Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive

Keep learning, or risk becoming irrelevant.

It's a truism in today's economy: the only constant is change. Technological automation is making jobs less routine and more cognitively challenging. Globalization means you're competing with workers around the world. Simultaneously, the internet and other communication technologies have radically increased the potential impact of individual knowledge.The relentless dynamism of these forces shaping our lives has created a new imperative: we must strive to become dynamic learners. In every industry and sector, dynamic learners outperform their peers and realize higher impact and fulfillment by learning continuously and by leveraging that learning to build yet more knowledge.

In Never Stop Learning, behavioral scientist and operations expert Bradley R. Staats describes the principles and practices that comprise dynamic learning and outlines a framework to help you become more effective as a lifelong learner. The steps include:

• Valuing failure
• Focusing on process, not outcome, and on questions, not answers
• Making time for reflection
• Learning to be true to yourself by playing to your strengths
• Pairing specialization with variety
• Treating others as learning partners

Replete with the most recent research about how we learn as well as engaging stories that show how real learning happens, Never Stop Learning will become the operating manual for leaders, managers, and anyone who wants to keep thriving in the new world of work.

Bradley R. Staats is an associate professor of operations at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. His work has been featured in many publications, including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR.

Author Website: public.kenan-flagler.unc.edu/faculty/staatsb/