Invest Time and Money in Learning new Skills

The world is changing around us faster than ever. The internet is hardly a few decades old and it has changed the way humans live in this world. Technology is growing at a faster pace than we could catch up with.

Before the internet era, things did not change much. Life was pretty much the same. Things changed over half a century or sometimes a century.

Invention of electricity, radio, TV and telephone did change civilisation for the better, but it happened over a long period of time. Nothing like what’s happening right now with the internet.

When people carried out their business in the olden times, they did pretty much the same thing for a long period of time. Some businesses grew fast and some stagnated.

Businesses were not under threat of closing down all the time. There was no dire need to keep learning new skills all the time. Learning new skills was a luxury. Not anymore.

Today, we live in a world where everyone is connected, it is a level playing field and competition is at an all time high. You will be facing competition from countries that you wouldn’t have heard of.

Being the best in what you do is not an option any more. It’s the basic requirement for surviving in this world and thrive in your career. And the best part is that we have the resources at our finger tips (literally) if we want to learn and grow.

For the first time ever, any knowledge that you want is accessible. Books, ebooks, courses, podcasts, workshops, free blog posts, free videos and the list goes on. All you need to do is make a choice to learn.

As you improve your skills and become good at something, you will also enjoy doing it more. When you enjoy doing your work, you will become experienced and your competition will find it harder to catch up with you.

Until you make learning a daily habit, you might have some friction. Once you build a daily habit of learning something new, it becomes almost addictive. Once you get into the positive spiral, you will become unstoppable. Competition will not worry you anymore.

We live in a knowledge economy. The only leverage you have compared to your competition is what you know. Access to everything else in this world is bottlenecked by what you know.

If you are an entrepreneur, it is very easy to get lost in the daily grind. During the most difficult phase of my business, I did not invest time in upgrading myself. If you do not upgrade yourself, it only makes things more difficult in the long run.

As an entrepreneur, you will be working so hard throughout the week and yet you will have pending tasks in your todo list. In such a circumstance, learning new skills might look like a luxury you cannot afford right now. But learning is not an option anymore.

You HAVE to find out a way to learn something everyday. Learning something new takes a lot of will-power. It is going to burn into the limited will power reserves you have. You shouldn’t consciously try to put your mind to learning everyday. You need to make learning a habit.

When you learn something everyday, your knowledge compounds over time. The brain has an amazing capacity to remember things. You might feel like not everything you learn is being stored inside your brain, but believe me, it does.

Just like you do not remember what food you ate one week ago, you might feel like you don’t remember much from the book you read or the video course you enrolled for a month ago. What you eat makes what you are today, and so does learning new things.

The No.1 goal of learning is not to memorize facts, but to change your behaviour. When you learn new things, your belief system changes. When your belief system changes, your actions will change. When your actions change, your results change. Your results change your reality.

Learning a new skill triggers change in your personal and professional life for the better.

So learn something everyday. And make it a habit. Just like going to the gym is a habit, form a habit around learning something new everyday.

There are different ways to learn new things. You can listen to a podcast while you are driving or working out in the gym. You can read a book on a weekend. You can subscribe to an online video course and learn on your mobile whenever you have some free time.

Different people learn in different ways and you need to find out what works best for you. I like to use a combination of all the media options to learn.

Never hesitate to invest time and money in learning something new. It usually has the maximum ROI in your business compared to all the other channels of investment.

Apart from investing in yourself, invest in your team as well. And learn with them. In our startup, we make sure that we attend a professional workshop at least 6 times a year. We’ve attended productivity and leadership workshops recently and I could see an instant ROI on the investment.

The best part about workshops is that you will be able to focus on learning without distractions. It’s not enough to just invest money in learning. A lot of businesses have money in abundance once they have carved out their niche in the market. It’s harder to invest your time than your money to learn new skills.

So make learning a habit. And learn something everyday.

And comment below, what are you going to learn today?