Today, students graduate from school knowing that what they learned will become stale soon. Technology is evolving at breakneck speeds. Computer science languages and frameworks used to change every 5-10 years. They’re now changing every few years. What was new yesterday is old today. By the time you realize you’re behind, it may be too late to catch up.
The end of my tenure running my mobile gaming startup was a rough period for me. I had stopped learning. I was constantly laying the tracks down while the train was coming. There were too many moles for me to whack; I didn’t have a chance to catch my breath. I stopped having fun. I stopped enjoying myself. I was on the path to burnout. Since that experience, I’ve learned that constant learning and enjoyment in what I’m doing in the present moment is crucial to sustaining myself. It’s a marathon, not a race.
So how do we keep pace in this rapidly accelerating environment? How do we prevent ourselves from becoming tomorrow’s coal miners who were blind-sighted by our rapidly changing economy? Well, we have to ask ourselves difficult questions and genuinely attempt to answer them. How does the future look? How do my skills fit into that future? Will my skills go stale? If so, what relevant skills can I learn that will be valuable? How early do I need to start training myself to learn those skills?
There are an endless number of questions that you can ask yourself. It can appear overwhelming. Here’s a way to simplify the problem: focus on learning something new every day. Learn something you enjoy. It will come in handy someday. As Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
The Japanese call this process of constant learning the Kaizen. It means “continual improvement”. It’s the driving force behind Japan’s product quality in the last 70 years.
James Clear extends this idea with the 1% rule: those who maintain a 1% advantage over their competitors over time rule their respective fields. The basic premise is that most systems have winner-take-all outcomes. For example, Google and Facebook own 65% of the astronomical $60 billion advertising industry and account for a ridiculous 99% of the advertising growth in Q3 2016 (link).
Clear explains this trend: “The margin between good and great is narrower than it seems. What begins as a slight edge over the competition compounds with each additional contest.” Those first to the gold mine have time to build barriers to entry to solidify their advantages and eventually push out all their competitors. As machine learning and AI evolve, this shift will magnify more and more.
So how do you cultivate a 1% advantage and how do you maintain it? You must cultivate a natural curiosity for learning. At its root, it doesn’t matter too much what you’re learning. Steve Jobs took a calligraphy course after he dropped out and that ended up being the seed for personal computers having the beautiful typography that they do (link). Once again, you can only connect the dots looking backward.
So why do many of us stop learning? Well, many of us have a natural inclination to start clinging to the idea that we’re perfect. That we’ve already arrived. As startup founders/CEOs and business owners, it’s easy to think that we’ve made it. We’ve climbed the hill and we’re reaping the rewards. But that’s the surest way to stumble, especially in today’s fast-paced markets.
Those who climb the highest mountains are constantly learning, improving, and setting their sights on the next mountain to climb. They’re learning from their experiences, hiring people to compliment themselves and their weaknesses, hiring coaches, asking their employees how they can be better leaders, becoming better managers, improving their systems and processes, learning from other leaders, and on and on.
Thinking that you’ve already made it is the greatest enemy to learning. It’s the surest way to be left behind in the dust, just like the coal miners. It closes your mind to new ideas, possibilities, and ways of doing things. Cultivating a beginner’s mind reminds you that there’s always more for you to learn. Even if you’re the expert in your field, there’s still more for you to learn.
Many of us stop learning because we have too much stuff on our plate — this is what happened to me. So how do you balance learning with the whack a mole game you’re playing at work every day? Here are a few ideas. Block off your calendar every day for however much time you’re comfortable with and let that be your R&D learning time. Spend it on whatever you’re interested in, as long as you’re learning something new. Find sites, apps, and tools that will expose you to new ideas. Talk to someone in an unrelated field to you. Read a new book. Here’s what CEOs are reading in 2017. Reconnect with an old friend.
Many of us may stall at the idea of learning something new when we’re at the top of our field. To do so — we argue — implies that we’ve lost the status or self-image that we’ve worked so hard to attain. You may think you have to start from scratch and think to yourself, “that’s not me”. Or you may think, I’m going to look foolish for trying this new thing. What if people see me fail? The simple answer is that if you don’t continue to learn, you are guaranteed to run into a hard wall in the future. None of us are immune to what happened to the coal miners whose skill set have gone stale. But you have the opportunity to get ahead of it now.
You’ve probably played the underdog at some point in your life. You worked your ass off. That’s how you became a startup CEO or business owner. If you lose your edge or stop pushing your limits because of where you’ve gotten, you’ll eventually get dethroned.
I challenge you to seriously consider this question: if you don’t start investing in yourself today, what do you stand to lose?
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
