Over the past five years, beyond survival basics like the mortgage and so on there are two areas where my spending has been consistent: charitable donations and education. Even in the year I took mostly off to recharge and help raise our son, where my income barely made it into five figure territory, I kept investing in those two areas to the point where each would have been serious slices of a pie chart if I’d graphed out my budget.
I want to talk about training today. Years ago when I was working as a custom enterprise software developer, I did hardly any ongoing education. I figured that the work I did was so specialized and courses were designed to fill rooms, so I’d just be wasting my time with a bunch of stuff that I’d never apply while I could be learning while doing (and boy, was I good at making myself busy!)
These days, as the head of my company, the work I do is even more specialized while also being spread over a zillion areas. I often have a very hard time explaining what it is I do, so I don’t know where I’d go to find a course on how to do it, even if one existed. But somehow this started to make sense to me:
Everything is training.
This started when I was doing a lot more work in the vegan/vegetarian outreach and education space, and I found that no matter what I was reading, I’d get ideas that I could take back to the team. A lot of that comes from being passionate about a topic, especially one where there wasn’t, in my opinion, enough specialized literature on the topic (that’s been improving in recent years, thankfully – ping me if you want more info!)
So now that I’m doing custom programming as well as marketing implementation, while managing a staff that’s building products, and then doing marketing for that, I’ve taken a very broad view of training, and I soak it up, not as an information junkie but as a lifelong learner.
I buy courses, attend webinars and pick up DVDs of conferences in industries I don’t touch, and I translate the concepts over. Sometimes I go to the actual events and seminars, but the networking has been awkward in the past. I think that’s more about me though, so I may revisit that soon.
And how do I know it’s working? Basically I look for an insight an hour. If I can get one good idea an hour that I can put into practice, or better still, gain focus that I can use to take something out of practice so I can reallocate my resources more efficiently, I’m happy to pay the fee (and often it’s free, so it’s just my time, but that has a real opportunity cost when I’ve got a backlog of billable work, not to mention the cost of not building assets like products and marketing plans that pay off increasingly over time.)
Two “best parts” come out of that: firstly, I get to surprise my brain all the time by putting myself in environments where I shouldn’t be expecting value but then it appears, and I’m all the more eager to gobble it up. Secondly, I try to stack the training with other things I’m less likely to do on their own. Today’s blog post came, indirectly, from a gym session where I got an insight watching a video (I’ll reveal that tomorrow,) so when the alarm goes off at 5:35 (AM!) I’ll be more likely to respond and go get more ideas while I get fit. In the same way, going to events forces me to get away from the keyboard and network, which is an area I need practice in, but it’s so easy to skip in favour of more keyboard time. The lure of that insight an hour keeps pulling me back.
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