One day this week, I found myself sitting across from a young man. He told me about his venture, and his goals, what’s done and what he’s doing. It was a fascinating conversation. And, bonus, he was fun to talk to.
Yet what I found myself doing was observing my observations.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m quite an observant person. I’ve studied observation, I learned it when I was a fledgling adult, coming to grips with the art of ethnography. This skill I embedded through my years of music journalism practise.
Therefore, as I spoke to this young man, I noted his perfectly groomed appearance. His beard was as crisp as a new autumn morning. His clothing was expensive, perfectly placed. His high-end watch was large and proudly on display.
I could nearly guess what type of car he drives, what he eats for dinner, what are his favourite hotels and restaurants.
During the conversation, I learned more about him than from what he told me.
I learned that he is needy: He wants people to value him, to put him on a pedestal, to run after him. I learned that small things stroke his ego. I learned that he believes he knows more about many things than those advising him, and that he doesn’t need experience to become valuable to others. I learned that he disregarded many of my comments until I found a nerve and hit it intentionally with an ‘off-hand’ comment that I knew would get his attention.
That was when I learned how green he was.
It wasn’t the first interaction I had this week where my expertise was totally disregarded for much of a conversation. I was in one workshop this week where a person literally looked 90 degrees in a different direction, totally changed his body language, and would not engage - simply because I challenged his knowledge.
What’s amusing to me is that people who do such things seem to believe that their intentions are hidden, as opposed to shining brightly from their shirt-sleeves.
(It’s nearly always the latter.)
But it wasn’t until I was debriefing with a good friend, and we were talking about our goings on over the past six months, that I realised how much of my perspective has been taught to me by my business.
The past six years have been enormous. I’ve not only kept this business going, but fallen back in love with it enough to grow it. I’ve worked through times of abundance and times of total penury. I’ve started other ventures, with other people, and learned how close I’d come to being in really difficult legal positions. I’ve been in the national press, released new books, found new ways of working. I’ve hired and fired, travelled and stayed still. I’ve had fantastic clients and the Clients From Hell (and a lot of clients from hell). I’ve had partnerships and mentors, guides and ideas, mysteries and clues. I’ve had exhaustion and depression, elation and energy.
But most of all, I’ve had learning.
Learning isn’t a passive thing. It’s active. It’s in the notes you take while you read, the things you write while you learn to establish what you don’t know yet, the hardships you experience because of your own ignorance.
This week has shown me just how much knowledge I’ve accumulated in the past six years. While it might seem like this happens through conversation with others, don’t be misled; it mostly occurs while I reflect on my own practices. The outcomes of that reflection inform everything, from how I interact with others, to how I mentor them, and even how I consider what are my next steps for the Pixie.
Realising what you know is both an incredible and a terrifying place to be. It’s no secret that the more you know, the more you realise you don’t know. As I stare down the age of 40, I find myself saying less and listening more.
The listening is instructive.
My attitude about learning is partly just who I am. But it was also fanned into a perpetual flame by my alma mater.
It’s no secret that I am a very proud alumnus of the University of South Australia, not least because that very institution has incubated many of the brightest minds that I know. As we like to say, all the cool kids went to UniSA. ;)
More to the point, UniSA has a set of graduate qualities that haven’t really changed since I first set foot on campus as an anxiety-filled first year student in February 1999. I identify nearly all of these graduate qualities in those I know who studied there.
The second of them tells us that a graduate:
is prepared for life-long learning in pursuit of personal development and excellence in professional practice.
You can’t have excellence in any practice without being committed to learning.
Achieving mastery means constantly reflecting on what you’re doing, why you’re doing things this way, and what could be better about what you’re doing.
Achieving the pinnacle of success requires the intentional development of better, better, better ways.
That’s how I have this week arrived at my own way of seeing the difference between entrepreneurs who succeed, and those who don’t. It’s the difference between a proactive and a reactive learner.
A proactive learner identifies a problem, and seeks a solution by themselves, analysing and digesting what they learn, and applying, testing, and iterating on their knowledge.
A reactive learner is more likely to wait for people to tell them what to do. They tend to get stuck in their own loops, and won’t go out of their comfort zones without being pushed.
So, dear reader, at the end of yet another very long read this week, I’d like you to ask yourself which one characterises how you walk through the world.
You might be surprised at what you discover.