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Is it worth spending time, effort and money to learn something new when you have already graduated from a university and chosen a profession? Ekaterina Bespyatykh, an expert on time management for women, helps answer this question.
Our life is a process of acquiring skills in various fields. We learn to walk, dress, speak, read and write. As we grow older, we require more and more complex skills — professional, social and cultural.
We are not born with a set of skills, but we get them through effort. Self-development, personal growth is what determines the quality and standard of living.
The ability and desire to learn allows you to adapt to the realities of the rapidly changing modern world, keep your mind sharp and your thinking unstuck, and remain competitive in the labor market.
When do you need to put an end to your development?
As children, we learn with pleasure, but as adults, we gradually lose motivation and the desire to learn something new. Most people after graduation simply use the knowledge and skills that they have mastered before. Their brain vegetates without training for decades.
But when we talk about the ability to learn new things, age does not matter. You can start learning English at 50, enroll in a dance studio at 60, take yoga classes at 70, and so on. Why is acquiring new skills so important and in what areas can it be useful?
Regulation of own infoload
Incoming information in huge volumes must be able to process and filter, choosing the main thing and cutting off the excess. The habit of living “with a phone in hand”, dependence on a computer and the Internet lead to the fact that we practically do not leave ourselves time to unload the brain. Stress and tension grow, insomnia begins, attention is scattered. It is important to learn how to remove «noise» and use gadgets correctly.
Implementation in the professional field
If a few decades ago it was necessary to decide on a profession “once and for life”, now the situation has changed. There are more and more new specialties, including those related to the Internet.
It is important to be open to new information and realize that at any time you can choose another, more interesting and relevant type of activity. In particular, to master some new profession in 1-2 months and start earning with it, most often more than where you worked before.
financial success
Nowadays, the level of competition in almost any niche is very high. The reality is that after a year or two of downtime, a specialist loses its value, because the world continues to change and develop.
Therefore, the winners are those who do not stop there, but continue to improve their skills, regularly undergo additional training — trainings, master classes, marathons, both in the chosen specialty and in related ones. And then they successfully apply the acquired knowledge and skills, expanding the list of professional competencies. For employers, they are more interesting, and, accordingly, their wages are also growing.
Self-development
When we study, we broaden our horizons, our outlook changes. For this, the skill of working on oneself is useful, the desire to take at least a small step towards the goal in the direction of an advanced version of oneself every day.
This approach makes it easier to overcome difficulties and more successfully resolve various problems, because a person approaches them from the position of creativity, understanding the causes of their occurrence and the essence of the processes taking place around.
Prolong youth
Scientists have long proved that as soon as a person stops learning new things, he begins to degrade and grow old. This is due to the neuroplasticity of the brain. To stay in good shape, the brain needs to be constantly trained, given a load, that is, to engage in activities that require concentration and mental effort.
The more we read, learn something new, the longer we live in full force, pushing the risk of diseases associated with the aging process.
High status in society
A person who constantly absorbs new knowledge can easily join an unfamiliar company or team and maintain a conversation with others on an equal footing, regardless of the topic — sports, politics, culture, hobbies, economics, weather.
This skill can be useful in an interview, when meeting a girl, communicating with friends, discussing an agreement with partners. Anyone who is well versed in a variety of things is automatically perceived by people as an authoritative person. And this status always works «in plus» both in personal relationships and in professional ones.
Now it is very easy to learn new things. To do this, you don’t even always need a laptop — it’s enough to have a cell phone to access the Internet. A person can master different professions, study almost any area that interests him.
Access to information is truly enormous. There are marathons in relationships, nutrition, in various specialties, creativity, programming. Everything depends on ourselves. And we can choose whether to scroll through the Instagram feed (an extremist organization banned in Russia) for hours on end or watch something useful and interesting, and thereby improve our lives.