Learn 1 Thing Every Day

I am sure I have heard this many times from many sources: "Try to learn one thing every day." However, I really remember it sinking in for the first time as I read the cheesiest self-help, motivational book ever written: Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior by Richard Marcinko. I usually try to live by that advice.

Some days, I go to a college or corporate classroom with the intention of learning something--that makes it easy. Other days, I really have to seek out knowledge. I wish more people around me were trying to learn.

I have been in classrooms where the instructor quit learning a long time ago. It is hard to learn from someone who hasn't actively built their knowledge: what they teach you is dusty and moldy, and I have caught more than one dinosaur with inaccurate, out-dated knowledge.

I have worked for managers who quit learning a long time ago. The business environment has globalized, the workforce has diversified, the customers are now into low-cost and high-tech rather than high-quality and personal service. Even so, the dinosaur manager keeps trying to pound square pegs into round holes, and has no idea why they are about to be volunteered for an early retirement.

I know people who have the resources and opportunities to use technology to make a better, more productive life for themselves. Instead of rising to the new age, they cower as techno-phobes, afraid to learn something new. I sympathize with the romantic notion of a simplified, technology-less life. However, you must accept that, while that lifestyle was fairly free of consequences 20 years ago, today a person without a certain level of tech-savvy will be forced to make some extreme sacrifices in their life. It may be wrong, ugly, and scary, but it is too late to fight it. Get with the times or get left behind.

I have skipped opportunities to learn something new, and accepted those opportunities when, luckily, they were offered a second time. I have always found that the learning isn't as hard as I thought it would be. I have also found myself in times when I regretted that I had not accepted a learning opportunity and needed that knowledge later.

Learning should be viewed as a rare privilege. Not everyone has the opportunities, resources, and capacities for learning that we of the cyber-space do. We have a limited amount of opportunities to learn, and most opportunities only knock once. We have a limited amount of time to learn, and the clock is ticking.

I learned something simple and useful today: I learned how to embed a YouTube video into a Powerpoint presentation. I have considered doing it before, but made do without the knowledge. For a presentation on the culture and business environment in China, I really wanted to include a couple of videos. I watched a brief video, and did it. Piece of cake. It isn't knowledge that will solve the energy crisis or make me a million bucks; however, it may prove to be a contributing factor. You never know.

If you are curious, too, how to embed a YouTube video into a Powerpoint presentation, watch this:

One of the videos I embedded in Powerpoint today is worth embedding here. It is a short video of Greg Bissky explaining how the Chinese and western minds differ on their perception of a contract. He explains that the best paradigm is to view it as a marriage. A marriage entails ongoing negotiation and compromise to be successful, and that is how the Chinese view a business contract. They tend to be fatalistic, and believe that you cannot predict what the future holds. Therefore, you must be offering a present value, and leave the future negotiable when doing business in China. I wonder how many billions have been lost by businesses who failed to learn that little nugget of wisdom.

Which brings me back to my original point: you rarely know how valuable something is when you have the opportunity to learn it. It may look like a dirty rock today, but if you clean it up, you may find it is a nugget of gold.