Don’t look for a teacher; fall in love with the Socratic Paradox.
Every time you go far, take a pause and look back. You will find a teacher silently standing behind you, rooting for your success. Your teacher, mentor, or coach plays a significant role in your journey. Your teachers are not limited to your school campus or your manager at work. If you look around, you will find yourself surrounded by many teachers from whom you may learn. And that is only possible if you develop curiosity and embrace a ‘growth mindset.’
Prof. Carol Dweck introduced the term’ growth mindset’; her research showed that continuous efforts and persistent learning can enhance cognitive capabilities. It is contra to the ‘fixed mindset’ for the people who believe that their abilities are limited and stop their interest in accepting new challenges and learning new stuff. The simplest way to start with the growth mindset is to believe that you need to ‘know more’ and ‘you are not the expert.’ And the first step in embracing this path is to start interacting with the people with a learning attitude.
People in your life are the best teachers, including those who are teachers by profession and those who are not. Once you have developed a growth mindset, you will not limit your learning within the boundary of a school campus. You will develop an ability to learn from people from all walks of life. A person in your learning phase could be a family member, friend, colleague, or stranger. You have to keep an attitude of learning. You don’t necessarily have to practice what they preach but should develop your ability to learn and decide for yourself what’s good and not for you. Most people emphasize learning from a success story or case studies as a benchmark, but for me, failure stories teach us the best lessons. It would be best to learn from other people’s mistakes rather than doing them in your own way. The learning is incremental and gets polished with deliberate practice. Once you’re trading your mind with a growth mindset, start incremental learning, and deliberate practice consistency, then you will become a master of that skill. Once this ability is developed, you can learn from real-life people and their professions.
Learning from a profession can be generalized and easy to adapt. For example, a chef on a food channel can teach you how to spice up your two minutes noodle pack, a random musician on YouTube can teach you how to read the notes on the stave, and a paramedic short video on TikTok can explain how to do CPR when needed. Technology has made it easier to learn anywhere and from any part of the world; the Internet and mobile devices have made learning limitless. All you need is a device in your hand and an Internet connection. The Internet is a gateway to wisdom and not just a means of entertainment. You can learn a lot from people willing to educate you, teach you a new skill, or tell you what not to do.
In your learning cycle, what not to do is equally important. Professionals are experts in their field, leaving a trace of learning when you interact with them. It’s up to you to decide what suits you to adapt and reject. For example, you may learn from a gambler when to leave the table, you may learn persistence from a beggar, a gangster may teach you how to follow the code of loyalty, and you may learn privacy from an escort. Every interaction with a fellow human leaves a trace of learning; you decide what to learn, unlearn, or relearn from such human-to-human interaction.
Once you embark on the learning journey, do not look for a person with the title ‘teacher’ or a ‘boss’; instead, look for the people who can teach you something practical because expecting learning only from a teacher is a sheer implicit bias.
If you are planning to go back to a business school, then the first step is to start training your mind to learn and unlearn. Because that’s the first step towards lifelong learning, it is to bring humility and kindness and embrace the Socratic Paradox. That is:
“I know that I know nothing”.
Although the research made by Prof. Carol Dweck is relatively recent, the true meaning of lifelong learning and a growth mindset can be traced back to ancient literature.
Since then, the message has been simple:
Nurture your curiosity; learning is a long haul.
Author: Asif Durrani
Dated: 04 Jan 2024
https://www.linkedin.com/in/asifdurrani
Also published at Medium
Reference:
- Deliberate Practice: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/deliberate-practice#:~:text=Deliberate%20practice%20is%20defined%20as,often%20performed%20without%20immediate%20reward.
- Incremental Learning: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_304
- Growth Mindset: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/series/growth-academic-mindset-carol-dweck
- Socratic Paradox: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183333
Asif Durrani 