Tag: continuous learner
Grow Your List of Habits To Increase Success
Ever wondered what it takes to be a successful person in life? It might be subjective to answer, but there are a few things that we certainly can point out and utilize them in daily lives to become more effective. Here is how to use habits to increase success
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Apart from skills, intelligence and opportunities, it’s there good habits that make the difference.
When we talk about habits, we know that not all habits are good. The bad habits are basically the negative behavior pattern that keeps you away from accomplishing your dreams, whereas good habits are those that helps you achieve your goals.
New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results.
People who are highly successful in life are because they practice some good habits of successful persons regularly which other people don’t.
One thing which separates high achievers from regular people: intention. Meaning, if you get up every day and just coast wherever events and situations take you, you’re going to end up somewhere other than the ideal place. To reach your utmost potential, you need to steer your own path via daily habits which prime you for success. Here are the things nearly two dozen executives say help them get ahead in business and life.
Here is a list of 50 habits of successful people that are common among them.
Start with little tasks
“As a founder and a mom, my multiple roles bring on a vast array of responsibilities, big and small. I quickly learned that tasks like ‘put more batteries in the remote’ or ‘dust keyboard’ can bog me down so much that I’m unable to focus on my priorities.
I learned from the book The Artist’s Way that doing morning pages to relieve my consciousness helps to remove these distractions first thing and help me to start my workday right. So I’ve created a habit where I write down these tasks and put them aside in an effort to clear my head.
With this exercise being done before my coffee is poured, I feel so much more happy and relaxed to handle the more significant initiatives throughout my workday.”
Check different industries to expand your thinking
“My most creative and successful ideas have been formulated by looking at best practices and successful innovations in industries that are totally unrelated to mine. When you’re successful, it’s easy to get complacent.
And too often, looking only at your competitors will give you only incremental improvements and perpetuate ‘good enough’ results. By looking outward, you not only draw on your own ingenuity and motivation as a leader, but it also gives you the power to drive key innovations that have the potential to transform your business and leapfrog the competitors, whether they’re traditional or non-traditional.”
Check communications only a few of times/day
“I used to pride myself on being responsive to emails, Slack and chats until a friend pointed out that I was priding myself on being bad at my job because my job was to give serious thought to big projects and decisions. Don’t get in the habit of constantly interrupting your workflow to check communications.
Set the expectation that you’ll respond once or twice per day, and stick to that. Being responsive means destroying your attention span and letting happenstance drive your priorities.”
Employ a checklist
“I start off every morning by writing a checklist of major tasks I have to get done for the day and check them off one by one, making sure I complete them all before I leave for the day. With so many workflow tools and task management providers out there, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and distracted.
I find that a pen and paper checklist is simple, keeps me accountable, and has a huge impact on my overall productivity and focus.”
Be a continuous learner
“Education and learning are not just for students, but something to be embraced at every stage of life. As a CEO, I am constantly looking to grow my skill set to not only remain competitive with my peers but also to nurture a sense of personal accomplishment and learning.
I believe it’s especially important to step away from your every day and gather new information and skills only tangentially related to your industry… It can be scary learning new things, and sometimes it takes a little push to take that step and open yourself up to try, but learning difficult things can build up confidence and an ability to be at ease with being outside of our comfort zone.”
–Tara Chklovski, CEO of Iridescent, an education nonprofit which partners with leaders from Google, NVIDIA, GM and more to deliver STEM education to underrepresented communities
Get quality sleep
“When it comes to sleep, it’s about quality, not just quantity. Sleep heals us. Sleep recharges us. Sleep is an important part of our biology. One of my keys to success is to prioritize getting a good night’s sleep. I start unwinding and switching off early in the evening in order to fully disengage before bed.
Disconnect from electronics and screens. Read a book, listen to calming music, or even an inspiring talk in order to get a good night’s sleep. Your body and mind will thank you for it, and you will be so much more productive.”
Connect with others
“I always try to find time throughout the day to ask people what’s going on in their lives and how they are doing. It’s important to have those connections and day-to-day interactions with the people around you and foster a sense of community.”
