Quotes About Learning

Recognition is famously a passage from ignorance to knowledge.

One of the questions I hear most often regarding my plan to read the OED from cover to cover is "Why don't you just read it on the computer?" I usually respond as if the questions was "Why don't you just slump yourself on the couch and watch TV for the year?" which is not quite an appropriate reponse. It is not so much that I am anicomputer; I am resolutely and stubbornly pro-book.

Every mistake is a lesson

That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.

Children are illuminated text-books, breviaries of doctrine, living bodies of divinity, open always and inviting their elders to peruse the characters inscribed on the lovely leaves.

Cities with all their advantages have something hostile to liberal learning, the seductions are so subtle and accost the senses so openly on all sides.

Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.

Our bravest and best lessons are not learned through success, but through misadventure..

Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.

I wasn't a very good teacher.

If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.

We even recommended the creation of a recurring IC Analytic Olympics to send home the message that fostering a culture of continuous evaluation and learning should be championed.113

It's difficult for analysts to get better at predicting when they don't know if their past predictions were ever any good.30

Knowledge never guarantees perfect decisions, but it does reduce uncertainty, which makes better decisions more likely.

For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge! This means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and half-formed ideas.

Finding out that you are wrong is even more valuable than being right, because you are learning.

Imagine if Wells Fargo had adopted an agile approach to strategy: the company's top management would then have taken repeated instances of missed targets or false accounts as useful data to help it assess the efficacy of the original cross-selling strategy. This learning would then have triggered much-needed strategic adaptation.

The other possibility is that you're learning something about your colleagues or your organization that suggests that you're not in a job that is a good fit with your personal values and goals. If you're sharing sincere concerns, ideas, and ambitions for the organization, and others are indifferent, turned off, or disparaging, then you may want to look for an opportunity where you will have colleagues who appreciate your commitment to making a positive difference at work.

Creating psychological safety is a constant process of smaller and larger corrections that add up to forward progress. Like tacking upwind, you must zig right and then zag left and then right again, never able to head exactly where you want to go and never quite knowing when the wind will change.

no one wants to take the interpersonal risk of imposing ideas when the boss appears to think he or she knows everything. A learning mindset, which blends humility and curiosity, mitigates this risk. A learning mindset recognizes that there is always more to learn.

Frankly, adopting a humble mindset when faced with the complex, dynamic, uncertain world in which we all work today is simply realism.

Confidence in one's abilities and knowledge, when warranted, is far preferable to false modesty. But humility is not modesty, false or otherwise. Humility is the simple recognition that you don't have all the answers, and you certainly don't have a crystal ball. Research shows that when leaders express humility, teams engage in more learning behavior.

The good teams, I suddenly thought, don't make more mistakes; they report more.