Feedback: Key to Continuous Learning
To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do – are the keys to continuous learning.
Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance (for instance, making a key decision), he is expected to write down what results he anticipates. Nine months later, he then feeds back from the actual results to these anticipations. This very soon shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally it shows him what he is not gifted for and cannot do well. I have followed this method myself, now for fifty years. It brings out what one’s strengths are – and this is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out where improvement is needed and what kind of improvement is needed. Finally, it brings out what an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do. To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do – they are the keys to continuous learning.
ACTION POINT: List your strengths and the steps you are taking to improve them. Who knows you well enough to help identify your strengths?
Reinvent Yourself
Knowledge people must take responsibility for their own development and placement.
In today’s society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill. Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic – skills change very, very slowly. Knowledge, however, changes itself. It makes itself obsolete, and very rapidly. A knowledge worker becomes obsolescent if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years.
This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time. People change over such a long time span. They become different persons with different needs, different abilities, different perspectives, and, therefore, with a need to “revitalize.” If you talk of fifty years of working life – and this, I think, is going to be increasingly the norm – you have to reinvent yourself. You have to make something different out yourself, rather than just find a new supply of energy.
ACTION POINT: Ask those ahead of you in age how they went about “repotting themselves.” What steps should you take now?
“A true dreamer is one who knows how to navigate in the dark”.”
John Paul Warren
“I have learned that the harder you fall…the higher you bounce!”
John Paul Warren
“I would rather live short and right then long and wrong.”
John Paul Warren
“You can stop a raging forest fire, a herd of stampeding buffalo or even a runaway freight train, but you can’t stop a good man”.”
John Paul Warren
“Birds do not attend flight schools; Rivers do not attend flowing colleges; Fishes do not attend swimming conferences; Trees do not attend fruit bearing seminars… There is something that you can do automatically that someone may not do… Find it and do it! There is something someone may do automatically that you may not do; leave it for him to it!”
Israelmore Ayivor
“There are lots of trips out there. It’s even possible to become a conference groupie, going from one seminar to another and being a Beautiful Evolved Human Being until you start making the people around you want to throw up.”
Michael Crichton, Travels
“No matter what they say in the conferences and symposiums about poverty and hunger in the world. At the end, they are the first one forgetting us.”
M.F. Moonzajer
“Conferences are assemblies of people who argue about how to conduct an argument and end by sending a telegram of congratulation to the minister.”
Pitigrilli, Cocaine
“Attend seminars, forums, conferences, summits and sessions where interesting topics about dream fulfillment and personal branding are prioritized themes and topics. Get exposed to better ways of doing things”
Israelmore Ayivor
“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
Sun Tzu
“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”
Steve Jobs
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
Sun Tzu
“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.”
Dave Barry
“Rejection is an opportunity for your selection.”
Bernard Branson
“Advertising is legalized lying.”
H. G. Wells
“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
Peter F. Drucker
“My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.”
Oscar Wilde
“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”
Warren Buffett
“When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.”
Sun Tzu
“Knowledge is power is time is money.”
Robert Thier