The biggest misconception that people who have worked for a while retain is that you are somehow defined by your job. This is not entirely crazy, when you think about it.
If you have spent any substantial about of time in a career most of the skills that you have now come from the training that you received onsite. You were taught how to work and so you assume that the only work that you can do is that which you were taught.
Modern Education
What you need to remember though is that well before you stumbled into whatever career that you now find yourself in, you were taught a much more important lesson — how to learn.
Modern education is charged with two extremely difficult tasks.
The first is to give us a set of basic tools, knowledge enough to make our way through most normal situations. If you want to balance your checkbook, you need to know a little math. If you want to send a letter, writing skills could come in handy. If you want to talk to an audience or make a presentation, all those social skills that you pick up outside of the classroom suddenly seem a lot more useful.
In sum, this part of education involves shoveling as much knowledge into us as we can stand and hoping that some small fraction of it sticks.
The second and arguably more important task of education is to teach us that we can, in fact, learn. Tests, projects, majors, applications, deadlines all of these structures are designed to force us to push our limits. They are put in place to be a proving ground for the more important adaptations that life will require of us.
Anyone who has ever crammed for a test and actually managed to do well knows that our mind’s ability to adapt to hardship can be surprising. What a lot of people forget after the leave the nurturing bosom of academia is that this ability to learn and adapt does not disappear with your diploma. As a professional you should always be learning, always be growing.
The only way to stay relevant is by always being ahead of the curve.
You are not defined by your job. Your job is defined by you.
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