Yearn to Learn!

When I graduated from college I believed that I learned everything that needed to be learned in the business field. I had a business management degree, an amazing job in a management role and a bright future ahead of me, so I felt that I won in the game of life. Beyond this, I felt that I was an absolute genius and that people could get smarter through osmosis if they only stood next to me. I was so motivated that I wanted to teach everyone everything that I knew and I believed that I was incredibly qualified to do so. This feeling was further reinforced by the fact that I began to receive offers to speak to college students on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to “life after graduation”. I was on top of the world and it was great, but then I had a shockingly humbling experience when I realized that I had not even tapped into .01% of knowledge that’s available in this world! Shucks!

When I stepped out of learning mode and transitioned into teaching mode, I severely limited my future potential by refusing to grow beyond being a naive “bright-eyed, bushy-tailed” college undergrad. After coming to this realization, I sought to immediately fix things by going back learning mode. This was a very tough challenge for the self-proclaimed genius. Eventually, I learned that instead of instructing people what they should do, I should share my learning experiences so that we can all learn together. I’ve started reading books from great authors like John Maxwell so that I could expand the capacity of knowledge contained in my abnormally large brain which is in my abnormally large head. I decided to learn at least one new thing each week so that I could always be intellectually stimulated by something new. All of these things were for the sole purpose of fixing the serious illness that plagued me for years– KnowItAll!

Instead of forcefully teaching others from the Gerey Textbook of rights and wrongs, I’ve learned that often times people would benefit from “collaborative learning,” where everyone learns from each other’s successes and failures. In doing so, people will make a lot less mistakes and accomplish far greater things in this world. I will be further reinforcing this initiative by using Geremology.com as a vehicle to communicate my learnings so we can all be geniuses. To the humble viewer of this website, feel free to always use the commenting function to share your own thoughts and viewpoints so we all can learn together (which was exhibited in this entry). Let’s all learn together so we can use failures and successes to refine us, not define us!