The World Belongs to Learners

I’ve decided to start blogging about learning. It’s super important for me, and I believe it’s critical for us as a country to teach people about learning. I’m not talking about school. I’m talking about a way of viewing the world and living your life.

Thomas Friedman, writing last week about current presidential politics, said: “To have a lifelong job, you need to be a lifelong learner.”

I believe that simple statement is true — and that it is profound. After all, what is the defining characteristic of our time? I would say it is the sheer speed of change.

It reminds me of an old-school U2 song…

Every breaking wave on the shore

Tells the next one there’ll be one more…

So it is with technology. And it feels like the space between those waves is getting shorter and shorter.

I was at the beach in Maine last week for a family vacation. One evening there was a summer heat storm, and I watched my 8-year-old carefully counting the seconds between each flash of lightning and each drum roll of thunder. Now, as I write about accelerating waves of change, what I picture in my mind are his eyes, widening, as he realized that the storm was getting closer.

Like the approach of lightning, the realization that change is becoming more and more rapid can be a scary thought. But it doesn’t have to be.

If the cycles of change are accelerating, then it follows that each of us will have to learn many new things many times.

That will not be optional. In order to prosper — or even just to be relevant — we have to carry ourselves in a constant learning posture. We must make this our mindset. Our paradigm for understanding every experience, every hardship, every win, every failure, whether small or large.

What can I learn here? What do I need to learn here?

There is much uncharted territory ahead of us. New ways to communicate. New levels of population. New governments. New technologies. New wars.

I’ll say this. At age 45, I find that I am more voracious for learning that at any other time in my life. I think this is because I can see how intensely important it is for myself and for my family. Never mind that I see it — I feel it.

And I love it.

My goal in starting this blog is to share this understanding of why and how to cultivate a learning mindset, and to help folks put that into action to improve their lives and to make our society stronger and our world more hopeful.

Pretty ambitious for a blog. I’m going to keep it simple, sharing some of my own experience and my own thinking, and also talking with others that I feel I can learn from, and also giving subscribers links to various articles and book reviews and videos and podcasts that feel relevant to this mission.

And obviously I’ll learn as I go.