In order to be successful in business and in life, you must continuously increase your knowledge and skill set. We live in a time when we are blessed with a wealth of information at our fingertips, but we may not always know the best ways to obtain this information.
If you want to be successful, you need to stay hungry and stay informed. Here are some great methods to help you stay sharp and up to speed:
Read. Feed your mind with as many different reading materials on as many different subjects as you can. Not only does reading provide you with the obvious benefits of learning about the sub-ject matter at hand, but reading is like a workout for our mind. Reading increases your cognitive abilities, improves your vocabulary, improves your memory and makes you more worldly. Apart from making you more knowledgable on the subject matter that you’re reading about, habitual reading raises the bar for how intelligent you can potentially become!
Be observant. Observe the world around you. In this day and age, we are all too busy with our noses buried in our smart phones and consumed with being constantly busy that we have for-gotten about the beauty of observation. There is so much we can learn from the everyday hap-penings around us if we only take the time to pay attention. Lacking in confidence? Observe the way the door man greets everyone and strikes up conversation with ease. Could your customer service use some work? Watch the way your server goes above and beyond next time you go out to eat. Need to work on your patience? Observe a mother playing with her children at the park. There is something to be learned from everyone around us, but most of us are too busy to take the time to notice.
Learn from those close to you. In addition to observing the outside world, observe those around you in the workplace as well. Make sure to pay attention to what has worked for them and what hasn’t.
Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions of those who you work with. Almost always, people are happy to help those who ask for it.
Learn from your mistakes. In the game of learning, mistakes are inevitable. You will make many of them, but the important thing is that you learn from them. Once you make a mistake, make a plan for how to avoid making it again, chalk it up for experience, and move on quickly. As long as you don’t allow your mistakes to make you crumble, you will be fine and you will be even better for having made them and learned from them.
Practice makes perfect. A big mistake people make as they get older is thinking that they’ve got everything under wraps. Just because you’re playing with the big boys now, doesn’t mean you don’t need to practice and perfect your skills. Feeling too comfortable is a big roadblock when it comes to learning and progression.
Always keep a student’s mindset. By keeping a student’s mentality, you humble yourself to the notion that you may never know all there is to know, and that’s okay. That’s what keeps you hungry for knowledge and growth. That’s what makes you strive to be better. If you hit the point where you think you’re the best, you’ve plateaued, and you stop trying. Always stay hungry.
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