Lifelong learning is the continuous and ongoing pursuit and zeal for knowledge. Learning can come out of passion and desire. Learning may also be the demand for a professional outfit. Overall, learning is said to enhance your personality and develop competence in sustaining the changes around you.
11 Habits of a lifelong learner
If you would also like to keep yourself abreast of times and put yourself in the learning curve for a whole lifetime, you may choose to inculcate the habits quoted below.
1. Involve in conversations with strangers.
Make sure you converse with unknown persons. By engaging in a chat with new people in life, you get to learn something fresh in life. Exchanging talks and discussions with unfamiliar persons and joining their groups’ gives you access to a world that is beyond your zone of work.
2. Train your brain.
Attend sessions that boost your brain activity. You may alternatively choose to play games using technology, or work out puzzles and Sudoku. Try also to fix a Rubik cube. By doing so, you become a forever learner. Now, work out different ways in which your brain begins to pay attention to learning new and continues its spirit for the same.
3. Stay active on a social networking platform.
Join a social site as it helps you in lifelong learning. Share your ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc. on a subject matter. Invite in views from the other side. By reading through and trying to understand what you were offered, plays an incredible part in helping you learn in life.
4. Follow the blogs of learned personalities.
Technology is helping in learning in a number of ways. Learned personalities always believe in knowledge transfer. They assist people by way of their blogs. Therefore, take out time to follow the blogs of such scholarly intellectual personalities. By following what and how they handle circumstances, you can master and replicate them in your space.
5. Make a list of things you want to explore.
You might have certain aspects interesting to you, which you would like to pursue sooner or later in life. Make a list of all such items—work towards equipping with the necessary time and resources. Arrange them in order of the highest interest. Learn them as per the plan laid out.
6. Spend a few minutes every day for creativity.
Unbolt the innovation in you by carving out your imagination, thereby making it lifelong learning. The creativity in you itself teaches you a lot. Learn from your own inherent skills. Keep chatting with yourself and release the resourcefulness by carving out your originality and imagination.
7. Learn from failures.
When you feel stuck at something and are in a chaotic state as to what to pick to learn, just recollect your mistakes and failures in life. Make a list of all of these as you keep recollecting. You become a lifelong learner as soon as you begin to understand where things are going wrong and put efforts to pave a way out. Try to turn these odds by not letting them repeat again.
8. Do things differently.
When you are in a confused and messy state of mind and do not know what and how to learn something new, just repeat your strengths. Pick your most favorite task that you repeatedly do in life. Now, try to do it in a different way, which you never tried before. Attempt to do the same monotonous tasks in different styles. Because lifetime learners think differently. By doing so, you are actually helping yourself learn something new without your very mindful involvement.
9. Work towards progressing yourself day after day.
Work in a way that you progress in life. Plan your routine and execute it for your betterment. The more attempts you make to refine your lifestyle and philosophies in life, the better version of you gets self-reflected to others. And during the course, you play around a lot by learning.
10. Love to face challenges.
Challenges and difficulties in life are to be accepted as being part of life. There is no escape. Long-life learning begins with a small step of facing a challenging situation initially. Since you cannot forego them, keep loving the challenges you come across. Love and deal with them in a way that they teach you to grow and step forward in life, with your foot over them.
11. Keep reading on a daily basis.
Make lifelong learning a daily habit by reading regularly. Dedicate a minimum of half an hour each day to keep reading daily. Be it a newspaper or a magazine or any other handpicked book or even a dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia, but ensure you read to learn something in life.
Overall, learning builds your lifestyle and adds meaning to your life. You enhance your understanding of the world you are in. You look at the world from varied perspectives, which in turn teaches you, the life skills needed to survive in this competitive world.
Oliver Walkerr
Passionate about growth
Learning is the process of getting to know more about aspects that you either already know or knowing about those aspects that you are new to. However, by being a lifelong learner, you know how better to direct and reroute your life. You know how to handle people and situations from the knowledge and wisdom that you earn in life.
Enumerated below are a couple of simple and yet effective behaviors. You can practice these skills for lifelong learning and polish your traits to handle and deal with the journey of acquiring knowledge.
1. Keep attending various courses, online or offline.
You may not be able to learn everything all by yourself. Therefore, pull out time to attend classroom sessions or offline courses to pursue your learning abilities. Out of the entire one-hour session, you might find at least one take away in life. Record that learning and move on in life.
2. Welcome and embrace change.
Change is everywhere, and change is unavoidable. Change is predestined. Just that you have to be prepared mentally to welcome change. Because change is like a passing cloud. Learn the fact of life that change comes, change goes, and change is replaced by another change. As a life learner, it is now time for you to embrace the changing circumstances and move on in life.
3. Watch interviews.
Make a list of famous, successful, and educated personalities. Spend time in watching their interviews and brainstorming sessions they organize. Your zeal towards learning increases by manifold. You not just learn skills for lifelong learning, but also build the thrust to learn even further as you move along.
4. Be multi-talented and a jack of all.
Try to probe into all possible subjects around you. Learn to refine your inborn and acquired talents. Make efforts to be a jack of all, although not being a master of everything. Nailing on every subject irrespective of whether it falls in your job deliveries or not, is important to drive your life towards a successful path.
5. Have the will power to achieve.
Do not worry that you were late to begin something. Do not hesitate to make the first move now. Become a learner for life. Have the courage and determination to start learning something new today. You are never old to pick in studying or acquiring fresh. Because you never know when this piece of knowledge might come for use, either for yourself or for others.
6. Work beyond your comfort zone.
Do not limit yourself to your learnings. Work beyond your capabilities and stretch beyond your spheres. This way, you stay bound to learning more, horizontally, vertically, and perpendicularly. Pick up new areas of work and master new skills for lifelong learning, to execute the new tasks that you chose to perform.
7. Be in the company of learned people.
Be choosy about the companionship you sail with. By acting-wise enough, you get to know how to be a lifelong learner. Endeavor to be in the syndicate of cultured and well-read people. You get to learn more with every step you walk with them, either from their gestures or experiences or even the informal chats you share with them.
8. Start your own blog.
While learning on your own is one side of the coin, teaching others either verbally or in written form, forms the other side of the coin. Begin your own blog and publish your experiences and share your learnings. This way, you keep yourself aligned to your goals and hang onto refining your learnings in life.
9. Teach others.
You learn naturally by indulging in learning. You learn even more when you begin to preach and teach others what you have learned in life. Life learners understand that learning is a continuous process. Either you learn to know or learn by letting others know.
10. Collaborate to learn more.
You can learn something when you are alone. You can, in fact, teach and train this new learning to yourself all on your own. However, when you learn something in alliance and team up with associates, the group effort you put in reap incredible results. You, along with your companions, earn a wealth of knowledge.
11. Have the ‘never give up’ attitude.
You may be given a task that you never did before. But understand that most tasks in life initially were new to you. Necessity demands you to put in the effort. Work towards being proficient in earning skills for lifelong learning. But, always ensure that you try to learn new talent with a free mindset, and not under pressure, especially when you are learning something new.
To sum up, learning improves the quality of your life. You enhance your personality traits and become a “good you” upon whom people count. You make wise decisions in life and grab all opportunities that come across. Learning guides teach, motivate, and adds significance to your life.