Loss Of Learning And Excellence

So a funny thing happened last week.

I was listening to a podcast from The Art of Manliness entitled "Grow, Adapt, and Re-invent Yourself Through Ultra Learning" (More on that tomorrow) in which the author of the book Ulltralearining, Scott Young, describes individuals who learn large amounts of new things in a short time (he himself took the equivalent of a computer science degree from MIT online in less than a year).  As I as listening to it, I suddenly made a huge discovery:

I was not longer into becoming better. I was in to just remaining at my current level.  And that was leading to a high level of frustration in my life.

I am busy. O friend, I am busy.  I am as busy as I have ever been, or more so.  But interestingly, I am not trying to become a better person anymore.  All I do anymore is work a great deal and try and fit in the little bits of my own life.

This alarmed me.  This shocked me.  I tried to think of when this lack of willingness to try new things and the pursuit of excellence left me.  Surely it was within the last year or so (turns out it was).

And my current goals reflect this:  they are things to do, not things to become or even achieve.

So I need to fix this.  I need to find that drive to become better, to become excellent, to learn more.  I need that as the focus, not just doing more.

That helps in a lot of ways - for example, I will focus less (or not at all) on the things I cannot control.  I will focus on the things I can control, on learning new things and strengthening what I have and become better.  It will help me push through things - not just do them (my current nemesis) but have a reason for why I am doing them (to get better, to learn something new).

Why does this happen?  Because I fell into a bad habit, a habit many people (I suspect) fall into:  we get so busy trying to just stay afloat that we lose the push for being excellent.  For learning new things.

Work - I would love to say within the last month but it has been longer than that - has become an exercise in just getting by.  Just getting through the next crisis.  Just getting through to do the next thing.

When that happens, I eventually lose the will to do better.  Why?  Because it is enough to get things done, because there is always something else to be done.

Of course, this does nothing for my career - or my life.  Everything becomes one long reactionary event, trying to either get something resolved or avoid something else.  And ultimately, just stay in place.

So that needs to stop.  And I need to rediscover the reason to excel and learn new things again.  Because now I have seen this side of things.  And that road leads nowhere good.