Of all the millions of words I’ve heard and read over the years, those words from my Dad, spoken on October 1st, 2011, influenced my life more than any others. What did I learn from what he said that day? I learned not to think about the right answers if I hadn’t figured out the right questions. Do I love what I’m doing? Am I learning something? Am I helping someone? Nothing else matters.
Question 1: have I learned something new?
200 years ago, life expectancy was approximately 40. It has increased by 2 years per decade since then. By 2060, life expectancy will be close to 100. What are the implications, for us and for our societies?
We need to move from a life divided into three phases - “get a
diploma, work, retire” - to one where we are unstoppable learning
machines. Do you really believe that your current set of skills and
knowledge will be sufficient to see you through to the end of your
professional life?
Most of us would like to be a learning machine. But how do you actually make it happen? Here are a couple of suggestions.
- Be curious
If you think of Leonardo da Vinci, what word comes to mind?
Painter? Scientist? Writer? Inventor? Architect? He was all of these: as
the embodiment of the term “Renaissance man”, he roamed between
disciplines, avoiding the kind of excessive specialization that stops us
being able to think and understand the amazing complexity around us.
When was the last time you did something for the first time?
Learning is therefore not something that happens uniquely at
university, at school, or at a professional course in your company. What
we do in our spare time can provide lessons to energize our working
lives. You coached an amateur sport team? You started to learn how to
manage a team. You tutored students? You learned how to motivate people.
You sold something, whether putting a piece of furniture on eBay or by
doing an odd job for cash? You grasped the psychology of buyers. You
took on an advisory role in local politics or volunteered in a campaign
you believe in? Then you understood the complexity and dynamics of a
group. You took visitors around a museum or showed them the sights of
your city? Well, you learned how to capture people’s attention. You
worked as a bartender? Kudos, you mastered a formidable skill: managing
difficult (in this case, drunken) clients. You were a babysitter? Well,
you fostered a sense of responsibility. In other words, many seemingly
trivial jobs can still form key elements in your work experience.
Personally I have learned more about poverty by volunteering in a
homeless center than in reading any report.
- Learn from people
Let's reflect on this simple point: every person you meet in your
life knows more about a given subject than you do. Therefore we can
learn from everyone, and mostly from the best teachers in the world:
children. Phillip Koter said "I got a wonderful lesson when my daughter Sadika was only four
years old. I was working and she came to give me a kiss. “Not now, I am
busy working,” I told her. She looked at me in disbelief and told me:
“Dad, never ever again refuse a kiss from someone who loves you!”
Children: the best teachers in the world
- Redefine what is failure
Let's play a short game: let's redefine the word FAIL. May I
suggest “First Attempts in Learning”? I have a serious problem in
accepting that the opposite of success is failure.
On the contrary, I believe that a key element of success is
failure, provided that we learn from it. Over the course of our lives,
we collect many successful failures. We all learn by making these
mistakes. Think about when we learned to walk, or helped our children to
walk when they fell on the floor. Did we think that they had failed, or
that they were learning? We are genetically built to pull ourselves
back up each and every time we falter. As Nelson Mandela once said: “ I
never lose, I either win or learn”
Question 2: are you helping others?
Let me introduce Sabine Choucair, from Lebanon. I read about her online, she has been in an conference full of important people with titles like CEO, president, or
chairman. Her title: clown. So, I went to listen to her story, as it
takes courage to be a clown. With a group of wonderful people she spent
weeks in Lesbos, a small island in Greece, welcoming refugees from
Syria. All she wanted to do was quite simply to give them few seconds of
joy and human connection. What has this got to do with success, you
might ask. This part is therefore for the more pragmatic of you.
A clown entertains migrant children at a makeshift camp on the Greek-Macedonian border
Who are the most successful people: the givers, the takers or the
matchers? The takers want something from you, the matchers wait for
reciprocity while the givers want to help you and give something to you,
such as their time, energy, contacts, knowledge, feedback or just
advice. This question goes to the heart of the way we engage with the
people around us. What do you think is the correct answer: the givers,
the takers, or the matchers? The correct answer to this question is “the
givers,” as long they understand the difference between pleasing others
and helping others. This was the conclusion of the psychologist Adam Grant's book, “Give and Take.”
Please consider this. Helping others gets you hired. Networking is
not about calling someone when you need them but investing time, energy
and respect in relationships. Who gets the most job offers? Candidates
who, in addition to being qualified, have built positive relationships
based on trust, integrity and reputation. It is not about writing an
elegant CV, it is about nurturing meaningful relationships.
Question 3: Do you love what you do?
I realized what my father's advice really meant when, many years later, I read a quote from Mark Twain:
“The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."
The questions my Dad asked therefore run deeper. It's not only
about finding things that you love, but about finding your purpose. Why
are you here, doing what you're doing, right now? What do you stand for?
Let me share with you a story of a motivator has he described the second most important day of his life. "After graduation, I worked in investment banking and then the World
Bank. During the first six months at the World Bank, I thought I had
made the worst mistake of my life. I had given up bonuses, stock options
and a nice company car. And to top it all, when I moved to Washington,
my girlfriend dumped me as I was boarding the plane.
After a miserable few months, I went on my first mission in 1996,
to a remote village in West Cameroon. The driver, George, took me to
visit an agricultural project; after many kilometers on dirt and dusty
roads, he stopped in front of a well and told me that, before it was
built, his mother had to walk 6 kilometers to go to the river to collect
water with a small bucket. Then the World Bank, along with the UN,
built the well, which was only few hundred meters from the village where
he lived, so his life changed. George wanted to thank me, even if I
personally had nothing to do with the well, and took me to his village. I
met his mother; we embraced for a long moment, she was a woman with an
astonishing dignity. I realized later that in this forgotten village, I
had experienced the second most important day of my life".
It took me back to the questions my father had asked, many years ago.
Do you love what you do, are you helping others, are you learning? My
Dad has given me the gift of 3 powerful questions that have been in my
heart since then. This has been my compass of success.
Even if you forget these three questions, hang on to one simple point: never ever refuse a kiss from somebody who loves you.
Source: WEForum, OurworldinData, WHO,
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