THURSDAY THOUGHTS - Is Entertainment Getting in the Way of Your Education?

It's really been an eventful week, and it started out with having conversations about how many times people want to spend too much of their time being entertained. We all have access to social media including YouTube and livestreaming services and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and the list goes on and on and on. A lot of people spend a lot of their time entertaining themselves and many would even consider that entertainment time educational time. Now don't get me wrong, there are opportunities to learn things in a fun way, through different types of platforms, that's not the issue. The issue that was brought up this weekend was how some people will prefer entertainment to education.

If there's something that you really need to learn, in other words, if you can't learn it in a fun way, you don't want to learn it at all. That's definitely a mistake. It's nice to have good content presented in an engaging way, but in reality, a lot of important ideas aren't always nicely packaged and something that's fun to learn.

I have to give credit on this topic to Tim Kight, he's the CEO of a company called Focus 3. He has a podcast that I've listened to over, I don't know, maybe the past three or four years. He's just a very, very wise guy and works with lots of leaders across the world. One of the things he mentioned was that it may not be fun to learn it, but you need to do it, and be aware if that is your mentality about learning new things.

Sometimes a speaker or your teacher or your professor or whoever it is that is teaching you something, they may be engaging or they may not be. Or the platform you have to use in order to learn information may be fun or user-friendly, or may not be. It's not the delivery that should be your challenge to learning the information you need to move forward.

You have to think about what is your intent, what is your goal, and then what you can do to make sure you meet it. If you need to be entertained any time you need to learn anything, that's going to put a lot of limits on different things that you can learn which will actually help you move forward. I was mentioning this in a LinkedIn post and I said that so many people avoid things that could really help them and be beneficial to them making progress in their lives if they didn't focus on learning needing to be fun or entertaining. This is not just isolated to young people, I've seen it be with all ages and all backgrounds of people. So much so that when my kids were really young, I instilled in them the idea that everything you need to do won't be fun, but fun is going to be on the other side of completing it. I was very happy to see Tim Kight share this message this week and that is why I'm sharing it with you. My hope is that it will encourage you to look at some things that maybe would make you a better innovator, entrepreneur, founder, or whatever type of leadership position you're in. It will help you overcome some of those barriers to learning new things that will help you move forward.

I always mentioned this, and it is probably funny to a lot of people who meet me now, but it was really serious back when I was an undergrad when I was studying engineering. My undergrad degree is in electrical engineering. I tell students that I speak with now, and have for a while “Hey, when I was in my undergrad years, it was a lot of times miserable. It was really hard, and I enjoyed learning about robotics and circuits and those types of things, but I didn't enjoy coding.” So, a lot of that time where I had to push through, this was a lesson that I had for myself. Now I never was a person that needed to be entertained to learn things, but I was someone who really sometimes even dreaded waking up the next day in order to have to continue on the journey like “oh no, we have this test today” or “oh man, I guess I have to do it.” Literally some days it would get that tough where I'm like, “I don't know if I can do this”, but I use myself as an example because no one is perfect and many times you're going to have to push through because it's going to make you better on the other side.

Now I know you all have heard that before, people say it all the time, but I can literally give you a hundred different examples from my own life, so it's something that I use to help encourage other people to move on the other side of what's in front of you and say “hey, I can handle this, I can overcome this and I'm moving forward” because that's something that you have to decide on more than one occasion. It starts to become a very repetitive thing that occurs as you try to accomplish more and more things in your career, especially as a leader. So my hope is that this Thursday Thought will encourage you to move forward and make progress even when it's not fun and entertaining.