Skills are an essential tool for success in the modern age. The more skills you have, the more likely you are to be able to use some or al of those skills towards a lucrative goal. We acquire skills through dedicating time to learn these skills. Therefore, anyone looking to achieve success should live a life of continuous learning.
Those willing to master specific skills find themselves able to attain incredible success in life. Professional sports players, celebrities, and Olympic athletes often enjoy a level of success unknown to regular people. These are the people society often looks up to, as their primary skills have elevated them to a level of fame that few can attain.
Life’s greatest rewards are only available to those who continue to push the boundaries of what they’re capable of. Those who continuously learn and improve upon their current skills. The truly successful understand that what’s good enough now won’t be good enough forever, and take it upon themselves to be the best they can be.
This principle of continuous learning is one that I think we should all adopt. It helps us achieve our goals, unlock new ways of earning a living, and brings us closer to the ideal we aspire to live by.
Welcome to the Work Series – my thoughts on why seeking out challenges unlocks the power for us to take control of our lives.
The Importance of Continuous Learning
A good life is attained by those who continue to learn. Of course, luck plays a large part in whether we succeed or fail. But it is continuous learning that gives you the tools to improve your circumstances. Without these tools, you are doomed to stagnate as entropy and inflation destroy your health and wealth.
Continuous learning is not a panacea for all of life’s problems. But through the process of learning, you gain what you need to overcome many of the problems you will face.
Achieve Progress in Your Life
The process of learning – and the skills that comes from it – allows you to improve your life. Whether you can make more money or optimise your home life, every skill you acquire will be useful.
If you are not making progress, the laws of entropy suggest you are moving backwards. Life isn’t going to get easier, and we cannot shy away from hard things in favour of what is easy. All this does is keep us trapped in our current situation while the walls close in around us.
Taking the time to learn how you learn allows you to perform this process faster. The skills you acquire will begin working in your favour to help you learn faster, do better, and do more.
Your progress and unique blend of skills, combined with your personal story, is what makes you valuable. But you need to develop yourself and your skills through the process of learning to attain that value.
Provide Value to Others
Learning new things is what gives you value in society. If you know how to solve specific problems or perform complicated actions, your time has a level of value that the time of others does not. You only gain this value by learning things.
Your value, when applied efficiently through your time, translates to money. This transformation occurs as you solve the problems of others with your skills. Trading your time for enough money for a long enough time period means you never have to do it again.
Your skills not only allow you to design your ideal life, but also allow you to provide service to others. Doing this on a large enough scale allows your skills to reward you handsomely. The pursuit of value through continuous learning is paramount for anyone looking to live a life of their own design.
Gain New Perspectives
Insight comes to those who are willing to try new things.
The process of learning doesn’t just teach you new skills. It also recontextualises what you already know. You begin to find links between old knowledge and new experiences, which give you advantages in every area of your life.
Building a deeper understanding of everything that came before can position you as an expert in your niche. Learning unusual combinations of things can help you reach insights that others haven’t achieved. This provides you with an advantage that’s unique to you.
Unique insights are often the foundation of big ideas. Harnessing these ideas can result in life-changing outcomes if applied effectively.
Independence
Continuous learning is what allows you to pursue independence. It is only through learning the rules of the game of life that we gain the skills to live as we please.
Independence comes in many forms. The independence you seek may be purely financial. For others, they desire location freedom, like a life off-grid, or living out of a suitcase as a nomad. Independence for many is the pursuit of a life of self-reliance, and being able to solve your own problems effectively.
Whatever your life’s journey looks like, that journey will only make you happy if you learn how to make it so. If you want a life of any type of independence, it won’t be given to you – you must develop the skills necessary to make that lifestyle a reality.
Happiness
Everyone’s source of happiness is different, and I can’t tell you what makes you happy. That said, I believe that a life full of community, learning, and freedom gives you the tools to create the happiness you desire.
In order to be happy, you must determine what doesn’t make you happy. Discovering this requires experimentation and continuous learning. You need time and space to discover what matters most to you.
