Are You A Lifelong Learner?

What new stuff have you learned recently? Do you like to learn or do you dread it?

Ever since I left school, where the only useful thing I learnt was how to type and forge my mother’s signature so I could bunk off games, I have had a lifelong love of learning. A bit contrary I’ll grant you but if they had taught anything I wanted to learn, I’d have tried a lot harder, I’m sure.

Visual type, see? Can’t take any info in listening to an old geezer waffling on, unless they were also doing half-decent drawings on the blackboard. Oh yes, I am that old.

So when I found myself temporarily without direction recently, in between clients, my own products finalised and marketing and sales funnels fully functional, I turned to various projects to keep my love of learning satisfied.

Creative writing lessons led to a half-finished sci-fi book. Scriptwriting tuition led to a finished pilot and outline for eight episodes, with several other ideas, but the ‘plandemic’ got in the way of a two-week residential course with a C4 scriptwriter. Postponed for two years, six months by another painful six months. A brief flurry of interest in the NFT world found me learning how that all worked, along with a renewed interest in art generally, adding digital art now.

But then I was thinking about the places in the world I want to visit next and they include Mexico and El Salvador, both Spanish-speaking countries. Then I saw one of my favourite ‘Vanlife / Canadian Cabin’ YouTubers, Hannah Lee Duggan, speak fluent Spanish on one of her trips to the Dominican Republic.

Impressed, I downloaded Duolingo and now, 28 days in, I’m starting to understand some Spanish Tweets from Bitcoiners and El Salvadoreans I follow. I think I’m hooked.

More importantly, I feel so much better.

Two years of futile lockdowns, gaslighting politicians and media censorship had knocked a large amount of the emotional stuffing out of me but the small daily achievement of learning a little bit more of a new language has revitalised me completely.

Give it a go, it’’s ‘muy bien’ on so many different levels!