Lifelong Learning

We go to primary school and after a few years that’s over. We then transfer to a secondary school and get our school diploma. As teenagers we long for those final days of school. We think it will be all over and we can finally enjoy life. Because it’s been so hard at school – all the learning, tests, the pressure from the teachers and from the parents to perform and to bring home papers with good grades on them.

Little did we know back then. In our next phase our title just changes from pupil to student if we decide to go on and study at university. The materials are not getting any easier. The tests are still there. The expectations by professors, parents and society as a whole are still there.

Then, we graduate. We go on and apply for jobs. Back to the tests. Job interviews, group assignments, evaluation forms.

We get hired for our first job and back to the learning table. Onboarding. Trial weeks or even months. Only the top performers of the new hires might stay after the initial phase.

Then, new managements, changes in the corporate structure, people getting laid off. Retraining in a different career…

You get the idea.

Actually, I haven’t done any of the above beyond graduating from university. I never actually sent off a CV or attended a job interview. I never had a job in my life. I’ve worked my entire life as an entrepreneur, from the age of 14.

But the story is more or less the same. Maybe even more intense. So you graduate university and then it’s back to the learning table. Learn about coding, online marketing, running a company, finances, raising funds, hiring team members, and so on.

The market is shifting, you need to pivot your business and learn new skills, there’s a recession and you need to learn how to lay off people in the most humane way, you need to change your marketing strategy and learn new ways to attract customers,…

Life is one big long rollercoaster of ups and downs, especially when it comes to education and learning.

This talk about “lifelong learning” that we’ve heard for the past decade or two is just scratching the surface.

Nowadays, you can learn 24/7, all year long. Universities are offering some of their courses for free online. Coursera has plenty of free options and courses on Udemy start from a few bucks and range from business over drawing to psychology. Millions of experts in their fields blog about their knowledge and offer their expertise for free. It’s just a quick Google search away. And if you run into a problem Q&A websites such as Quora and Stack Overflow have huge communities of experts that are happy to help.

It has never been easier to access information, and therefore to learn.

This actually created a new problem: what should you learn?

The information overflow is just too big these days and especially if you’re like me, then a lot of things can be super interesting to you.

It’s really hard to decide whether I want to learn more about coding, business, SEO, psychology, drawing, biology, forestry, a new language, geography, …the list goes on and on.