EP. 21 - 12 Ideas To Construct A Life Worth Living - #5 LEARN FOR LIFE, NOT FOR A JOB

Learning for a job or merely to advance your career is too often one dimensional and rigid, the other - learning for life - is interconnected, holistic and open, and then it flows into all areas of our lives. And, afterall, a life well lived, a good life, has to be connected. Our world is full of people with great careers and financial success, who are miserable in almost all other areas. They linger in the realm of quiet desperation, like Thoreau would say, appearing to be doing wonderfully well to those equally blindsighted by the traps of our economical world. A lack of positive relationships, positive emotion, interests, intellectual wealth, joy, and thus freedom act to imprison them in a type of slave like existence with no chains in sight. 

Sutter instead asks us to learn for life, for life itself, showing us how to live with curiosity and awareness. He pleads that we must make a change to our way of learning in order to prevent the misery so rife in our older (and other) populations. He calls for a shift in education so we can create new norms and conditions for the full growth of the human being. 

When we stop learning we replace curiosity, openness, playfulness and a lightness of being with narrow views that are ignorant and fickle. We just see problems, and barriers, and roadblocks and a tone of negativity takes over our entire lives. The lifelong learner, on the other hand, is less reactive and sees chances to enjoy themselves, and thus their lives, before they die. 

And of course this isn’t just a cautionary tale for when we get old - it is something we need to do now - a habit we form now, and a value that we cherish now. Because that’s the trick, maybe one of the greatest, that we can start doing the things we want when we get older and have ticked off all those other things that we have to do. No, you can’t. If you don’t do them now it is difficult, almost impossible, to then shift deeply ingrained patterns and behaviours after 30 years of doing the opposite. You will have money and lots of time - maybe, maybe not - but you will be in a type of coma, lacking the creativity to think differently and paralysed in doing anything you really want, and need, to do. 

A punchy and important 20 minute talk to help you construct a life worth living.