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The 6 stages of ignorance
Lifelong learning for leaders
One of the hardest part of leadership is that you’ve never arrived — you’re never the complete package. Worse still, the skills required to be effective can feel counter-intuitive. Which is assuming that you know where your gaps are. I can say with some confidence that becoming a semi competent at management is something that takes place over the timescale of years. I’m not sure it’s possible to progress to true competence because the breadth of subjects is so great. All you have hope for is it to continue identifying and developing your leadership blind spots as time progresses. Luckily, there’s incredible writing on the subject out there waiting for you.
What this means is that learning is a skill you need to develop. It’s worth investing in this if you are to stand a chance at making a dent in the knowledge mountain and keep up with what’s happening in your job. A great starting place here is the free course Learning How to Learn. If you want to go a step further you can even learn to read more quickly.
But reading is not enough. Reading doesn’t get you anywhere if you don’t learn anything from it. To quote Schopenhauer from his essay “On Reading and Books”.
For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and…
