Never Stop Learning
16 Mar 2022 | Emma Benham
We never stop learning, even subconsciously each day, every experience provides us with new information to process and add to our personal data bank. So, is taking time to continually develop ourselves the key to evolving our capability, our creativity, and our consciousness?
Evolution and the continuous cycle of change is inevitable for organisations and individuals. However, this doesn’t just apply to the ‘product’, we must also seek to learn from how we work, and apply these learnings to our approach, processes, and people management. Mistakes are a natural part of this evolution, with some of the most successful business people of all time having failed in early ventures, even Walt Disney nearly went bankrupt making his first movies. Failure isn’t always failure; it is the realisation that when one approach isn’t having the desired outcome that then becomes the catalyst for change and the shift to the, ultimately, successful path.
In the most recent gravity9 Digital Matters podcast, hosts Andy Ross and Andy Newman spoke with digital entrepreneur Joshua Wohle, who is an advocate of continued learning. Joshua is a serial entrepreneur, technology executive and investor. With five successful businesses under his belt Joshua is now co-Founder and CO of Mindstone, a platform focused on helping people learn faster, remember more, and get things done.
While the podcast explores much about Joshua’s entrepreneurial background and business acumen, his approach to learning is one that struck a chord with us at gravity9.
Where to Start Learning?
When Noel Ady and Andy Ross came together to form gravity9 they had a vision of how they wanted the business to operate. After many years working together for enterprise scale consultancies, managing companies and leading large teams under the jurisdiction of a large corporate machine they knew that they, and the market, craved something different. While the desire to bring together small teams of senior individuals to solve problems through design thinking, bleeding edge tech and modern working methods remained, they knew that getting this right would be an iterative process.
“We have made mistakes, I have made mistakes when it comes to how we manage the team, communicate with clients and approach projects but I’m grateful for these mistakes as they have enabled us to learn and to grow into a stronger team and a more capable business as a result” says Founding Partner Noel Ady. “We have always been extremely selective over who we bring into the team, seeking to employ only highly skilled, experienced individuals, however we understand that these individual are not at the end of their learning journey and we must support their continued learning journey as well as our own.”
The Future, Now.
Author Willian Gibson once said, “The future’s already here it’s just unevenly distributed”. Meaning that things that will become normal for some in the future already exist for others today. In the podcast Joshua refers to this quote in relation to how our education is used to determine our suitability for a role.
For some in roles such as engineering, the future is already here; you can hold a CTO job without having a degree but through demonstrating very clear evidence of your skills and capabilities, however, this isn’t the case in many other industries.
“It is not that in other industries the skills don’t matter but the proof is harder to provide” explains Joshua. Joshua describes how anything you want to learn today is available online. So, is the future of learning now choosing how you want to learn, in a way that enables you to match your learning to you as an individual enabling you to learn faster and remember more?
At gravity9 we agree that everyone’s learning path is different and opening up new methods and paths to learning is the best way to allow individuals to achieve their potential. Whether you apply it to an individual or a business we all learn in unique ways and we have all learned what suits us best through our experiences.
Business Application
As a young small business (gravity9 was established in 2019) we are fortunate to be able to pivot and adapt with relative ease. However, recognising the areas requiring change and the direction of change is a more complex problem. Luckily for gravity9, we like solving problems, in fact it’s what we excel at. It’s rare a business gets everything right first time around and we, are no different, our approach to our projects and our team is continuously being evaluated and flexing to meet the changing demands of our market and our clients.
Joshua has experienced the same throughout his career. As for many individuals in start-ups, Joshua’s role would evolve every 6 to 9 months and so he would need to adapt. From keeping the servers alive to becoming building the team. As a founder Joshua’s, and many others, remit was first and foremost product, but you must think about people, process, finance, every aspect of the company.
Planned Learning
A takeaway many of us at gravity9 took from the podcast with Joshua was his approach to optimising learning. How can we learn to do what we are doing better. How about creating a daily learning log? Every day Joshua takes fifteen minutes to go over every meeting, every discussion to think how would he have done things differently knowing how events eventually unfolded. He then rates his day on four KPI’s which are individual to Joshua based on what he values and how he wants to evolve.
Every day is an opportunity to learn, to evolve, be it yourself, your processes, or your business. Never stop learning!
Listen to the Digital Matters podcast with Joshua Whole via your preferred podcast provider or download via our website.