To achieve your goals, you'll have to learn.

[00:00:00] Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] I saw this the other day in James Clear's newsletter, "Don't worry about being the most interesting person in the room, just try to be the most interested person in the room. In general, the interested person learns more and tends to be well liked. And in the long run, it's hard to keep down someone who is well learned and well liked."

[00:00:39] I really like that. The well liked part is interesting and subject to interpretation, but the well learned part I super enjoyed. Learning plays a role in our life, or, mmmm, at least it can, if we let it. And learning plays an outsized role in our ability to achieve our goals.

[00:01:05] Our goals are our goals because we've never done them before, right? Sometimes not at all, and sometimes not to that extent. So, to get there, we're gonna have to learn some new skills, processes, or both, and maybe even more.

[00:01:23] The thing is, as adults, sometimes we have this weird idea in our head that learning will somehow be easier for us because we're adults. I see this underlying assumption show up time and time again with individuals, and I very often see this in entire work cultures.

[00:01:41] But, One, learning quickly is an acquired skill that not everyone possesses, and not everyone possesses in the same amount. And two, it's easier to learn something adjacent to what you already know than to learn something entirely new to you. And sometimes in life, you do have to learn things that are entirely new to you.

[00:02:04] If you don't learn often enough in your life, or if you only ever learn adjacent things, it's really easy to become rigid and inflexible. Which is a terrible thing to be when learning new things, because instead of learning, you might be like a branch that snaps.

[00:02:23] And I would also argue that pride and a desire to always appear great starts to play an outsized role as well in our inability to learn, or at least learn well or willingly.

[00:02:40] We do things we already know and don't want to do things that make us look bad. Unlike when you're a child, the adult world often penalizes your failures, and you develop a fear of failure. There's a lot of things that can go wrong in your life if you fail, but learning is a core component of goal achievement.

[00:03:01] And learning is, like we just talked about, not necessarily easy just because you are older. You watch the toddler fall a million times and then get up and try again anyway because the toddler doesn't have shame or pride. They don't go, well, it didn't work the first time, or the second time, or even the 30th time, so I'm gonna give up and just stick to crawling. What was that voice?

[00:03:28] Anyway, so that teaches us that failure is a part of learning. Even if a particular attempt fails, it teaches you something. Maybe you got further than you did before. There's a learning there. A learning of what may lead to your next breakthrough and what certainly won't. I'll put this link in the show notes, but something my spouse and I really enjoy watching on YouTube is videos showing AI models learning something.

[00:03:55] There's this really good one where an AI model has to learn how to park in a parking lot correctly, in a very specific spot. And it takes the AI model more than 310, 000 times to learn how to do this. In each attempt, whether it's a failure or not, it learned something. And there were even times early on where, by some fluke, it would park the car correctly.

[00:04:19] And at that point, if that was you, you'd be like, Yay! I made it, right? Nope. Sometimes it's a fluke, a false positive. You have to do it again a few times to ensure you actually got it. So one, learning is inevitable if you want to reach your goals. Two, you will inevitably fail, so don't let that discourage you.

[00:04:39] And three, don't be too proud. Be proud of your achievements, but don't let your pride stop you from growing.

[00:04:51] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?