4 of 5 Expanding Hobbies/Learning — “Every person that I meet, I can learn from.”
I laugh at people sometimes.
They spend 9–5 complaining about their 9–5 then they spend the next 5 hours at home cooking, watching tv, and relaxing.
It’s tough to expect any change to occur if that’s all you do outside of the office that you dread.
But, it’s reality for so many people. Maybe it’s that they don’t know what they can do to make the changes they wished they didn’t have to make.
Maybe it’s a number of other things that all work together. The thing is, though, there are always options.
Lifelong Learning
How many books do you read in an average year?
How many of those books impact your life in a positive way?
How many times do you seek out learning of that nature?
Maybe not many, why not?
There is always something new to learn and always another way that you can grow and improve.
Many times we might find ourselves drawn into something just because it’s fun. What if we could make learning fun again?
I don’t always love listening to audiobooks in the car — sometimes music or some silence is much more appreciated. Yet, I often look forward to the audiobooks. I look forward to learning and making some productive use of time that I need to spend regardless.
It’s tough to see people complain about certain things or certain time wasters yet continue to do the same things over and over. Why complain about something if you don’t actually want to change anything? Ultimately, there is no value in self-pity.
Leveraging Your Hobbies
Oftentimes, it seems that people are able to use hobbies for the purpose of learning.
The neighborhood dad who starts coaching his son’s baseball team gets to practice leadership, encouragement, and success.
The new accountant who steps up to the plate for a few weeks while the CFO is on maternity leave gets to practice delegation and task organization.
You can learn from any situation and anyone, it’s all dependent on what you’re striving to learn.
Sometimes we learn the wrong things.
We might just have poor examples — maybe we learn bad management styles or poor driving technique.
It’s a part of life and really, one of the most valuable skills that can be developed is that of discernment.
Discernment meaning identifying and understanding (and then acting on) which people or activities are going to be leading towards the direction we want to go. There’s not much use practicing basketball if all you want to do is become good at golf.
It’s the same with a lot of different things.
What most people don’t want to admit is that we already know what we need to do, we already know what will take us where we want to go, we just need to do it.
It’s easy to make more time for hobbies and learning, we just need two things — fun and utility.
If there is purpose behind the fun that we are partaking in, we are going to be much more likely to do it.
“We are all unique and can learn from everyone; it’s up to us to determine what is worth learning and what isn’t.” — Harrison Wendland
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