Be self-critical
“I try to stay humble by being self-critical, looking for my potential faults, taking responsibility for failures, and looking for critical feedback. This pushes me to always strive to improve, not only in my career but in my personal life as well.”
Start the day off early and quiet
“I have found that if I get up before the rest of my household, sit in my office with a nice cup of coffee and write (whether it be the next presentation, blog post, or book), it helps me focus on the task at hand and have a sense of accomplishment before I dive into the workday.
It completely changes my well-being too, which empowers the rest of my day.”
Keep an idea journal
“Creativity is not just for artists and designers. And inspiration can strike at any time. I have several different notepad pages on my phone, organized topically. Whenever I have an idea I quickly and immediately write a sentence or two in the form of a running list to remind myself later of the thought.
This is an incredibly powerful way to tap into your own creativity and combat the natural forgetfulness we all have. Develop the habit of adding several notes a day. Don’t edit, delete, or judge, just write it down. It gets easier over time and you’ll be surprised how quickly your lists can grow.
Some topics I find useful range from ‘ideas for future blog posts’ to ‘for follow up with INSERT NAME.’ Later, when that person walks into my office, I can skip the whole ‘I had something I wanted to discuss with you but forgot…’ preamble.
And when it’s time to write a blog post, or speech, or company presentation, instead of staring at a blank screen I flip open my notes and get to work.”
Work on your hardest daily task first
“I did not personally develop this concept, but it’s one that I’ve found very useful in staying productive and also staying focused on the most important things. If you’re familiar with the book Eat that Frog, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
It’s easy to procrastinate starting the projects that challenge us most. Setting a goal to tackle your hardest challenge first will make the rest of the day or week seem easier and will ensure you get the most important things accomplished.
I prefer to spend 30 minutes on Fridays thinking through my priorities for the following week so I can come in on Monday ready tackle my biggest problems first.”
Check-in with annual and quarterly goals
“I’m a big believer in working backward from long-term goals. I allocate a few days at the turn of each year to think deeply about and write down my long-term (five- to 10-year) and one-year goals, both personally and for our company.
I check-in with these notes when I’m creating my quarterly goals and then at least two to three times per week. It helps me make sure that my daily activities are aligned with, and that I am on track to accomplish, what I’ve decided is truly important.”
Take time each day to learn
“Early in my career, I felt some guilt about reading a blog while at work or signing up for a trial of that new software and playing around with it. It felt like goofing off.
But now I recognize it as an essential skill and encourage everyone on my team to take time to read and learn. Digital marketing is constantly changing which is scary but also what makes it fun. There’s always something new to learn.
The people who are able to learn quickly and apply that knowledge to their work will stay a step ahead.”
The bottom line
Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. For example, you may not be able to imagine sequences of images very well, but you may excel in imagining other modalities such as smell, touch, and sound. You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings.
DO not feel compelled to stay within any single modality but make your visualizations and imagination vivid and rich by including numerous modalities. Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind.
Make it colorful and exciting. Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.
Educated Person: 12 Traits That Will Motivate You
The question of what defines a top notch educated person is not necessarily easy to answer, but it’s important to try. How do you think educators would answer this question? Would you find it surprising that they often don’t consider that question? When they do, the answers aren’t what one might expect.
Check out our thoughts on team leverage.
The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind … creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.
– Daniel Pink
Look at the Daniel Pink definition of the ‘educated’ person of the future shown above. One who is a creator, a pattern recognizer, and a meaning maker? The times of an educated person are certainly become more complex, aren’t they?
Before we go any further, we offer this short video on what an educated person is.
One of our favorite educator experts, Marion Brady, says that the main aim of schooling is to model or explain reality better. As you read the rest of our article, don’t lose sight of that.
His thoughts on the aim of schooling aren’t to teach math, science, language arts, and other school subjects better, but to expand the understanding of reality. He takes a holistic or systems approach to what it takes to be educated, and we wholeheartedly agree.
To be considered educated, we believe students should leave school with a deep understanding of themselves and how they fit into the world and have learned what some call “soft skills” – complex problem-solving, creativity, entrepreneurship, and they should have the ability to manage themselves.
