There are many other skills that one could include in such a list, and each person has his or her own unique criteria. What’s on your list?
You might notice that many of the skills recognized by both Harvard and Princeton as hallmarks of an educated person are “real-world” skills. But if these are the skills deemed important for education and success by two of the most respected universities in the world, why do we tend to focus so much on grades as the measure of a truly educated person? Students have been conditioned to believe that the only way to get an education is to go through a formalized schooling process, get good grades, and get a degree, when they should have also been encouraged to focus on acquiring the real-world skills, capabilities, and mindsets that can help one get ahead in the real world.3 Lifelong learning is about educating yourself in the areas formal academic training doesn’t cover.
Lifelong learning is critical to thriving at work and growing professionally. Keeping up in your field is essential to doing your job, both the day-to-day tasks and undertaking new projects, and it’s especially important when considering new career paths.
Lifelong learning is also critical to personal success. It can play a role in everything from buying a house to building a life with a partner to raising a child. In fact, undertaking any new endeavor, big or small, benefits from being open to continued learning.
In other words, learning opportunities are everywhere and affect all aspects of our lives and well being -- emotional, interpersonal, mental, physical, and spiritual. When we become aware of these opportunities and act on them, the rewards are evident in the self-improvement we see.
You determine who you will become by how you invest in yourself today and tomorrow. Investing in your learning is the most lucrative type of investing and also the most personally rewarding. The Japanese have a word for constant and lifelong improvement -- Kaizen. The word kai means change and zen means good. Pursuing learning and self-improvement daily will place you on the path of developing your own Kaizen or “good change.”
Here’s a question: how is what you’re doing now related to the subject you majored in? If you’re like me, your current work isn’t remotely related to what you studied in school. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if I hadn’t continued to keep learning after school. If you want success in life, if you want to grow and achieve, then never stop learning. Educate yourself by learning from others, formally and informally, and self-improvement will follow. Your formal education was just a stepping stone, and it’s the informal education that will determine your success in life.
The world is constantly changing and so should you. Entirely new industries are created each year to address needs we couldn’t have imagined a generation ago. The kinds of people who will thrive in this ever-changing environment will be those who can learn, adapt, and be thought leaders. Those people have made a conscious choice to remain active, lifelong learners. You, too, can make that choice.
Today, technology plays a critical role in lifelong learning. Thanks to the Internet, in the last two decades we’ve seen more changes in how people learn than were seen in the preceding two centuries. The Internet has completely transformed the learning landscape. Google, Wikipedia, eBooks, YouTube, and a host of other technological advancements have had a profound effect on how we learn, communicate, create, and collaborate. The most important sources of information, including non-Internet sources, are captured in the following visual map.