Some things just can’t be taught. Yet, it doesn’t stop everyone from trying their best to learn them.
In business circles, I’m constantly bumping into executives and professionals desperately trying to learn how to:
In their personal lives, people are pursuing:
These days, everyone is trying to:
They’re all chasing empty and impossible goals.
The best way to understand why is to read this 1851 quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlett Letters:
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us on a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.
How can this be? Everyone in the world wants to be happy. But the more you pursue happiness, the less you’re likely to attain it? That just doesn’t sound right, does it?
But maybe, just maybe, Hawthorne was on to something. Something truly profound. Consider this:
Could it be that the way we’ve been pursuing all these goals has been all wrong? Could it be that we’re collectively in this economic mess because we’ve been pursuing rules and systems and ‘best practices’?
Like it or not, the answer is “yes.” In our pursuit of best practices, we’ve edged out our ability to see the next practices.
Sorry, folks … but we’ve been learning at the wrong level.
Aman
(Aman Motwane)
Jump up from your current Level of Learning to skills 2.0.
Aman, there’s review of one of your talks on linkedin that I’m pasting here: “Although he brings an unconventional approach to management, he makes more sense than all the main stream leaders or business gurus often featured in television or social media outlets.” That’s what brought me to your blog. Unconventional and on-target. Why are there so few like you?
I don’t agree. Happiness DOES come incidentally, sometimes… However, if I don’t take steps towards success, there’s no way I’ll find happiness. Had a great day out with that girl? The fact that it was great was luck, however had you not asked her out you would be sitting at home watching tv. It’s little things like these where you have to learn about yourself, and set a balanced approach. You can’t ‘learn’ to be confident, but you can take steps towards doing things that will over time make you confident – such as becoming good at things and solving your problems at the root cause. The same can be said about influencing people, which you can’t just do like turning on the computer. But by doing simple things like listening, smiling and actually looking at things from the other person’s view, you might find out that you not only learned something, but that people will come to like you; which in terms makes you influential.
Remember, everything can be taught.
Rene, you say you disagree. But all the examples you gave actually support what I say in this post.
As you say — if you want happiness, learn something else … like steps for success; if you want to influence people, learn something else … like steps for listening. Happiness and influence are both byproducts. You learn something else and happiness and influence come as a result. Sounds like you agree with me, Rene. Great!
There are, however, 4 fundamental problems with the examples you gave:
(1) how many different ‘steps’ would an individual have to learn to attain all the things we treasure in life? As Ralph Waldo Emerson correctly pointed out, there are millions of ‘steps’ and then some. He also adds that anyone who follows such steps is sure to have trouble.
(2) With so many ‘steps’ to follow, how do you know you haven’t missed the core issues that make the biggest difference?
(3) Success doesn’t necessary lead to happiness. Often, quite the opposite.
(4) Your response illustrates the problems with learning such steps. For example, you mentioned listening as a step. Yet you offered only personal examples on a business web site, while also ignoring all the problems I’ve cited throughout this web site with learning steps. This makes me wonder if you’re really listening to what I am saying.
By the way, successful listening is not a step; it’s a byproduct of something else.
The fact is that the truly successful people and companies of today learn at a completely different level. They go beyond steps and methods.
For example, Costco doesn’t waste time on steps to Employee Empowerment because it is simply a “byproduct of how we run the company” (their words). Apple doesn’t “strive to appear cool” (Steve Jobs’ words). Jobs also scoffs at rules for innovation. Yet, Costco is exemplary at empowerment and Apple is coolness and innovation personified.
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