Penelope Trunk, Co-Founder of Brazen Careerist, recently released an article that stated there were 5 Key Attributes Adults needed to UNLEARN in order to be successful in business and/or life. For the first 18-21 years of our lives, we put so much emphasis on learning, school, and preparing ourselves for “life”. That said, Ms. Trunk believes there are some key attributes that we learn during those “formative” years in school that really need to be removed from our everyday lives in order to be “happy and successful.”
Here are her Five (5) Principles we must “UNLEARN” in order to have Success:
1. Accommodating forced learning
In order to create our own value, we must create our own learning path. You have to unlearn the habit of waiting to be told what comes next in your education if you want to take control of your adult life.
2. Studying for the grade you can get on the test
Adult life doesn’t give letter grades. Many times the reward of adult life is being able to find a path that’s good for you and put yourself on it. There’s no letter grade for that because the only person who can judge whether it’s a good path or not is you.
So school teaches you that you should study what’s on the test. Life is the opposite. What truly “matters” many times will never be on the test.
3. Saving self-discovery for vacation
In life or at work, education and self‑knowledge are the twin tickets to adult happiness. If you’re not synchronized so that you have them moving together, you will always feel like you’re missing something. Don’t just save self-discovery for down time or R&R. Make it a habit of your everyday life.
4. Saying something even when there’s nothing to say
Paul Graham, one of the premier investors of college‑age startup founders, talks about how forced yammering on topics about which you have nothing to say end up affecting you negatively.
Graham points out that the idea that it doesn’t matter whether something is relevant or pertinent or necessary is lost on kids who have been forced to talk about nothing for eighteen years.
5. Using video games as a reward for finishing learning
It’s fashionable right now for parents to use video games as a reward for having finished schoolwork or, for the really nice parents, as a reward for just having made it through the school day. The thing is that video games actually teach important skills for work. And kids who play video games do better as adults.
I’m really happy to tell you that human resource managers understand this so well that it’s been shown that people who play World of Warcraft at work during work hours on the work computer are higher performing employees. There are lots of reasons for this. World of Warcraft is extremely competitive. It requires long‑term commitment and strategy, and it favors people who understand how to shift between different sorts of tasks that require different kinds of thinking.
If society is willing to “unlearn” some key attributes from pre-adult years, then as a whole, we have an opportunity to become happier and more productive, and more fulfilled!
That’s the bottomline…
“Change…Part Nature…Part Opportunity”