Learning is not just about consuming wisdom for yourself — it’s also about transferring what you know to others.
That’s how knowledge spreads.
Parents unconsciously (and on a few occasions deliberately) pass on their beliefs, values, perceptions, morals and mental models to their kids.
“While we teach, we learn,” Seneca said.
I’ve learned a lot from others via books, blogs, newsletters, podcasts and courses.
I’m still learning every day. It’s a more deliberate process now. Learning is a massive part of my life and what I do for a living. I’m still learning how to write better articles. Writing helps. So, I try to write daily or better still, teach what I’m learning.
What I don’t want to do is to keep all that knowledge to myself. That’s why I learn in public and share my intellectual curiosity journey with others.
I learned a lot of things late in life:
- How to enjoy learning without making it a chore.
- How to read good books and get the most value from them.
- How to stay calm when everything around me is chaotic.
- How to invest wisely and leverage compound growth.
I also learned through self-directed learning the life-changing value of solitude, the importance of taking responsibility for your own happiness and success and the practical value of thinking clearly.
I write about almost everything I learn. And I find even more ideas to write about when I publish in public.
These days, I ask more questions about life and living it and tend to question conventional wisdom, beliefs and perceptions I picked up growing up.
Do these conventional wisdom still serve me? I keep asking myself. I measure a lot of habits and experiment with different things I come across daily.
“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned,” Richard Feynman said.
I am focusing more on questions that can help me optimise my daily habits and routines for a simpler and meaningful life.
I’m still learning the insane value of emotional intelligence and how to contagious it is, especially for young people who learn a great deal from us.
Peter Drucker was right when he said, “No one learns as much about a subject as one who is forced to teach it.”
In teaching, we connect and relate ideas better. We also reflect and dig deeper into topics concepts we missed the first time we learned it.
If you focus on teaching others what you know, you learn twice because you are forced to recall what you know. And the process of remembering what you know solidified knowledge.
We are all teachers in life. We all have something to teach the world. It’s just a matter of finding the right opportunity to impact your specific knowledge if you choose the deliberate path.
We all unconsciously teach a lot of people a lot of things. If you become more conscious about your knowledge diet, and sources, you are more likely to impact good and better knowledge to others.
Teaching what you know is a timeless skill that pays of for the rest of your life. Think about all the opportunities that can come your way if you express yourself boldly in public.
The best life teachers are often those who are willing to take time out of their day to impart wisdom, even when they’re too busy.
Some people make a living by teaching others what they know. You don’t need to be an expert to impact what you know.
“Focus on what you’ve learned, or what you’re learning right now, and how you can share those lessons in a way that will help others. If it helps, imagine you’re teaching your former self, before you’d learned these lessons,” says Belle Beth Cooper.
Ideally, teaching others what you know should happen as naturally as possible. But you can also consciously learn new things and pass them on to others through different formats: books, podcasts, courses, newsletters and blogs. I use a combination of them and do more of what’s working.
You can teach others about your chosen subject by using different platforms to express yourself, learn more about yourself, reinforce new knowledge or make a living.
Whatever your goal, there are incredible benefits of teaching what you know. And remember to enjoy the process.
Your best life is hidden in the questions you are not asking. What would you do if money was not an object? The answer is a clue to what you can comfortably teach others.
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This post was previously published on Thomas Oppong’s blog.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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