1: Learning at the Speed of Light
Are you a reader or listener? Which do you tend to do more as far as when you’re learning something new? Do you tend to read a lot or do you tend to listen a lot or watch a lot?
Here’s an important point. When I ask people individually how do you learn best; most people have an easy answer for me. However, when I ask them if they act on that information, do they actually consider that and leverage it when they go about learning something – very few people actually answered yes.
And yet acting on your knowledge of how you best learn is the key to growing your performance, to getting better and learning faster. Not acting on this knowledge condemns to inefficient learning and therefore, condemns you to suboptimal performance or non-performance.
So what is the best way that you learn and are you leveraging that way? It could be by reading. It could be by thinking about and writing about what you’ve just discovered. It could be about watching videos. It could be about talking about what you’ve learned with friends. It could be a lot of things, but the point is that you need to know how you best learn.
If you know how you get motivated and you start actually using that to increase your motivation. And you know how you learn and you start leveraging that so you can learn faster, I think you can kind of see where this is going. Ultimately your performance will be so much better than it is right now because you’ve brought some consciousness to who you are; how you do the things you do; and how you could perform at your best.
2: Work Preferences
Another area is your work preferences. There are too many topics to discuss here, so I won’t go too in depth. But, let’s take one easy example.
Do you work best alone or with others? If you do work better with others, what kind of relationship does it usually take? Is it with friends? Is it with people who are subordinates? Is it with a boss telling you what to do? (I hope not if you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur.)
How do you work best? Do you work best in the morning or the evening? Do you work best working on one project for the entire day or working on several different projects at the same time or throughout the day? Do you work best at your desk or in different environments? Do you perform better under stress? Or, do you do better with a highly structured, predictable environment?
Personally, I tend to work best in different environments so I’m always moving around. A while back, someone was asking me how I dealt with ADD as far as multitasking. I told them when I start feeling bored and get the need to start working on something else; rather than dropping what I’m working on and starting something else, I take what I was working on and I go to a different environment. So if I’m working on something and I’m at the beach and I’m starting to get antsy, then I’ll go to the cigar bar or I’ll go to my office. Once I get antsy there, I’ll go to Starbucks. I’ll just move around.
But it’s not important what I do. It’s important what you do that works best. Maybe you’ve never thought about these things. So you don’t know the answers to these questions right now. That’s completely okay. But now that you’re aware these are things you should know, you can start actually thinking through your motivation strategy; your learning strategy; how you do work strategy.
Do you see how knowing these things can make such a huge difference in your level of performance? When you do, you can adjust your work in a way that really leverages the best
out of you!
The Way I Stay on Top of These Kinds of Things
That’s one of the reasons I love writing in my journal. Because a lot of questions like these get answered. Not always in a premeditated way, but just by sharing experiences in my journal. I see the patterns over time like “oh, the last six times I really learned something quicker than I thought. It was because I did X, Y and Z in all of those cases.” Obviously X, Y and Z would be something very useful for me to consistently do whenever I’m learning something new.
So, that’ll wrap up this brief topic. I’ll leave you with this…
Q: How well do you know yourself? And based on that, are you leveraging who you are to get all that you want? If not, are you willing to be introspective to reflect, to think through, and ultimately bring more consciousness to who you are, how you best work and what gets you going and how you learn best?
I believe that the rewards for knowing this far, far outweigh the time it takes or the energy that you expand to learn these things about yourself.
If you really want to perform at a high level, then it’s not a “nice” thing to do; it’s an absolutely essential thing to do.