Today is April 14 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often are you learning, unlearning, and relearning?”
Many people believe that once they graduate high school or college their learning has ended. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In a small but impactful publication entitled The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours, Marian Wright Edelman, American activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, summarized “Twenty-Five Lessons for Life.”
In an interview she noted that “Growing up in Bennettsville, South Carolina there was one thing that my father continually stressed—education, education, education. My parents taught us that education and knowledge were an individual’s source of strength.”
In The Measure of Our Success, Edelman noted: “Don’t ever stop learning and improving your mind or you’re going to get left behind. The world is changing like a kaleidoscope right before our eyes.”
In a world where today's students will have job not yet created using technologies not yet invented to solve problems not yet identified, it is an absolute imperative that individuals across all industries demonstrate a commitment to being a life-long learner.
With disruptive technologies altering entire industries, causing drastic change in how people work, communicate, live, and just do about everything else, the number of jobs where people can simply turn up and be told how to do the job and be well paid for it is diminishing rapidly,” says John Howkins author of The Creative Economy. “We need now to go on learning throughout our lives,” he adds. “When somebody stops learning, now it’s like they’ve stopped thinking, or at least being creative.”
Futurist and best-selling author Alvin Toffler echoed similar thoughts when reflecting on how individuals can succeed in today’s hypercompetitive and ever-changing global marketplace.
Toffler concluded that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
American inventor and businessman Charles Kettering noted “People are very open-minded about new things – as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.”
How open-minded are you about new ideas?
How often are you learning, unlearning, and relearning?”