Continuous Learning

Steve Pavlina just posted an article talking about the chance of becoming a black belt has no bearing on whether or not you would succeed, because success is a choice, not a chance. Most black belts start as white belts, and it takes years of learning to become worthy of black belt. It is the journey that makes it a worthwhile experience.

I have previous written that passion is the one of the biggest indicators for future success, and the true passion does not mean what would you like to do for fun, but rather what would you do after you are done just having fun, and are ready to overcome any challenges. Few people in this world develop true passion for things, and rather they shy away from the first sign of difficulty - I know so myself

Why is that? Is this a human innate nature? Or is this something that we are conditioned to do?

While scientists are still busy learning about human genome and perhaps can one day answer all questions in terms of genes like in the movie Gattaca, the truth is that the environment plays a big role in our lives. How we grow up, who we contact and learn from all play an important part of shaping our psychics. Parents, family, teacher, and friends have enormous influences deep in our subconscious just as we grow and mature, and these learning can make deep and almost indeliable imprints.

When a little baby touches a hot stove for the first time, you can bet that she will remember the feeling for the rest of her life. The learning is done. If the family and she is not careful, such learning might even develop into fear of stove in the future, which might have drastic implications.

And that’s how we learn. We learn best by feeling, not by the abstract logics and mechanisms. When we take a math class and flunk the exam, the lesson that we pick up as youngsters is that we suck at math, that teachers and friends look down on us, and that we do not like that feeling. To resolve the cognitive dissonance, we will quickly rationalize our failures - “I do not have capacity for math”, “my math teacher sucks”, “who needs math anyways”. These excuses allow us to feel better about ourselves.

We do not like feeling like failures.

The biggest environmental challenge that we have is that we are brought up learning to hate and avoid failures. The society today is performance oriented from measurement perspective, but completely lacks the ability to manage performance improvement. Our school system punishes students for failing exams. We teach them that getting an A is the most important objective, but yet fail to recognize that consistent incremental improvements and persistent will breed true long-term success. While some students will measure up and get the necessary positive reinforcements to achieve long-term success, most of us only get negative reinforcement about how incapable we are, and we in turn ask ourselves - what do we need to do to avoid the pain?

Success in the real world only happens after failures and after you learn from those failures. Overnight successes are often preceded by years of no fame and little awareness, not to mention failures after failures. Each failure afford us something valuable to learn, more so than success. This might sound funny and weird, but instead of avoiding failures, we should welcome and embrace them. If you avoid failures, you might just have avoided success.

The best thing about humans is that we are a learning machine, and we can continuously learn if we choose to do so. With commitment, we can unlearn bad habits and thoughts that are deeply embedded in our subconscious, and relearn positive habits that will get us closer toward our goals. And one of the learning we all must do is to embrace and learn from failure. Do not shy away from them, because they are our best teachers.

They are our guide to a brighter future.