Daily Dose: Learning

Learner.  That is my dominant theme on Gallup’s Strengths-finder.  It aligns with how I live each day…like a student-athlete…although college graduation is decades behind me now.  Adam Kayce got me thinking about learning this week when he posed the question: “What is your learning edge?”  How am I learning these days?  What is pushing my intellectual horizons? 

I learned during my dear undergrad years at Yale to appreciate and embrace synthesis.  Original thought drawn from countless resources, academic and otherwise, is pure human art in my view.  The confluence of what we read, experience, think, dream is original for each one of us…a mosaic as unique as our own thumb print. 

Often an odd mix of an article about sustainable building in Portland, a conversation with a colleague about a meeting we struggled through last night, a passage of a book about the fear of rejection during a sales call, and a killer tempo workout at the gym creates breakthrough learning for me.  There is something about the work of processing these ideas and experiences intermittently, that synthesis of “stuff”, that enables a new view, a new curiosity, a new learning for me.

 

Reflecting back on my learning this week I have mixed these things in the bowl: excerpts form Susan Scott and Gregg Thompson, a fantastic quote from Bill George (“authentic leaders understand that leading is about serving others”), the goose-bump generating intro of Farrah Gray’s Reallionaire, wonderful, hand-written notes from some great kids that I coach at SEI, and 99 Ways To Open a Bottle of Beer by Brett Stern.  I did a good deal of mixing during a 13 mile hike in the Columbia Gorge.  All of that hard pumping blood was good for the brain cells…a day in the life of a student-athlete, indeed.

What are you learning these days?