The Importance Of Learning On A Daily Basis As An Entrepreneur

byTareqHelmi

283 followers

Updated 4 years ago

Believe it or not, this topic, as obvious as it sounds eludes many of us.

I am not talking about the academic sense of the world, where you are "force-fed" information that you don't care about to pass an exam.

We're discussing something much more profound and philosophical here!

As entrepreneurs, we often get so distracted with growing our business and starting to make money ASAP, that we forget our own personal growth in the process.

The thing is both go hand in hand, your business cannot grow if you remain stagnant.

Think about it...

If you keep on making the same mistakes and taking the same actions you are taking today, how are your results ever going to improve?

Learning & Entrepreneurship Success

Some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs are known to have made it a daily habit of learning at least one new thing every day.

Notice how often many will quote writers and books in their videos, speeches and interviews.

We're not talking about learning in the traditional sense here though.

It's not about how many books you own or how many of them you have actually read.

Any child with proficient reading skills can read a book a day.

The issue is way deeper than that.

Before we get into learning the right way we need to point out the big elephant in the room!

How Often Do You Educate Yourself?

I personally have 100s of books in both my physical and apple books library, books that I paid a small fortune for over the years.

If you are into the habit of buying books like me you can relate, a $10 or $20 book is not a big investment but over the course of your life if you buy a few books every month it adds up.

Have you read these books though? Or are they sitting in your library collecting dust?

How many online programs have you invested in but haven't completed yet?

Do you have videos sitting in your "watch later" YouTube and Facebook playlists that you haven't had the time to sit and watch yet?

No matter how busy you are my friend, you need to set an hour a day for learning.

An hour is not a big amount of time to do away with, but it adds up, that's 30 to 31 hours of learning a month and 365 hours a year.

Imagine how much you can learn in a decade? What about over the course of your lifetime?

Educating yourself is what paves your path to success.

But watching a video or reading a book alone won't add anything to your life or business unless you learn the right way.

So how do you learn properly?

The Right Way To Learn

You can spend every waking hour learning new things.

The question is, what have you actually learned?

How did it impact your life and decision-making process?

Most of us hoard information like our life depended on it, but how much of that information do we actually apply in our lives and businesses?

How much of the knowledge we acquire do we retain?

Our minds are not a hard disk with infinite Terra and Peta bites of space.

Unless we practice what we learn, it's a matter of time before our brain considers the information redundant and delete or archive it to save space for new information.

It is like filling a broken bucket that's full of holes with a weak stream of water from a tap.

In order to apply what we learn we need to first know how to actively learn.

Before you start your hour of learning, prepare a notepad and pen.

As you read a book or watch a video don't just skim and memorize as you used to do in school.

The purpose of learning here is not to pass an exam, the exam is every day life for the rest of your existence on this plane.

That means you need to actively engage in what you are learning, think as you learn what parts of your life can benefit from this new knowledge when applied?

Start taking notes in the notepad.

As you actively learn you will have what I like to call "Eureka Moments" and this is not my term I heard it from someone long ago (can't remember who) but apply it constantly.

You need to write down these things for later reference lest you forget them.

I personally like to draw a little light bulb beside these "ideas" so I can find them easily later.

After the hour of learning, take at least 5 to 10 minutes to reflect on what you've learned and create an action plan to apply your learning.

You then must keep referring to that notepad regularly.

What Do I Learn?

It's easy to think that as an entrepreneur you must only learn entrepreneurship stuff.

This is totally not the case.

If you learn about meditation or affirmations for example, all aspects of your life will benefit from that.

A clearer and more aligned mind is beneficial even to your business performance.

Learning another language will help you serve clients who speak that language, clients you potentially couldn't serve before.

You name it, whatever you learn will help you in both your personal and business life.

It is a huge mistake to think they are separate.

Think of yourself, your mind, your body, as the engine under the hood of that business.

If all the above are in order, your business will benefit.

Even if you have relationship or health issues, learning how solve these and having stability in your health and love life will have a positive impact on your business.

Everything ties into your business success one way or another because quite simply put you are at the center of it all.

I Am Too Old To Learn - You Can't Teach An Old Dog New Tricks!

I am going to stray away from the main topic here for a second because this is important.

This mindset and frame of mind are destructive and limiting.

There is no impossible in this world.

Look at someone like Stephen Hawking, may his soul rest in peace.

If he thought the way many of us think, focusing on the challenges rather than the goal, we probably wouldn't know as much as we do about black holes and so many other things he was responsible for teaching the world.

Yes a 70-year-old may not be biologically capable of learning as fast as a teenager, but they are still capable of learning.

How many elderly people with dedication and motivation learned something faster than a teen, just because they focused their mind on learning, while the teen wasted their time playing Xbox?

Think of the tortoise and the hare.

So to wrap up, you can learn, here on WA there are hundreds of people in retirement and in the older age brackets who are out preforming other younger members.

Your age is nothing more than an empty excuse, get over it, don't give your mind permission to make excuses for being lazy.

Those who don't try fail before even starting, if you've never failed, you've not lived buddy!

We learn more from failure and mistakes than we do from success, it's human nature, it's the way this world operates, like it or not!

You think Kyle (the founder of WA) got to having such a successful platform without making mistakes and failing first?

I am willing to bet he failed many times, and had to fight the temptation to give up on numerous occasions before he could get to the success he's at right now.

To Conclude...

Learning is important to your success, let's not cry over the spilled milk and all the learning opportunities we've all missed.

We move forward, arming ourselves with useful knowledge on a daily basis.

No more excuses, no more taking decisions that are not deep-rooted and founded in knowledge.

Before writing this article I had to read, quite a bit about the topic, so that whatever information I pass to you is useful.

Educate yourself so that you can do a better job educating people.

I didn't mention this in the article but as you most probably know, the best way to learn something is to teach it.

As always, I welcome your suggestions, question and ideas in the comments guys, so feel free to drop me a line, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Here's me saluting you! To your success my friend!

Evolve Your Wealth,
Tareq Helmi