“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Albert Einstein

It turns out that passionate curiosity about our own experience is key.

Henry Mintzberg, the John Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies in the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal said in an interview “The best way to learn is by reflecting on your own experience.“

By being passionately curious about and reflecting on all that I experienced this week, I pulled out some key learnings about learning:

Regular learning is important.

The idea of a “job” is going away. Instead, people are hired to do something and move on. For example, the average tenure in a “job” is 2 years. And 40% of the US workforce is contingent which means regularly moving on every 18 months. That means regularly learning new skills, situations, objectives, and teams. (You can read more about this in The Future of Work is Here by Josh Bersin, Principle and Founder of Bersin by Deloitte.)

Everything is learnable.

The good news is that everything is learnable. Everything is a skill. Everything can be learned. It may be hard. It may take time. But it can be learned. (Check out Skills vs. Talents by Seth Godin.)

Learn daily

Kelly Palmer, Chief Learning  Officer of Degreed and panelist at a recent Silicon Vikings-sponsored event said that work is moving too fast for us to learn periodically. We need to learn daily to keep up.

Hang out with humans

At the same panel, Jenny Dearborn, CLO of SAP, said “Learning happens with humans.” It’s informal. At a separate event, Ashley Goodall, SVP of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco, echoed the same theme: “We develop most in response to human beings.”

He also said, “To make a good guess of the future you have to be a good observer of the present. You have to be a student of work and practice the forensics of work. How does it happen?”  What a great place to practice passionate curiosity!

Food for thought:

• What are you passionately curious about?
• What have you learned this week?