I was 10 when I fell in love with the dictionary. I’d read and internalise strange words then go around the next couple of weeks asking people older than me if they knew the meaning of the words. Safe to say some adults really found me irritating, I didn’t let them put me off though, thankfully.
But somewhere round puberty a lot changes, this is where I got to telling people I’m big now, walking with my shoulders puffed up and climbing my imaginary high horse. For some reason now that I look back I notice that being BIG somehow came with the territory of not enjoying to learn anymore. I walked around like I had arrived and needed not to learn or enjoy the process of learning.
Worse still learning becomes totally uncool and for some reason the opinions of others really matter and learning becomes more prominent in the dark away from prying eyes.
You’re always learning. The problem is, sometimes you stop and think you understand the world. This is not correct. The world is always moving. You never reach the point you can stop making an effort.
Paulo Coelho
Learning is probably the best part of the journey, some would argue learning is the whole journey. Albert Einstein famously said, “once you stop learning, you start dying.” But then why is learning frowned upon as being “uncool” especially before it wields the intended results.
I would blame social media for this because everyone on social media seems to be made, but one of my brothers told me something that changed my trajectory. He said, “Hollywood is poison, cause movies make the process to success seem over night”
I felt that, with the one or two difficulties fed to us in movies and then the big heroic over come, making me emotional all over my timeline. With the inspiration from the movie well adjusted I’d be back at having a low motivation tank again, wondering where I went wrong, worse I’d be left waiting for my big over come.
I missed the whole point of the struggle before the big over come, see I thought the struggle was there to glamorize the over come. I was completely concerned with result instead of the journey and so at the result stage I was completely confounded because at the end I felt nothing because I couldn’t remember what I had learnt from the journey or struggle if you will.
Then I watched a movie that had a thought provoking quote which said, “The journey is what brings us happiness. Not the destination.” I struggled with this notion at first but then I thought about sports after my team wins a game I didn’t much care about the score as much as I did about how the game was played and how we won. Watching the game is also more fun than watching the score result at the end of the game.
Life is like that game, to win innovation is an absolute must and innovation is an impossibility without first learning that which must be innovated upon. And unfortunately learning is not possible if the goal is the only thing on our mind, because we might eventually get to the goal without learning or even understanding how we got there.
Learning is a beautiful process if only we allow ourselves to be present at all moments and venture whole souled into the art of discovery that only a journey can afford. Benjamin Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget.Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn” May we all be involved in our lives thoroughly for the process of learning to marinate itself and leave us better than when the journey first began.
May love for what we do guide us and enable us the privilege of a beautiful process.
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