TRAINING YOURSELF:
The 21st Century Credential

Seize the Initiative

“Our world is changing faster than ever before, and the importance of learning is growing even faster. Any significant improvement in life—from a more rewarding job to more enjoyable leisure time—is based on learning.”

Ronald Gross
Peak Learning

When English novelist Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with the line, “It was the best of times and the worst of times,” he captured an eternal literary truth which grows richer in meaning with every decade. There have always been and will always be people who are better disposed to making the best of their situation, but the possibility is there for all of us. We can enjoy the best of our times through the knowledge that comes from pushing our efforts far beyond what it takes merely to get by. This lays the groundwork for the understanding necessary to experience a good life.

 Every adult has a philosophy of life, a hierarchy of values, and a strong sense of what is important and what constitutes success. Yet only one adult in a multitude can articulate these principles when asked. Therein lies the problem.  Uncertainty and ambivalence about what is truly important to us sends us in hot pursuit of the grail without really knowing what that grail is. Like Don Quixote, we joust at windmills, often taking the wrong path, and we do these things for years without realizing we are traveling in circles.

All of the advice in this little book about the self-education required to earn a good living counts double for living a good living. Developing a thirst for knowledge and understanding is an acquired taste. But it can’t be given to us. We must take it for ourselves. Simple prescriptions for wisdom are enticing, but unless we apply the intellectual effort necessary to judge their authenticity, they are meaningless at best and hazardous at worst. Life is anything but simple. As living creatures we are hardwired to thrive on complexity.

Understanding the nature of knowledge in our personal lives means mastery of our culture. A liberal education that delves deeply into the drama and mystery of human existence and extends widely in its cultural comparisons enables us to define what is valuable to us, not because others say it is but because it clearly resonates with our understanding about value. A walk in the woods in conversation with Thoreau makes us view the shopping mall differently. If we commit to examining philosophy and great literature with the same effort we bring to communicating in the workplace, we can move ever closer to hearing our own inner voice loudly enough to drown out the persistent beckoning of popular culture. 

This book is about developing an autodidactic philosophy of life. You can read it in a few work breaks or a long lunch hour. The time investment is short, but the payoff is big. When you internalize the strategy that follows, your life will change in profound and fundamental ways. Your political leanings and your line of work are beside the point. What matters is that you understand the importance not only of knowing what you’re doing, if you work for a living, but also of learning in anticipation of what you will need to be doing. 

We are in the throes of a learning revolution in America. More and more career advisors have begun using the sports metaphor of free agency to describe today’s most dynamic workers. Indeed, some software programmers have agents. The message is clear: What you know is rapidly becoming more important than who you know. Earning a living is tantamount to learning a living. Educating and training yourself--taking charge of your own learning--is critical to your success today and to your continued employability in the future. Whether or not you have a wall full of degrees and certificates will be less important in the future than whether or not you are genuinely interested in what you are doing and continue to learn on your own. The code word for the future is initiative.

You’ve probably heard this familiar refrain hundreds of times, especially if you have a lot of work experience: "I never got any training in that subject," or "We never get any training." Well, guess what? If you wait for someone else to give you what you should take for yourself, you're in for tough times. The twenty-first century is likely to become unemployment hell for people who wait to receive from others what they ought to be taking for themselves as instinctively as taking in a breath of fresh air after a hard run.

People sometimes ask what the difference is between education and training.  A simple, practical approach is to think of education as the theory side of your enterprise and training as your technique. In the context of a career, theory and technique are the left and right feet marching toward an objective. Anything less amounts to walking in circles. Suffice to say that training is simply learning on the job in order to do your job better. Formal education is based on study followed by test, while work, which is more complex, is an open book test.

 This is a recent development.  A few decades ago, you didn't want to be seen trying to figure out what you were already supposed to know. Today, change in many technologically driven disciplines requires on-the-job learning. It's the only way to perform at your best. Indeed, for years the willingness to learn what you needed to know without being told was simply characterized as outstanding performance. This is now true for everybody in every field. If you need remedial training you will not likely be allowed to acquire it on the job except in times of a severe shortage of workers. But, if you insist on staying ahead of the learning curve, and if your work is sufficiently complex, you'll not only be allowed to train on the job, you'll likely get all of the support you need--provided, of course, you use an effective approach.

