A new language? How to knit? Ways to be more patient? How to network effectively?
To be a better golfer? To laugh more? Improve your photography skills? How to do that DIY project you’ve been putting off?
Tackle French cooking? Master a new yoga pose? How to start a blog? To be a better communicator?
Figure out how to use social media for your business? How to garden? To be a better parent? How to be more grateful?
Intellectual stimulation makes life more satisfying.
There’s lots of research to suggest it also helps preserve mental function. Learning keeps your brain happy.
We all have the capacity to learn and what’s supremely cool about being an adult is YOU get to create your very own learning plan.
Now, there may be non-negotiable learnings required as part of your job, but what about outside the work realm?
Nailing down your learning plan is not as dry as it sounds.
It simply starts with what you’re curious about.
- What sparks your interest?
- What would you most like to explore?
- What do you want to know and know how to do?
In fact, how about creating a learning list?
It’s like a bucket list, but instead of being all the things you want to do in your lifetime, it’s a list of all the things you want to learn.
If you end up with a long list like me, here’s a way to narrow your focus: Go through each possibility and ask yourself: On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited am I about the act of learning—not just the end result, but the journey of learning?
Sometimes I find there are topics I’d like to KNOW, but am not so excited about the actual learning part. I set those aside for something that gets a 9 or 10 on the sheer joy of learning scale.
We’re all life-long learners.
Whether we want to be or not.
The world is always changing, and we have to learn new information and skills to keep up.
What if you were to focus on what you want to learn rather than what you have to learn simply to keep up?
What’s on your learning list?
