Do the Majority of People Celebrate Learning?

I’ll admit it. I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore, and haven’t for a long time. Its not that I am unappreciative of achieving another year on this earth, I just don’t think I did anything important enough to achieve the milestone. Not to mention, birthdays at my age seem to pop up before I know it.

Celebrating new methods and skills we have learned are another matter.

We have many opportunities to celebrate the everyday, ordinary, unique things we are always learning. But, do we??

Do we celebrate when we learned how to organize our multiple Google calendars? The simple, yet effective, skill we learned during a class we signed up for at our company’s lunch-and-learn program. The training we received to be someone’s back up so they can take some time off. Or, how we, as a company, can respond to changing business needs with a workforce of cross functional employees.?

I was with a large team last week that had no way of knowing if they were doing a good job each day, not to mention hour by hour. We taught them how to use red and green visuals to indicate if they were meeting their hourly goal, and more importantly, how to correct a negative trend while there was still time to turn things around. Cheers could be heard when going from a red underperforming hour, to a green meeting or exceeding the hour goal. No cake. No ice Cream. No presents or streamers. But it was a celebration none the less. Learning a new skill and sharing it with our team can be incredibly satisfying. Especially if this new skill helps us to meet or exceed our goals. Perhaps we share a new technique to reassure our quality standards are not only getting met, but are consistently getting surpassed. Maybe we teach someone a better way to organize files so purchasing and quoting is streamlined.?

These are all worthy of celebration. I mean, not like birthday cake and ice cream worthy, but worthy none the less. Let’s not confuse the word celebration with the birthday variety. A celebration to acknowledge our learnings at work doesn't need to be elaborately planned to be effective. Let’s think of these celebrations as being spirited acknowledgements.

Let’s start acknowledging those learnings today!??