Training yourself involves a strategy, no secret here. It goes without saying that in order to maintain a high level of performance in a job requiring lots of learning and innovating, you will have to do a lot of both. But thinking your way through this proposition with a clear, objective game plan can dramatically change your efficiency and effectiveness. Once you ponder the notion of training yourself in a methodical, purposeful manner, it will so alter your perception that you'll never have to do it in such detail again. Here's an approach in seven steps:

1. Internalize the notion that an education (and especially training) is not something you get but is something you take. Freeing yourself of the baggage of unpleasant experiences with formal education is a lot harder than it sounds, but the rewards are profoundly dynamic. 

2. Set out to understand the nature of knowledge. Don’t settle for facts in the theoretical realm of any disciple without developing a deep understanding of the origins of and suppositions behind that knowledge. Develop a mastery over mystery plan. Decide what you must master completely to meet your career goals: what you must know, what you would like to know, and where to find out anything you want to know for any reason.

3. Leverage your own strengths and those of your organization by understanding how your strengths mesh with those of your organization. Present your talents in ways that will enhance the strengths of your organization.

4. Demonstrate your interest. More than fifty years ago Dale Carnegie declared that one of the greatest secrets to success was to become genuinely interested in other people. Well, here's one for the next fifty years: BECOME GENUINELY INTERESTED IN WHAT YOU'RE DOING. Understand the validity and profundity of Saul Wurman's assertion in Information Anxiety, that a strong interest defies all of the rules of memorization. Learning is like Velcro, he says, when you’re motivated.

5. Create your own bank of information resources, your own self-university, and your own help desk. Collect names, telephone numbers, mail and e-mail addresses, and web sites of people and organizations who can help you find out what you need to know when you need to know it with as few steps as possible.  Peers, co-workers, experts, newsgroups, associations, trade publications, newsletters, magazines, colleges and universities, vendors, books, CD's, web pages, software, search engines, cyber assistants, training departments, and libraries can all be valuable resources, and that’s just for starters. The wherewithal to do this with your computer browser and desktop management software has barely begun; the possibilities for improving individual productivity are still in their infancy. Think of this process as linking yourself to the future.

6. Expect the unexpected. When you are sufficiently linked in a connected world, then, in effect, you are positioned in a catbird seat with the ability to learn as a matter of routine without even formally acknowledging that your actions amount to learning. Ask yourself continuously what you will need to know to make the future happen the way you want it to. Failure to give education and training front-page attention and top priority inevitably results in endless anxiety and frustration for thousands of people, who wind up feeling their careers are out of control. In fact, the new interpretation for the “haves and have-nots” catch phrase may well turn out to be "those who have control and those who don't."  For the near- and long-term future, having control will require staying ahead of the learning curve.

7. Set and then meet your objectives. Develop a strategy for enlisting management's assistance in accessing the resources you need to learn as you earn. Form your own training cooperative with your peers and co-workers. A good rule of thumb for developing a mastery over mystery strategy is the old 80-20 rule. For sales people this traditionally has meant that 80 percent of your sales will come from 20 percent of your clients and that you should give of your time accordingly. For a mastery strategy it means you must master whatever form of activity requires 80 percent of your time.

Many different types of computer software are being developed which slash the amount of training time required to do professional-level work, and these applications are going to become tough competitors. When professional software becomes ubiquitous (which is inevitable), it will have a downward pressure on white-collar work. As a result, paying a fortune for a college education will become an increasingly risky proposition, though not as risky, perhaps, as not knowing what you need to know to do your job effectively without it.

It may be a while before this becomes a reality affecting the majority of those whom we consider professionals, but it will occur. Expert systems amount to inexpensive authority on demand. In the near future, the diagnostic ability of software will do the same thing to the general practice doctor that IBM's Big Blue computer can now do to chess masters. And when that happens, we're going to have workplace issues that are as interesting as they are hard to solve.  Exciting as technology may be, it generates fear at the same time.  We are going to have to embrace some big ideas to create an equitable future.