Most of all we believe they most have the ability to be lifelong learners … have an ability to know how to learn. Here are some additional qualities we believe an educated person should have:
Educated … always curious
We find that curiosity is stimulated by stretching our boundaries into new and different realms. It is also stimulated by practicing the creation of good questions and by being part of diverse groups where other parties can give useful feedback.
Continuous learner
Today knowledge is growing so fast that a higher education can no longer provide all, or even close to all, information needed in a typical professional lifetime. An educated person must devote considerable time and energy to hone the skills for continuous learning. The most important characteristic of an educated person, we believe.
Definition of educated person … self-confident
Self-confidence tends to emerge from growing experience in widening groups, from successes in assigned tasks, from taking meaningful initiative, and from high expectations and consistent encouragement from those we respect the most.
Have a morning ritual
You wake up most mornings, and the world is already screaming at you. Emails are coming in asking for everything under the sun, the kids are yelling, and there’s stuff you didn’t get done yesterday that’s still plaguing your mind. And you’re still in your jammies.
So you start the day reacting. You’re not following a plan and getting your goals accomplished; you’re desperately responding to all the things the world is throwing at you. But that’s not how you get achievement in life.
The vast majority of the most educated people have a morning ritual that involved some mindfulness. Getting your head straight and your priorities in line so you could face the day doing what matters to you.
Educated … open to others
Openness to others emerges in those with a sense of self-confidence, those who live in a widening circle of people from different backgrounds and persuasions. It should be a by-product of one’s inquiring climate of the surrounding environment.
Sense of direction
An educated person must have a true sense of direction that includes the self-discipline, personal values, and the conviction needed to pursue it. All of us must bear some responsibility for setting the tone here. Like it or not, we are all role models for a sense of direction, both micro and macro.
Give yourself an overnight task
Reid Hoffman is the billionaire founder of LinkedIn and one of the co-founders of PayPal. When he has a tough problem to crack, he doesn’t think straining your brain is the only way to go.
He writes the problem down before he goes to bed, lets his subconscious take a stab at it and writes about it some more the next morning. Often, this simple process helps him get the answer he needs. This allows his subconscious to digest and ruminate on that, and journal first thing in the morning to try to elucidate some non-obvious solution.
Oh, and another successful guy was a big believer in this, too. His name was Thomas Edison. He once said: “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”
Talk with anyone
An educated person knows how to talk: they can give a speech, they can make people laugh, they can ask thoughtful questions, and they can hold a conversation with anyone they meet, whether that person is a high school dropout or a Nobel laureate. Moreover, an educated person participates in such conversation not because they like to talk about themselves but because they’re genuinely interested in the other person.
One of the most important things a friend of mine once told me was that in having a conversation, his job was “to figure out what’s so neat about what the other person does.” It would be hard to imagine a more succinct description of this key quality of an educated person.
Committed to collaboration
We believe that the reality of most problems is that they can’t be understood in isolation of one subject or field of endeavor. This is the holistic view of Marion Brady. Most problems are a complex set of component problems that make up the system.
To understand the reality of these complex systems and problems requires many disciplines working in concert. This requires a commitment to collaboration and ability to collaborate. This is what we believe is the second most significant characteristic of an educated person.
Top notch educated person … intellectual passion
A person’s intellectual passion must include an awareness of its substance, its modes of thought and relationship to all of these characteristics. The marks of this passion are not the mere passion of knowledge but its comprehension and its significance, not its value.
Communication and expression
The ability to communicate effectively has never been more critical than today. It is estimated that one out of five American adults is functionally illiterate, with reading skills below 8th-grade level. Many employers report a decline in the ability of their employees themselves orally or in written word. Clearly, a fundamental characteristic required for most, if not all, of these characteristics of an educated person.
Delights in variety
The aim of an educated person is to seek the diverse, imaginative encounter and the reflective experiences that will enrich every aspect of one’s life.
The bottom line
Do you have additional thoughts on what makes an educated person? Or a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
It’s up to you to keep improving your ability to learning to learn. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
It’s up to you to keep improving your continuous learning from all around in your environment.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
More reading on learning from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
The Nine Most Valuable Secrets of Writing Effective Copy
How Good Is your Learning from Failure?
10 Extraordinary Ways for Learning to Learn
Continuous Learning Holds the Keys to Your 