I used the principles of Financial Independence to take an extended break from work, which gave me time to design the life I wanted to live. The financial investments I made earlier in my career and maximising the value of my time allow me to engage more in leisure and creation. My current lifestyle is much less stressful than before, and I feel much healthier and happier for it.
Happiness, as an ideal, is something we continue working towards. Building a life that is content, secure, and stable allows you to dedicate your time to pursuing the happiness you seek. Learning and continuing to evolve allows you to continue to meet your changing desires and needs, and do your best to attain that happiness.
Modern Life Makes Continuous Learning Impossible
Unfortunately, the pressures of modern life often trap us into lives we don’t enjoy. Earning money and looking after dependents force us to sacrifice the time we would dedicate to learning and improving our health.
Without this time for self development, we languish and continue to fall behind in our careers and personal lives. To those struggling with unfortunate circumstances or the consequences of past mistakes, overcoming them can feel impossible.
That said, the rules of the game of life are constantly changing. What was once difficult or impossible may become easy due to advancements in technology, as well as our ability to access them.
Access to information has never been more abundant. We keep devices in our pockets that can access almost all information recorded across human history. Just about everyone has a smartphone that’s capable of accessing the Internet. Failing that, public libraries have computers with internet access available for use, plus more physical books than you could ever read. There are an endless number of ways you can get information, and most of them are easy and free to access.
Getting access to quality information to learn is the easiest it’s ever been. But a huge barrier stops a lot of people from using it it. Many people are forced to sacrifice learning in favour of meeting their base needs. If one solves this issue, one can create the time necessary to learn.
The name of the game of today is capitalism. Unfortunately, you cannot play the game effectively if you do not have capital. Therefore, acquiring capital is the quintessential problem to solve in order to grow your wealth. Learn to solve this problem before you run out of options, and out of time.
The Two Levers
A person’s base needs are met if their income exceeds or equals their expenses. I’ve talked about this before on the site but it bears mentioning again:
If you spend more than you earn, your finances are entropic by nature and doomed to become worse over time.
There are two levers you can pull in order to pull yourself out of entropy:
- Spend less
- Earn more
I dedicated the Saving Series to exploring how and why we need to spend less and save more. Not only does this reduce our baseline consumption, it also allows us to free our mind and money to focus on more important things. Namely, investing for the future and Choosing Work We Love.
I believe that many people are able to pursue Financial Independence with a bit of upfront work. Conscious spending, paying down bad debt, and compounding your wealth are mandatory, not ideal. Creating a savings buffer staves off misfortune of income loss or ill health. And a financial portfolio unlocks another income stream that can supplement or replace your labour income.
Early on in your financial journey, there are only two levers available to pull: spending and earning. Careful use of both results in a life of enough, both now and in the future. Finding your “enough” is what gives you the ability to incorporate continuous learning into your life.
How To Live a Life of Continuous Learning
Continuous learning is evidently, quite important. Not only does it empower us to continue earning enough, but it also guides us towards what makes us happier.
We have to take in and understand useful information, then use this information to our advantage. Developing the tools we need to make our lives better is an essential skill in the modern day.
Below are some of the factors I consider important for anyone considering a life of continuous learning.
Achieve Profit in Money and Time
Being in a profitable position of both money and time is essential in order to learn effectively. Consider this step one of your continuous learning journey.
The first thing to learn is how to live a life where your ability to learn new things is sustainable. You have the time to focus on acquiring new skills, and the financial strength to afford to trade working hours for learning hours.
This exchange may seem dubious in the short term – especially if you have the capacity to work more. There’s an argument to be made for “making hay while the sun shines”: continuing to work as hard as you can, while you can. This makes sense, especially in certain industries where you’re unsure if the work you do will dry up. But this is the reason why continuous learning is so important.
By freeing your time to learn new things, you gain the ability to earn an income in new, more lucrative ways. This frees up even more time to move towards the life you truly want to live. You must achieve profit in both money and time in order to make this possible.
To stick with the analogy, I know how much “hay” I need right now. I know how much “hay” I need in the future to meet my needs passively. I use these to determine how much hay I need to make before I have enough, after reasonably accounting for loss and unexpected issues.
