The Willingness to Learn is a Choice

Hey. All right, it is Wednesday. So, here we are. Workshop Wednesday. We love them. So, I got a quote for you. His name is Brian Herbert. He said that the capacity to learn, the capacity to learn is a gift. The ability to learn is a skill, and the willingness to learn, well, that’s a decision.

It’s a choice, a choice that we make. That is the willingness. I think that we all realize and recognize that we do have the ability to learn. The capacity to learn is a gift that’s given to us by our maker. And so we learn. We start learning from the moment that we come out of the womb.

We are picking up colors and shapes and different things, and we’re learning to grasp with our hands. I think back to my little boys, and it’s hard to believe that David’s eight and Jonathan’s 12, and you kind of miss some of those days. And I start seeing little babies and stuff around and everything.

There are those moments that I miss. Not that I miss changing diapers and waking up and holding them at one o’clock in the morning and all those kinds of things, but I do miss some of the learning stuff of little babies and watching them learn to walk and learn to crawl and learn to turn over and how they take one step after another. And the learning process is a gift. The capacity to learn is a gift.

Then there’s the ability to learn. Well, that’s a skill, and we all have different skills in our ability as we continue to learn and we grow in learning. But then we have the willingness to learn. Well, that is always a choice. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve run into quite a few people, both in work life and in many different experiences in life that seem to refuse to learn.

Let that not be us, let us not learn from our mistakes, let us grow sharper, stronger, better. Let us recognize that we make mistakes. There’s nothing worse than making a mistake and blaming somebody else for it, not taking ownership for your own involvement in it.

In every situation that we have, we tend to run up against something that is maybe bigger than us, that’s hard, that’s difficult. Maybe someone else has done us wrong. But we typically, if we look at it, we have our own involvement in it. We have done something to allow it to happen to us and how it happens to us and how we choose to handle what’s happened to us, or we ourselves have perpetrated the problem and it is our mistake.

It never falls short on me to recognize that when I’m talking to a team member that is constantly looking at others and blaming somebody else for their faults, saying, “Well,” or saying, “I’m better than somebody else.” “Well, I’m better than Tom. I’m better than Susie. They make more mistakes than I do.”

And I always come back to, and it’s something that I was sitting in a disciplinary interview a couple of years ago, and this is where that quote comes in, in the world of Timex, be a Rolex. You’re sitting here. We want to be excellent, be valuable, nothing less will do. That’s what it comes down to: our choice to learn from our mistakes and grow from who we are and what we do.

We might have the God given gift, and we might have the skill to learn, but if we don’t make the choice to learn, and especially in the tough moments of life, then you are doomed to repeat the same mistake again and again and again.

I’ve seen it in people when it comes to marriage. I’ve seen it in people when it comes to choosing employment. Everybody thinks the grass is going to be greener on the other side of the fence until you step on it. And it is you stepping on it that starts killing the grass. That’s why it starts to die. It’s because you’re involved in it.

You become a part of every situation that you’re in. And if you don’t recognize your own involvement, your own mistakes in the process, and fix those and work on you, you do you.

Quit worrying about what somebody else contributes. Learn how to advance yourself and learn from your own errors and judgment. Sometimes, maybe you won’t get into and get involved in the next situation because you learned to just keep your mouth shut. Stay away.

I’ve learned. You guys all know I love to talk, but I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut and step away from something. It doesn’t mean that my mind doesn’t race 50,000 words a minute, but I just don’t open my mouth. I keep quiet, and I walk away because I’m not going to move the needle on that situation.

And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about politics or religion or choices or work or different things. Every situation that you get involved in, you have a component in that relationship, in that work environment, in that environment in itself that you yourself are contributing to the positives or the negatives.

And when things go wrong, if you don’t review and interview yourself and look backward and do a debrief on what your involvement was and where you are in that, I’m not saying other people aren’t making mistakes. I’m not saying that they’re not sometimes at fault. I’m not even trying to put a percentage on it. It doesn’t matter.

You can’t quantify that. It doesn’t really matter. And spending all of your time walking around going, “Oh, but if this wouldn’t have happened to me, if these people wouldn’t have done this to me, if this wouldn’t have taken place, I’d be in a better place if it wasn’t for so and so or this or that job or Chad.” I’m probably part of your problem.

I get that, and I appreciate that. But you’re not going to be able to move the needle for yourself while you’re sitting and pointing fingers at other people. You need to interview yourself. You need to evaluate yourself’s involvement in every situation that you’re in because that is a choice. And you can learn, but you have to have the willingness to do it.

And that’s a big piece of how we grow and become better people and better involved in this world and community that we serve.

All right, you guys have a wonderful week. I know this kind of deep subject for the end of October, but it’s something that popped into my head, and I just wanted to share it with you.

You do you, work on you, and you’ll be surprised that the world around you gets better. Think about your influences, too. That’s a whole other subject. Maybe we’ll do that next Wednesday. What influences you? Who are you hanging around?

All right. Talk to you later. I see him.