch on or off.  Growth learning is a conscious choice whereas shock learning is a compelled option. So reach out to that switch inside your mind and switch it on. Enjoy learning. It’s fun.


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