Learning is for the brave

There is no such thing as effortless learning. At the very least you need to get out of bed early, or go to sleep late. The older you get, the more time-constrained days become with family, job, groceries, cooking, cleaning…

Most people get stuck on the idea that learning requires time. But that cannot be true. When would the Zuckerbergs, Gates and Bezos of the world learn? When would any of the hard-working highly-succesful professional and entrepreneurs of the world learn?

Experience has shown me that learning is an attitude. The attitude of the brave. Learning is about understanding that each one of us is not 100% right ever, that there is a different angle or point of view to every thought we have. Learning is about focusing on what we don’t know, rather than what we know.

In the early stages of my career I worked with a CEO who ressemble a dictator. Every single person in his company had to do and behave exactly as he wanted, or get fired. Two years after that experience I still thought that I had nothing to learn from him, and could not understand how the company survived — and actually end up selling for a huge amount — . Recently, I experienced a situation where an avalanche of opinions of a tenured executive committee, lead to a delayed execution on a project with potential losses over $1MM. At the time, I found myself thinking on how other companies handle such situations, until I realized that I had been exposed to similar situations in the past but neglected a great opportunity to learn.

Yes, my former CEO’s management style was bad for many things, but was actually great to drive focus across the organization. We might not be working on the right thing, but we were all working in the same thing. Our time-to-delivery of any feature or project is today still unmatched by any other team I have had the pleasure to work with. Does this mean that holding such strong ownership of the workforce is great? Probably not. What it does mean, though, is that if I had been in learning-mode at that stage in my career, last month my company would have saved $1MM. I would have seen that we were working on different directions, on different goals. I would have surfaced that on our second meeting — not the 10th — and I would have asked everyone to seek agreement before continuing.

Let’s be positive, this time, I learned.