Always be learning

While talking to a friend recently, I told her that I am learning how a twitter audience is grown, and how to write content to drive leads for a B2B SaaS business.

She exclaimed that “you’re always learning something new!”

To me, learning something new happens all the time. I don’t even think about it. But it wasn’t always this way.

If someone were to look at my school or college history, I wouldn’t be categorised as a “model student”.

Heck, I never tried to study.

There were many factors, but the ones that stood out were my lack of curiosity and interest.

I was neither curious, nor particularly interested in what I was studying. Whether that be chemistry in school, or signals & systems in college.

But something changed entirely after I left the education system and entered the real world.

I started working at early stage startups, and it felt like being thrown into a battlefield where every minute you’re faced with a new task or challenge that you previously had no clue on how to solve.

Initially, I hated it. And that’s largely because I treated work as “work”.

But during my time working at startups, I was always surrounded by people who were curious, driven, trying to learn new things and solve new challenges everyday.

And they didn’t seem to be treating it like work. It felt like they were performing, just like a dancer performs on stage.

If a dancer performing on stage was treating it like a “job”, the audience would know.

Eventually I started toying with the thought - “What if instead of just doing the job, I tried to excel at it?”

That thought stuck.

For the first time in my life, I was picking topics, making notes, studying, trying to understand, learn, become good at something. And entirely on my own volition.

Nobody was asking me to study and make notes. Nobody had given me a syllabus. There wasn’t a final exam with grades that I needed to score.

No.

For the first time in my life, I was allowing curiosity to guide me. And I had interests that I picked up entirely on my own to apply my new found curiosity to.

It’s been 5 years since that tiny change began manifesting in my mind.

Today, when someone says “oh you’re picking up a new skill”, I simply reply “Always be learning”.