Accelerate learning during COVID-19

If there is one thing, we all have in abundance during COVID-19, it is Time. As nature hits ‘pause’, these character-building times, a blip in the grand scheme of things, present an excellent opportunity to rethink and recalibrate our long-term objectives. The Japanese call it Ikigai, ‘a direction or purpose in life, which makes one's life worthwhile’.  

Personally, it is an opportunity to accelerate writing my ‘life’s learning journal’ which gained momentum 3 years back with two courses, a two & a half year long MBA and non-academic readings. I’m a learning aficionado now and my living room is my classroom! For a while now, learning in & outside of the work life has been my Ikigai.  

In the corporate world, ‘Learn-it-All’ instead of ‘Know-it-All’ mindset or Growth instead of Fixed mindset, is a great way to avoid getting trapped in the Peter Principle, which states that ‘everyone in a hierarchy will rise to their incompetence’. Whether in a hierarchy or not, learning is a continuous, lifelong process and the only way to keep oneself growing.

From reading one-book-a-month until last year to one-a-week this year has been a revelation. Facebook/Instagram sabbatical and cutting down on the energy-sucking clutter in life does help! And it is increasingly becoming evident that, “the more I learn, the less I know and the less I know, the more I learn”. We’ve long heard the phrase ‘Read like a CEO’, I’d also say, ‘Read to think like a CEO’.

Finding ‘learning hours’ during the week isn’t difficult. A good start is to take control of the ‘default setting’ of the information that goes in our heads every hour (News/TV/WhatsApp/FB/IG and the list goes on……) We should be the Boss of our Time!

First time ever in our lives, we can save the world by saving ourselves. And whilst all of us do our best to save ourselves, let us ensure this Time is well spent. Let us come out of these times with a new skill, knowledge, information; let us come out of it, Wiser and Stronger.

Happy Learning! 

Here are some excellent books that I’ve enjoyed reading this year so far:

• Good to Great (Jim C. Collins): Read it to – know what takes an organization from Good to Great. With insights -

About people: that people are not assets, only right people are, and right people do not need to be motivated, just ensure you do not demotivate them. Put your best people on your best opportunities and not on your worst problems. First ‘who’, then ‘what’.

About Level 5 leadership:  leaders that embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. Leaders that look out of the window to attribute success to factors other than themselves. When things go wrong, however, they look in the mirror and blame themselves.

About: focusing on your hedgehog concept.

• Good strategy/Bad strategy (Richard P. Rumelt): Read it for – a deeper understanding of the difference between an ‘actionable-strategy’ and slogans/jargons/visions/ambitions/stories……… 
• Outliers: The story of success (Malcolm Gladwell): Read it to – know the author’s perspective on how we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from; that is, their culture/family/generation/the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing or simply, date of birth! It’ll make geniuses look a bit less special and will make you realize that if you’re not successful, it might not be your fault.  
• Multipliers (Liz Wiseman & Greg McKeown): Read it to - find out whether you’re a genius or a genius maker, multiplier or a diminisher. To know how ‘Multipliers’ make everyone smarter, amplify intelligence and how ‘Diminishers’ drain intelligence, capability and make a constant endeavor to prove that they’re the smartest in the room.
• The 80/20 principle (Richard Koch): Read it to - understand how the universe is unbalanced, how the world is not linear. How 20% of customers account for 80% of revenues, how 20% of our time accounts for 80% of the work we accomplish, how what we spend our time on actually counts. Why most of us need a ‘Time revolution’ (not to be confused with Time management)? Time management is about ‘speeding up’, whereas Time revolution is about what we choose to spend our time on?
• Zero to One (Peter Thiel and Blake Masters): Read it to – know how the brightest entrepreneurs take a ‘new’ idea from Zero to One as opposed to an ‘old’ idea from One to n.
• Rise and Fall of Nations (Ruchir Sharma): Read it to - learn the 10 rules about the economics of a country (such as geographic/demographic/inflation/debt levels) that contribute to the rise and fall of a nation in a post 2008-financial crisis environment.
• Fact fullness (Hans Rosling): Read it to - know how most of us have a myopic and misinformed view of the world. How our view of the world is blurred because of our Gap/Fear/Size/Generalization/Blame/Negativity/Straight-line instincts.
• Talk like TED (Carmine Gallo): Read it - well, to talk like TED! Unless you’re born as Winston Churchill or Steve Jobs, there’s no substitute to practice for engaging an audience on stage.
• Buy-ology (Martin Lindstorm): Read it to - understand the ‘Biology of Buying’. How our brain subconsciously chooses certain things over others for us. How, Neuromarketing is the new key tool which will revolutionize marketing strategies in the future and help us understand the science behind why we buy.