There are 5 principles that I believe are critical if you are going to step away from accepting an average existences and unleash your inner greatness. You must learn them and live them. I’ll be sharing each of the five in a series over the next few weeks. Last week we discussed Principle number 1 and that is, you are responsible for everything in your life, everything.
Principle Number two
Continuous learning and personal development are essential for living your life to the fullest.
We are here on this earth to pursue, stretch, and test the limits of our potential. We can not do that unless we are continuously improving ourselves, learning new skills, and developing our ability function at a high level.
They say success leaves clues, Tom Corely studied wealthy people and found that 83% of the wealthy read at least 30 minutes a day for education or career and 63% listen to audio books on their commute.
You’ve heard the saying that failure or mistakes teach the best lessons. I would agree with that, we certainly want to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them but I would add, while your failures may teach lessons, it is even better to learn from the failures and the mistakes of others.
This is where reading books, listening to podcast, and taking courses have the most value. Learn from others who have already done what you are trying to do, they’ve already made the mistakes. You don’t have to always reinvent the wheel. Learning from others can help you avoid mistakes and delays in the pursuit of achieving of your goals and can even propel you forward.
Want to be number one at your company? Number one in your industry? Why not seek out who is number one now and study that person. Learn what it is that is making them successful and implement it. What if you chose a career or industry specific subject every 90 days and studied it, read a book a month on it, researched on the internet, study industry product literature, etc. What if you reached out to others with the skill or knowledge you want to learn and asked questions? If you picked a subject every 90 days and studied it like I suggest, how far ahead would you be in a year? Three years?
Jim Rohn always said, work harder on yourself than you do on your job. What he meant was by continuously learning and improving your skills you become more valuable. It is a fact that your value in the market place is in direct proportion to your skills and knowledge. You want to make more? Be more? You must continue to lean. The real learning starts when you leave school. Mr. Rohn also said, formal education can make you a living, continuous learning and personal development can make you a fortune. 
Lastly, developing your interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence is key in any business, job, or personal relationships. Learning how to communicate which also means focusing on the lost art of listening. One way I have found to hone these skills is by reading and listening to sales trainers, not the shading used car salesman guy but real salesman. Real sales trainers teach communication skills with an emphasis on listening skills. It is important not to just hear the words of the person in front of you but to know what they mean, what the really mean, what they feel, what the pain points are. We are all selling, maybe not a product but maybe an idea, maybe a path forward, maybe that we understand. If you learn, build on, and exercise great communications skills this skill alone can take you a long way.
Continuous learning and personal development are essential, If you don’t continue to grow and learn, you are falling behind. Continuous learning and personal development are like fuel in the fuel tank, without it the race car isn’t going anywhere. They say that knowledge is power, I disagree with that, Knowledge is stored power. We’ll discuss in the next article how we turn knowledge into real power.
