As a society we place a high value on learning.

We put ourselves through many years of (often expensive) schooling, we celebrate when friends and family get to to universities and we highly respect people with degrees.

Though most of the time we place value on formal learning. In school, university or through professional qualifications.

What’s more difficult to acknowledge and understand is the everyday learning; the learning outside of a structured system.

This learning can be scary and even painful. Because it takes admitting that often we don’t know. We have to challenge assumptions, habits and established thinking.

I experienced this first hand today when I was trying to design a new system in our startup and realized that I had no idea what I was doing. It took pushing past the fear and the uncomfortableness for the learning to take place.

Doing this is ultimately where growth happens. And if you don’t do this, you’ll stay in exactly the same place as you were before. As the quote in the picture above says:

“The success that comes with executing what we know and what we’ve historically done is exactly what prevents us from seeing what’s next”

-Lisa Kay Solomon

The cover picture is of a guest lecture given by Sharron McPhearson in my Strategic Thinking course