Learn Something New Every Day - How to Maximize Your Personal Potential

Any self-respecting goal setter knows that achieving a goal will inevitably involve learning new skills. No matter what you set out to do, you will have to gain new capabilities and new understanding about yourself along the way.

Expanding your personal skill set is a big part of the pleasure and the challenge of being an effective goal setter, which is why it makes perfect sense to include a learning target in your everyday planning.

Here is why self education should be part of your daily ritual and how to ensure that it is.

  • Keep your mind fresh. As a child, your earliest years were the period when your mind expanded at its fastest rate as you continuously absorbed new and fascinating information about the world. This process slows as we grow older, but if it stops altogether we become dull and staid. Our brains are naturally curious and to stay fresh and alert they need constant new stimulus. Research shows that continuous learning helps to stave off problems like Alzheimers in our later years.

  • Plan it into your day. As a goal setter you will already be skilled at writing down your daily tasks and disciplined at getting through them efficiently. My advice is to add an extra element to your day plan and challenge yourself to acquire new knowledge, as well as complete the tasks you set yourself.

  • Learn one new thing a day. So as not to get overloaded, I suggest you keep the learning curve down to a manageable level, so one a day is perfectly acceptable. The key thing is that the skill you learn should be in line with your goal. For example, if you are trying to build your first website, then learning a new knitting stitch might be fun, but is not going to bring you closer to your aims. However, learning one new thing about SEO each day, or figuring out one new feature of WordPress, makes much more sense.

At the end of each day, look back and be proud of what you have learned. Keep a journal of new skills and at the end of the year you will be staggered by the new capabilities you have mastered.

 
  • About

    headshot: David Beroff in St. ThomasDavid Beroff started writing software at the age of 11, and was teaching Computer Science at Rutgers University by the time he was 18. After designing software for two decades, he started his own Internet marketing firm in '95; one of his company's earliest successes was Freedback.com, a free feedback-form service that was later sold to Wondermill.

    Beroff had bought and sold four million voluntary, opt-in email leads generated with properties like LeadFactory and SuperTAF before the business failed in '07. He is the author of the book, Turn Funny Email into CASH!, and is currently developing a new social media site, AboutTh.is.

    He has two grown children, and now lives outside of Scranton with his girlfriend and five cats.

  • Contact

    If you have any questions or concerns about our website and/or our advertising, please feel free to email me directly: David (at) Beroff (dot) com.