My strategy is thus: determine what your current and future “enough” is, achieve that, and use the rest of your time to make your life easier.
Find Things You’re Interested In
What do you want to do when you’re not at your job, or at school? Everyone has things they like to do or learn about. And there are plenty of people who want to learn about what you know about.
Explore your interests in a way that genuinely excites you. The best way to learn is to find what you enjoy and go from there.
My career trajectory was heavily influenced by my interests. After I began working in payroll, I found that I enjoyed applied my knowledge of finance to supporting pay outcomes for real people. Eventually, this grew into learning about timekeeping software, which led me down the paths of system administration and implementation consulting.
Your skill set will evolve as you begin to understand what you truly enjoy. Take the time to not only understand what you enjoy, but why you enjoy it. Then use that knowledge to experiment with learning skills in the same domain.
Whatever you find enjoyable, there’s a ton of overlap between disciplines that can result in some very useful skills. I’ve found through my career that a broad collection of skills can be vastly rewarding – often more so than becoming a specialist in a hyper-specific niche.1
Think About Where You Want To Go
While continuous learning itself is a helpful skill to use, it must be applied correctly if you want to make progress elsewhere in life.
You may want to learn a specific skill in order to progress in your career, or unlock a new way of earning an income. Knowing where you want to go is more important than knowing what skills you need to get there. You’ll need both to learn effectively, but your North Star will always serve as a better way of getting you to where you want to go.
There may be things you enjoy about your current job. If there are, try to identify them and discover the essence of what makes them enjoyable. Use that to learn about adjacent discplines that move you towards your North Star.
I transformed my desire to help people get paid correctly into a more lucrative skill set (consulting and system administration) that unshackles me from permanent employment. This allowed me to reconstruct my life in a way that was more ideal to my interests.
Figure out what you want out of your life, work, relationships, etc. Then, determine which skills you need in order to make that life a reality.
Be Humble
Nobody knows everything – not even the greatest minds in the world.
In order to learn effectively, we must be willing to accept that we are either ignorant or wrong – often both. We cannot learn if we are not willing to admit that we have something to learn.
Live life with an open mind and a desire to understand the perspectives of others. Your ability to learn and think critically will by stymied if you do not consider opinions that differ from your own.
Humility goes a long way when learning. Be open to being wrong, and be open to someone offering you their thoughts – even if you don’t totally agree with them.
Be Conscious
Once you are committing to continuous learning, you must find a way to stay on course. Your situation can change at a moment’s notice, and you need to be ready to take action should that occur.
Even if you have enough to meet your needs, there’s no guarantee that this will last. Job loss, injuries, and other catastrophes can take everything away from you if not adequately prepared for.
My life strategy works right now and has a decent chance of success. However, I’m open to the idea that I may need to return to permanent employment in the future.
Being conscious of how your current life works, where the pain points are, and how your learnings plan to make it better.
If you want to learn new things, you already have the desire to change your circumstances. This trait, if pursued hard enough, will change your life. All you need is enough time to make your disciplined efforts pay off. Remain conscious of the things that can stand in the way of your goal and continue to learn ways to overcome them.
Closing
We are constantly taking in new information. But learning, and becoming better from that information, isn’t something I believe we do enough of.
Living a life of continuous learning isn’t about getting an endless stream of information. It’s about living in a way that allows us to learn and grow in a sustainable manner. This includes learning how to do this sustainably!
Our world is changing extremely quickly. I see continuous learning as a necessary step to not only learn how you can do better and earn more, but also protect yourself and your loved ones.
We need to know what’s ahead of us, we need be able to plan for these challenges, and we need to be able to learn how to triumph over them.
The possibilities you unlock for yourself through continuous learning are endless. The sooner you incorporate it into your life, the more incredible your life can become.
Thank you for reading.
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- Those who know me in real life may question this, as I often perform work as a specialist on timekeeping software. Despite my expertise, I consider myself system and process agnostic; being good at one thing doesn’t (and shouldn’t) shoehorn you into becoming a specialist. ↩︎