How To Redefine LEARNING ON THE JOB In Career and Life

I took the phrase 'learning on the job' often too seriously in life from early on. I understood, 

Learning on the job = Learning while you're in the process of anything in life (not just limited to your career)

But I didn't stop there. Instead, I dug deep into circumstances where I would interact with a professional not related to my career or job but in a completely different place set. 

For example, imagine going to the hospital for a doctor's appointment for a checkup but using that occasion to learn something from the hospital's operation process or how the doctor would run his/her evaluation of my symptoms. 

Go even further. Notice how different doctors would use a different approach to address your concerns. For example, some would follow a strict diagnostic process to evaluate your symptoms. They would listen to you and give you some tests right away to find out what's possibly wrong with you. 

Then there is the 2nd kind (my personal favorite), which will follow a historical data analysis by asking you questions from your recent past. The doctor will follow a combination of pattern recognition trigger, stepwise refinement, and probabilistic reasoning to pinpoint the underlining reason for your symptoms first. 

These are the diagnostic frameworks that I have learned not from my employers or any external training. It's simply by observing and connecting the dots to make sense of the process. 

The reward? I use this diagnostic framework for pretty much everything in life and my career. 

Whether you're a manager evaluating a project and people, or a startup entrepreneur trying to understand the market and business potential, or a product manager trying to understand customer pain points to deliver a great solution. This framework, when used as part of our mindset at work and in life, can be super useful.

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