The following came across my YouTube feed today. It’s an interview with General James Mattis, USMC, Retired, talking about lifelong learning, the expectations of learning in the Marine Corps, and at the end, the need for humor in the military. The first part, on lifelong learning, is what I keyed in on. It’s only an 8 minute video so definitely one that you can watch on break or at lunch.
I’m nearing four decades as an IT professional, having started professional programming (before we changed to use the word development) even before I entered college. Today I still do a lot of reading, maybe more than I have at any point in my career. Part of it is how much is changing in technology, but part of it is knowing what I don’t know and wanting to make some of those things what I know.
Learning, in general, has had a significant positive impact on my career. It’s one of the reasons I’ve often described myself as a “jack of all trades,” because I don’t stay focused in one discipline. Often times, when troubleshooting or trying to understand something, that cross discipline knowledge has proven important. Others whom I’ve known with a similar bent have experienced the same.
Are you a lifelong learner? Keep in mind that it isn’t just about college degrees. That can be part of learning, but learning isn’t exclusively about college/university work. For instance, when I was writing in Visual Basic 4 back in the 1990s, no college I knew was teaching it. Fast forward to when I had to go hardcore into Perl to solve problems and I don’t remember many universities teaching Perl at the time. That’s not to say academic learning isn’t also helpful. I took a one semester course on Discrete Mathematics, typically a second year undergraduate course, and I’ve been surprised over the years how often concepts I learned in Discrete Mathematics come up in my IT work.