Mental habits that support lifelong learning

I often address the importance of lifelong learning. I instill it to my staff, my children and my friends. I learn from the book “The World is Flat” that Passion Quotient(PQ) + Curiosity Quotient (CQ) > Intelligence Quotient (IQ). But how do we intrigue passion & curiosity? How do we convert a person from nothing of passion & curiosity so that it will drives lifelong learning? What is the basis of lifelong learning? It is a tough question.

Today, when I read the book “Leading Change” to the chapter of Leadership and lifelong learning, I find the answer. We need to develop the following mental habits:

1. Risk taking: Willingness to push oneself out of comfort zones
2. Humble self-reflection: Honest assessment of successes and failures, especially the latter
3. Solicitation of opinions: Aggressive collection of information and ideas from others
4. Careful listening: Propensity to listen to others
5. Openness to new ideas: Willingness to view life with an open mind

Actually, honest reflection, listening, solicitation of opinions, and openness bring bad news and negative feedback as well as interesting ideas. In the short term, life is generally more pleasant without failure and negative feedback

It is tough to develop the above habits because it is more painful in the short term. Inertia is human weakness. We need to overcome the natural human tendency to shy away from or abandon habits that produce short-term pain. Particularly, when in our early stage of career, we got some success. Complacency start to spread in our mind. There is fruitful consequence after our success is recognized – higher pay, people respect and commencing to enjoy authority. By all means, the person must be smarter at that time so as to gain recognition. However, when a manager is promoted to a higher position, everything has to change. New demand will be from management as well as new capacity of leadership. The existing knowledge is definitely not sufficient to keep up with the pace of change. Continuous learning is mandatory. Listening and keeping patience are one of the job tasks for a manager/leader.

On the other hand, if not possible to develop all of the above mental habits, the only way is to bring yourself to crisis. It is true. Only hardship can trigger off human instinct of insufficiency and therefore continuous learning.

My reader, do you agree?