This article has been originally published on my blog.
Live and learn or just simply live to learn?! The point is the same: learn every single day! If you want to be ahead of the pack, if you want to live a quality life, you have to keep pushing yourself, you have to keep learning. Join me in my 66 days learning challenge!
Keep learning and your efforts will pay off in large dividends. Why is it so great and important to learn? Take Hamming's thought:
"I always spend a day a week learning new stuff. That means I spend 20 percent more of my time than my colleagues learning new stuff. Now 20 percent at compound interest means that after four and a half years I will know twice as much as them. And because of compound interest, this 20 percent extra, one day a week, after five years I will know three times as much... [or whatever the figures are ...]”
This is so powerful that Joe Armstrong, the inventor of Erlang quoted him in the book Coders at Work.
As Armstrong does research, he spends more like 40 percent of his time on learning and he's been doing so for decades. When he's invited to a problem, he can really feel that he knows more. We should all follow his example and invest in ourselves, learn every day so that we can be on top of our field.
Learning does not have to mean getting a formal education in school. Learning can manifest in many different forms. You might want to attend online courses. Or just take a book and read about a topic you don't know or not well enough. Teach. Write. Play with your kids and pay attention what they do and think about why they act so. The point is to pay attention. If you pay close attention to anything you do, you will learn!
Take at least a Pomodoro each day to improve yourself, but I'm sure you have time for more if you most of your time waster activities.
To keep yourself motivated join to my 66-day challenge and tweet each day something you learnt that day tagging your tweet with the hashtags #66DaysLearning and #D, so #D1 for the first, #D2 for the second day, etc.
why 66 days? Not because of my interest to drive along route 66. That would be silly. I've taken 66 days, becaues on average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the middle, at the end, whenever you want how the challenge changed your life, how it made you a better version of yourself.
Happy learning!
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