Quotes About Learning

I don't know how to drive a car.

the books we don't read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late.

Hay que cruzar una línea que ya no puede descruzarse para comprender y arrepentirse, para querer echarse atrás y aceptar que se ha metido la pata; hay que cometer un error hasta el fondo para comprobar que era un error, y entonces se intenta salir de él cuando ya es tarde para deshacerlo sin daños, o sin estropicios.

uno nunca sale ligero ni indemne de las averiguaciones. Me

No one can experience everything first hand; in fact, no one can experience more than a few dozen things even through books and courses and other first-hand descriptions. We have to rely on other people's experiences in order to continue broadening our world - even if, once we have heard those other experiences, we want to go out and have our own, to test their descriptions in practice.

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders"5 of the previous generation. The danger of such a position is that we can forget to put our own feet on the ground.

Learning about ourselves can be painful—sometimes brutally so—and the feedback is often delivered with a forehead-slapping lack of awareness for what makes people tick. It can feel less like a "gift of learning" and more like a colonoscopy.

When your real goal is finding the dog, fixing the ceiling, and preventing such incidents in the future, focusing on blame is a waste of time. It neither helps you understand the problem looking back, nor helps you fix it going forward.

Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback. And

Want to fast-track your growth? Go directly to the people you have the hardest time with. Ask them what you're doing that's exacerbating the situation. They will surely tell you.

So here we are. Torn. Is it possible that feedback is like a gift and like a colonoscopy? Should we hang in there and take it, or turn and run? Is the learning really worth the pain? We are conflicted.

Step 2: Check Your Purposes and Decide Whether to Raise the Issue • Purposes: What do you hope to accomplish by having this conversation? Shift your stance to support learning, sharing, and problem-solving. • Deciding: Is this the best way to address the issue and achieve your purposes? Is the issue really embedded in your Identity Conversation? Can you affect the problem by changing your contributions? If you don't raise it, what can you do to help yourself let go?

Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback. And of course, as you move up, candid coaching becomes increasingly scarce, so you have to work harder to get it. But doing so sets the tone and creates an organizational culture of learning, problem solving, and adaptive high performance.

Managing truth triggers is not about pretending there's something to learn, or saying you think it's right if you think it's wrong. It's about recognizing that it's always more complicated than it appears and working hard to first understand. And even if you decide that 90 percent of the feedback is off target, that last golden 10 percent might be just the insight you need to grow.

When competent, sensible people do something stupid, the smartest move is to try to figure out, first, what kept them from seeing it coming and, second, how to prevent the problem from happening again. Talking about blame distracts us from exploring why things went wrong and how we might correct them going forward. Focusing instead on understanding the contribution system allows us to learn about the real causes of the problem, and to work on correcting them.

Blame Is About Judging, and Looks Backward

The heading says it all: inquire to learn. And only to learn. You can tell whether a question will help the conversation or hurt it by thinking about why you asked it. The only good answer is "To learn.

Say what's in it for the boss. Explain how having a conversation is in your boss's interest: "I want to make this initiative a great success. To do that I need a little more help in making sure I understand the logic well enough to execute effectively." Of course for this approach to work, you have to be open to learning.

we don't know what we don't know.

Moving Toward a Learning Conversation

This book will help you turn difficult conversations into learning conversations by helping you handle each of the Three Conversations more productively and improving your ability to handle all three at once.

Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it's about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow.

Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback.