The Question You Should Ask Yourself Every Day

If you want to be a success – in work and in life – there’s one question you should ask yourself daily: What did I learn today?

When you do that, you’ll start to see life as a continuous learning opportunity – and yourself as a lifelong learner. It will give you the right mindset to keep building what we economists call your “human capital,” or the skills, knowledge, and experience that you bring to anything you do.

I credit my parents with showing me the wisdom of this practice. When I was growing up, they would ask me and my siblings “What did you learn today?” every night at the dinner table. It wasn’t a throwaway question, either. They were genuinely interested, and they expected an answer.

The query arose from their individual passions and values. My mother was a schoolteacher who thoroughly believed in the power of education. When she asked the question, she sincerely wanted to understand what knowledge had been transmitted to me in class that day. For my dad, the question reflected the adventurous lens through which he saw the world. He was the kind of person who delighted in introducing his children to new experiences – typically simple pleasures like flying kites or fishing. I think that in asking the question, he wanted us to see our lives as ripe with opportunities for new discoveries.

Of course, as a child, I didn’t understand my parents’ motivations, and as I moved into my teen years, I didn’t appreciate the nightly question either. I was happy to be free of it when I went off to college. But a funny thing happened as the years went by. In my adulthood, I began to realize its power. It slowly dawned on me that asking the question on a daily basis was a very useful way to approach life, because it encourages you to see every day as an opportunity to grow.

Continuous learning is important in all facets of life, but in the workplace, it’s truly essential to success. To keep adding value to your organization, you must keep growing your skills, knowledge, and experiences. Fortunately, any job, even those that may seem menial, offers endless opportunities to learn – about the organization and its stakeholders, the industry or sector within which it’s operating, the competitive environment, and so on. There are many different ways to go about that. If you are fortunate enough to work for an organization that offers formal training opportunities, take advantage of them. You can also ask questions of your colleagues, serve on committees, or raise your hand to be part of initiatives outside the scope of your current responsibilities. Throughout my career, I’ve observed that the people who take full advantage of learning opportunities like these tend to be the same people who excel and advance.

We should all be striving to learn something new every day, and it doesn’t have to be anything profound or huge. It’s amazing what you can learn just by engaging in conversation with others or by reading the newspaper. Being a continuous learner is especially important in today’s world, where technology and other forces are reshaping the landscape at lightning speed. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the future will bring – but being a lifelong learner will give you the confidence to know that you can navigate it, come what may. There’s no better source of security than that.

So tell me…what did you learn today?

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