The Learning Years....

The Learning Years…..

We consider the learning years to be the transition years between childhood and adulthood. These are the years between the time when you first started making decisions for yourself and the point in life where you become established on a steady career path. Some people have more of these years than others, in fact, it could be said that some people never get beyond the learning years, because they never get established on a steady career path. These are also the years when you begin trying to apply lessons learned during your formative years and are often the years when people run into problems. We call these the learning years because they are the years in which you discover that you don’t know everything, after all.

I am pretty sure you’ve known young people who dropped out of school with great career aspirations only to run head-on into the reality that life doesn’t always happen the way you expected. Even those with high school diplomas and college degrees often face unforeseen setbacks that change their direction in life and set them on different courses than they thought they would take. Whether we want to admit it or not, money and the need to earn a living alter the lives of nearly everyone in some way or another.

Unfortunately, our public education system concentrates so much on preparing students to get a “job” that it diminishes or kills the entrepreneurial spirit in many young people. Guidance counselors and other academic advisors show students the average difference in income between school dropouts, high school graduates, college graduates, and those holding advanced degrees as a way to encourage them to advance their education. Don’t get me wrong here, I certainly don’t mean to imply that education is not important. Education puts tools in your toolbox, and the more of them you have, the better…. most of the time.

High school students are taught Maths and Science, English, and foreign languages but very few graduates are equipped with the ability to balance a checkbook or prepare a family budget, nor do they understand how critical these things are to succeed in life. Most of us have had some form of education but many of us didn’t have a clue how to apply it.

The learning years begin when you get out on your own and start trying to apply what you learned in school and from your childhood experiences to situations in the workplace. During these years, many people become frustrated because what they learned as a theory doesn’t always work when applied to practical situations. It’s like a person who takes a sales job goes through the company’s training program and learns to make a great sales presentation, only to call on prospects that didn’t attend the same training program or do not understand it. Unless they come to the realization that it’s not how good the presentation is, but whether the sale is made, they only become more and more frustrated, until they leave that job and go looking for something else to “try”.

It is also important to understand the role common sense plays in developing your success or failure. Everybody is different, but we have had experiences that contain hidden life lessons, we need to find these lessons and learn from there. In time, you will begin discovering things you missed at the time, things that will help you to make better decisions in the future. You also begin to see that the decisions you make determine your success or failure in life.

You can’t control what already happens to you, but you can control the way you react to what happens to you. It takes commitment to change your life, the kind of strong commitment that will not waver, no matter what. Life gets better when you get better, that’s why it’s important to learn to take charge of your actions.

That's all for now, friends. See you all in my next article.