How Continuous Learning can Boost Performance

You know that thing that all teachers hope to ultimately instill in their students? That’s continuous learning. Unfortunately between work, grocery shopping, chores, binge-watching shows, and scrolling endlessly social media, it can be hard to find time for to actively learn something new.

What you do outside your 9-5 can have a big impact on how you feel during the 9-5. Learning something that is not directly related to your job can still have a big positive affect on how engaged and effective you are.

So here are five challenges you can give to yourself to put the continuous into learning:

1. Pick a book, any book  

Fiction or non-fiction, a manual or a biography, a classic or a spy novel. Anything that grabs your interest and keeps you engaged. You don’t have to read something directly connected with your job to gain value from reading.

Even if you work in finance, and you read novels about fantasy worlds, you can still make connections and find correlations between the two. It’s the ability to make these leaps and connections between two disparate things that is at the heart of creativity. The more connections you can make, the more opportunities you will be able to see.

2. Get outside your comfort zone  

You’ve probably seen a super filtered Instagram quote telling you to “get outside your comfort zone.” You might like the sentiment, or roll your eyes at the cliché, but there’s a lot to be learned from truly making yourself uncomfortable. It could be feeling awkward and alone at an industry networking event, or it could be much more outside the box like striking up a conversation with a stranger (if that’s not something you normally do) or going to a speaking or community event. You’ll be more motivated if you take a friend, but don’t be afraid to go alone—get comfortable with being uncomfortable and you’ll be amazed at what you learn about yourself and the beautiful variety there is to experience in the world.

3. Get Moving  

Keeping active, whether is a sport, running, playing with your kids—it helps you learn about how your body and mind are connected. How you get energy and motivation comes a lot from how you feel physically. When you get moving you learn a lot about your body and can learn new skills that can calm you down (like breathing in a yoga class) or increase your confidence (like learning how to shoot a three-pointer in basketball.

4. Take a class  

Maybe you crave that structure a classroom can provide, and are missing it from your undergraduate days. There are free classes you can find on Meetup.com, there are adult classes at your local library, and you can always pay for a course at a nearby university or community college. Whether you want to learn how to paint, or speak Spanish, there are many options that aren’t necessarily cost prohibitive. If self-study always ends with playing Clash of Clans on your cell phone, the structure and accountability of a class might just be the answer.

5. Make Something  

You can learn by doing. Between YouTube tutorials and Pinterest, there’s nothing to keep you from getting crafty. Always wanted to build more than an IKEA bookshelf? Or at least an IKEA bookshelf? Then take the challenge to make something. Want to make something less tangible? Write a story, build an app or a website.  Experience is the best teacher, so if you want to learn: do.

While the interests you choose to pursue outside of your industry, skill set or job title may seem completely unrelated, in this increasingly connected world, the more you widen your horizons by learning and exposing yourself to new things, the better vision you will have. Vision to see opportunities that were always right in front of you, but took a change in paradigm to truly see.

Maybe all this continuous learning will make you the ideas person during meetings. Maybe it will inspire you to start a business, write the next great novel, or just feel more fulfilled in general. It can give you a greater sense of appreciation for the work that you do during your 9-5 and keep building up a complimentary skill-set to make you an indispensable asset and a really interesting person to talk to.