Catalyst

Posts Tagged ‘learning’

The class of 2010 has now sat through hours of names read listening for their own. Students sweated bullets over finals (and sometimes standardized tests). Textbooks were closed, accounted for, and stored in the sauna of a dust-disturbed storeroom.

The moving of the tassel on the mortarboard signals the completion of school. It says, “you’re through, finished, completed. School (with its accompanying learning) is over.

Perhaps you need to rethink the tassel and just not bother because it’s a false alarm. Learning of a different kind is just beginning.

Mark Twain observed, “If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way.” It’s a different kind–and longer–education.

The Greeks practices “praxis,” a philosophy that called for taking what you know and putting into action. How do we find the “praxis” of our lives today?

Find mentors. We grow when we have someone bigger, faster, smarter, and wiser than we are. The tragedy of young lives is they surround themselves with friends with the same level of ignorance and disdain the sage counsel of experience. Make sure your circle includes someone who can teach you something new.

Ask questions of others. Ask them other others. Too many times, we want to appear smart, so we nod in agreement when our mind is nothing more than a fuzzball. Stop and ask, “tell me more about that. I’m not sure I completely understand.”

Reflect on experience. Ask three critical questions to  improve anything.

• What happened?
• Why did it happen? (What did leader, speaker, teacher do to get the result that took place?)
• What would I have done differently?

Keep learning in the right tense. As a minister, I hear people say, “I already learned that in the Bible.” They think learning is a past-tense experience. Once you read it, know it, can feed it back, you don’t need to learn it again. Learning is really a present-tense experience. When you read the Bible, it’s not what you learned but what you are learning.

Let the schoolbooks back in storage. Take your mind out of storage and learn something. The great failure of many lives is that they live by what they learned rather than by what they are learning.

One of the burners on my stove would not heat so I called the repairman. The doorbell heralded an arrival of two repairmen. (I did not think it was that serious!) One was the owner of the business who brought with him a young apprentice.

He turned over the work to the apprentice who wielded a screwdriver as if it were an epee. He promptly touch a wire that sparked (and bit).

Once the young man shook off the sting, came an emotional sting. Rather than a lecture, the owner calmly asked the question, “What did you learn from this?”

It wasn’t the wire that taught the young man something. It was the reflection on the spark.

People who grow in their lives constantly ask, “what did I learn from this?” While this is a good question, it really summarizes three other questions.

• What happened?
• Why did it happen?
• What would I have done differently?

The most difficult question to answer is the first because many people don’t get specific enough. In the example of the apprentice, the answer is not, “the wire sparked.” The specific answer is “when I touched the wire, it sparked.”

Once you answer the what, the why uncovers the reason–”because I did not check to see if the power was off.”

The third question avoids future consequences. The young man learned that he needed to check the circuit breaker before touching any wire with a screwdriver.

Develop the habit of asking that question after every meeting attended, after every presentation made or heard, or after every difficult situation. Then you will learn.

Twain said, “the cat doesn’t walk across the hot stove twice. But neither does he walk across a cold one.” If you will ask the right questions, you can outsmart the cat.