This has been a year of so much learning about the business and what it takes to be successful. Many of the things I’m learning seem as if I should have been learning them years ago.
Being so late to learn makes me think about missed opportunities. That is why thinking back over the new learning occurring this year (and even in the last few days) is top-of-mind for me right now.
9 Ways to Unlearn Faster than You Are Now
The drive to realize future opportunities more quickly prompted me to think about how I (or you) could unlearn faster to be able to learn new things more rapidly. Here are nine ways to unlearn that occurred to me right away:
- Wait to be proven wrong.
- Surround yourself with one or more people who will joyously call B.S. on you.
- Strip away as many of your personal best practices as you can without imploding.
- Stop EVERYTHING (or at least some things) and do completely the opposite.
- Go off into a new environment where you absolutely MUST start over.
- Force fit practices from someone who views the world (and acts) completely differently than you.
- Turn over control to someone very different than you.
- Immerse yourself in EVERY experience that will challenge your thinking.
- Accept that everything you know is wrong.
These ideas vary in difficulty for me. I do some of these more (and more readily) than others. Based on how they’re ordered, if you can only manage number 1, you’re not going to unlearn without a lot of real world setbacks and days of reckoning along the way.
Where are you most comfortable within this list? Where are you spending YOUR time trying to unlearn? And, are you unlearning as quickly as you want to and need to do? – Mike Brown
