Arming Yourself with Skills For Your Future

There is a Chinese saying: ‘Live till old. Learn till you are old.’

What the saying translates to is: that we are never too old to learn. Yet, learning is a choice. Nobody can force you to learn, including your employer, spouse or family. Without learning, we become stagnant, and stasis and inertia set in, eventually.

However, there is a universal belief that as one ages one’s ability to learn diminishes with disinterest and fear. My impromptu polls, with the mature working population, yield this impression: They wish to learn something useful for their future, yet do not know where to start.

Learning is an attitude. Either, you like to learn or not. Redundancy is the sure way to go if we refuse to change for the better, and learning is one way to stay relevant. Here are some ways to get you thinking if you have concerns about learning.

1) Age is not a disease; stop using age as an excuse to learn.

2) Explore and research which skills would be useful for your future.

3) If you enjoy your profession, identify how your skills can be upgraded and enhanced.

4) Move your mindset from abilities to capabilities: which skills will keep you employable in the future?

5) Which are your fears about learning and improving? Are you above learning?

6) Apply what you learn; otherwise, it is just textbook knowledge (or book-smart).

7) Review which of your skills can continue to add value to you. If it is important to your organization/industry, it has value.

8) When in doubt, ask; verify what you don’t know.

9) If you say you already know – then you still haven’t learnt. Knowing is intuitive, while skills are demonstrated and expressed with results.

10) Surround yourself with motivated, supportive and skillful people. Learn from them constantly.

When I meet weekend athletes and endurance athletes, who are in the forties to seventies, I am deeply impressed by their dedication to learning. Hobbies and sports give us an opportunity to learn new things, and thus arm us with new knowledge and skills. Age may just be a mindset, integrated into a sense of maturity and expectation.

Henry Ford said: ‘If you think you can, or cannot, you’re right.