Learning Through Observation

I shared my thoughts on biggest human assets in my last post. One more thing I came across and found it interesting which is learning through observation. For sure you need to have good analytical skills to excel in your professional and personal life, isn't it something which starts with careful review or observation of something. Your way of handling certain things is often found inherited from the people in your surrounding e.g. family, friends and colleagues, why so? In my opinion its because knowingly or unknowingly you learned so many things by them through your observation. In day to day life you can easily find such skills you have which you didn't get by reading a book, because everything isn't yet there in books or may be you didn't come across such book. Here is my attempt to show importance of observation in learning.

Observe Events and People

Its in relation with quote from Groucho Marx "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself." You got to be really good observer of events and people around you. It will help you in not only learning new things but will also empower you with the wisdom of handling similar type of problems when you face it. It looks like the main reason you will often find many motivation gurus who recommend to surround yourself with people smarter than you. Because on the one side you learn many things by being with them and observing their way of handling certain things, but it also motivates you to invest(put efforts) more in educating yourself.

Importance of Retrospection

If one look back and do a retrospection of past. Interestingly he will see that all the skills he has today is the result of utilisation of various knowledge sources like reading books, blogs, videos etc. and experience working and dealing with various day in and out personal and professional objectives. In this journey of learning major chunk of skills one gets like importance of effective communication, dealing with technical or managerial or personal life challenges came through observation.

What is Experience?

The next relation with the quote I mentioned earlier can be found with experience. What is experience? In my opinion dealing with something over a period can't be called experience, if there is no learnings involved/associated with it. Learnings come through mistakes you make and also through the mistakes made by others that you observed carefully. But it can only happen when you always look back not only for your mistakes but also the mistakes being made by others in your surrounding.

Direction Confirmation

To make sure you are moving in right direction its really required to always periodically observe and retrospect your activities carefully. It helps in making sure you are heading towards right direction for achieving your goal. It surely helps in correcting things on time after each milestone you achieve.

This was just a collection of thoughts I was having around learning through observation. I am sure there is nothing you haven't read or heard before. My point is, have you observed that you learned so many things by observation only :).

What is your opinion? Please let me know with your comment.