Learn More, Suffer More?

‘Why learn more and suffer more?’ The subway ad for a cram school caught my eye. Its pitch to students and parents was clear. Studying is painful, but we have shortcuts that will optimise your grades. Still, what a destructive message! Does learning really = suffering?

Later in an industry discussion about national talent development, I challenged a fellow panelist who said ‘there’s no point in learning something unless you can use it!’ A lot of the talk was about certification and practical experience to gain jobs and promotions. But is learning later in life only a tactical means to an end? Can’t there be intrinsic value in learning?

Even if we focus just on work, the distinguishing factors I've seen in successful careers include pattern-recognition, lateral thinking, creativity, risk-taking, and the ability to communicate and inspire others. Schools help with discipline, structure and collaborative skills. But they don’t really teach a lot of the other things we need. Nor do schools teach how to handle the most important things in life: relationships, health, money, fear of mortality. Even their monopoly on technical knowledge (once located in libraries or the teachers’ heads) has ended, thanks to the internet. This, combined with companies realising the value of competencies over credentials, has sparked an existential crisis for schools.

My advice to the industry panel was - Get kids away from parents for the summer!? Doing back-breaking work on a farm, I learned about value chains, how bosses treat easily-replaceable workers, and the importance of educating yourself to get ahead. Working in a bar, I learned teamwork, customer service, and how to handle people at their worst. As a patent researcher, I learned about innovation, bureaucracy, and the creative mind. But it wasn’t just the work. I also gained street smarts as a teenager, by getting a visa, organising flights and shared accommodations on a tiny budget, and hitting the sidewalks of foreign cities to find a job.

A few years ago, I was tutoring at a local university. In class we would role-play job interviews, with me as CEO. Only about 1 in 10 students could handle this curveball: ‘I am interviewing you only because HR asked me to. I don’t think we need to hire for this position at all.’ These elite students had prepped work experience, career goals, and strong and weak points, anticipating a conventionally-structured interaction. Most simply froze up. But a few with the soft skills were able to bounce back: ‘I’m sorry you feel that way. Perhaps you haven’t considered all the value-add a hire like this could bring! Let me give you examples…’

My second piece of advice to that industry panel was - Stay Curious. I didn’t do stand up comedy to improve my presentation skills, but there’s no better way! Reading rock star autobiographies taught me the importance of persistence in the face of rejection and how to overcome personal vices. I gained new perspectives on motivation from espionage novels (spies are driven by one or more of M.I.C.E. - Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego - doesn't some of this apply to corporate life too?). I have learned as much if not more from ‘bad’ bosses as I have from ‘good’ ones. There’s so much interesting material out there to draw on!

Learning boosts skills and confidence, but also embodies our search for meaning. True, it's not always fun or easy - especially when based on experience from painful mistakes - and sometimes we have to learn stuff we don’t like (I studied Latin at school!). But if education has any real purpose beyond the basics, it’s for learning how to learn. And if you didn’t experience school that way, you can still leverage curiosity, passion and raw exploration to build lifelong learning skills that will enrich your personal journey as well as your career.?

Up top is a photo of my secondary school English teacher, who used to ‘waste time’ away from a real job back then by ‘dabbling’ in his passion of local theatre productions. You might know him better as Oscar-nominated Hollywood actor Brendan Gleeson. :)