How I keep learning about my business
Matt Henderson (00:01):
Welcome to The Business Mind podcast. This is Matt. Today I’m going to talk about all of the different learning methods out there and what I’ve used over the last few years to help me excel.
Hey guys, welcome back to The Business Mind podcast. It’s Matt. I’m excited because I want to talk to you about honestly probably the biggest part of becoming an entrepreneur, your own business owner, honestly successful, and I’ve spoken about it a few times on the podcast which is about learning,all right? And the different types of learning. That’s what we’re going to discuss today. I know that doesn’t sound exciting or ultimately thrilling when you say learning. But something I’ve discovered as I started to mentor somebody, I noticed it in them as well, when I was in college and high school and whatever, my entire scholastic career, I noticed that in the learning process, I struggled, I was not somebody who did very well with just sitting in a classroom, in a desk, and that was just me.
…I know there’s a lot of people out there probably just like me, but my experience was it was very difficult for me to sit still and just pay attention to what somebody is talking about for whatever amount of time, 45 minutes, 90 minutes, or whatever they were back then, and it went that way straight through college. And even I took a few classes after college just for further education, and I just kept running into the same exact feeling that this isn’t for me. Learning in that environment wasn’t for me. So I feel like that system of education for people like myself, maybe it’s all entrepreneurs, but people like myself, it was difficult and it was not necessarily conducive to my style of learning.
So when I had certain classes I excelled in back then, now we’re talking 20 some odd years agowhen I was in … Twenty years ago when I was in college, I wasn’t really great at picking out why I was having a hard time learning in certain classes and other classes seemed to speak to me, but it was ultimately looking back, it was how the classes were taught, how the teachers, professors laid out their system for the marking period that made a difference for me. And ultimately, what the biggest thing was is when I went back and looked at all the things I didn’t do well in school and all the things I did, the biggest differentiator was anything I was interested in, go figure, I would do fairly well in, not too bad. But when it came to topics that I just didn’t care about.
Now for me, it was accounting classes in college. I was a business major and sitting in accounting classes at 8:00 AM, three days a week, and I kept saying to my advisor back then that in no way, was I ever, ever, ever going to be an accountant or go down the path of trying to be an accountant or anything like that. It was just not my thing, but they made me drone through the classes over and over and over again. And I just could never figure it out. And to this day, I still don’t know why that happened becauseI’m not an accountant. I’m pretty good with numbers, but I’m not a formula person who will just sit there and work out your taxes for you. That’s not me.
So I had to start to develop over the past couple of years methods of learning that worked forme, and that’s what I want you guys to look at now is what works for you. And some of you guys are going to say, “I don’t need to continue learning.” For those people, you should probably stop listening to the podcast, this might not be the podcast for you. I believe in education, never stopping. I didn’t always feel that way through my twenties after going through college, and I’m paying student loans through my thirties. I kept saying, “I don’t need to learn anymore because the amount of the checks that I’m writing states that I know enough.”
But you know what? It’s a fallacy. People just have to take out huge loans, pay for college. Whenyou leave college, were you any better off than when you started? Probably a little bit. Did you know exactly what you want to do for a living? If you’re like 90% of people who go to college, you have no idea, even when you graduate college, what you’re going to do. So I had to discover different methods of learning and online learning for me, I had some success with, and some not.
Now when it came to just online learning and taking a college class, I found they were justtrans forming their same in classroom learning process to an at home version of the exact same thing. Sit and drone through hours and hours and hours of stuff that you’re not interested in, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get whatever the passing grade was like a C or something, and then you’ll get credits for this class. Now I don’t care. You know when I started to excel, when I took non credit courses, things that did not in any way impact whether I would get credit for these courses, because the credit was what I made of it. Idon’t need credits to tell me that I’m doing the right thing. I need success to tell me I’m doing the right thing. I need understanding. That’s success. Learning a new skill, that’s success. Not getting three more,four more credits towards a college degree that at the end of the day wasn’t going to mean anything.
So what did I learn? My best aspects or my best methods for learning? I found audio books. I loved them as a kid, my mom and I, when I was a kid, we used to drive down to Florida once in a while and coming from New Jersey, it was quite a trip. And my mom is an avid reader, so when we would get inthe car, she would actually come and yes, back then they had tape decks, tape cassettes in cars and she would buy one or two audio books, one for the way down, one for the way back, and we would sit there and we would go through each tape one by one and we’d listen to like mysteries and stuff like that, and it was tons of fun. I loved audio books.
And I guess had I been paying attention when I was a kid, I would’ve realized that maybe that’s like a great method of learning for me is to listen. Just listen. I didn’t have to sit there and be taking notes all the time, but just to listen to things. And so audio books, as I became … As I started to search out better ways and methods of learning for my style, I found that audio books are probably one of my favorites to learn by. And I use a couple of methods. Some are paid, some are not. I do listen to … And I have Audible, which has been an amazing resource for books because … Man, I mean, it’s Amazon. They have so many it’s absurd, and I’ve been able to find almost anything I’ve been looking for.
On the free aspect of audio books, if you go to your public library and you will need to get alibrary card, so for those of you who don’t know what a library is, you should probably start there. But get a library card, and most libraries, at least, I mean, I’m speaking on the east coast over here, in the northeast, they have digital versions and you can go online and you can actually “rent” e-books, or eBooks, yes, but audio books as well, and you can listen to them for free. So here it’s called Hoopla,something like that, and all of the books on there and movies and audio books and everything, they’re all free. So to say I took advantage of that is an understatement. I’ve been pillaging through there and just devouring information. But audio books, massive thing for me.
And when it came to the learning aspect of audio, I just found it was so much easier to take in ona more consistent basis. I can only read so often because I’m not typically sitting still, and I also find that my attention is difficult to keep when I’m reading. So for me, it’s a lot easier to do in audio because whenI start to fade out of something, I can just easily hit pause and then I’ll come back to it later on when Ihave a few free minutes again, but I listen to it everywhere. I listen in the car. I’ve got my head phones ina majority of the day, and honestly, I listen while I’m doing everything. So audio books, number one or two, it’s a close tie and you know what it’s a close tie with? Can you guess it? Podcasts. Yeah, just like this one.
I started out listening to stuff just like this, and the amount that I learned has been incredible. The motivation that I’ve gotten from people online are part of why I felt that I needed to give back and do my own podcast because I was so fortunate to learn so much from so many people that if I could giveback just small fractions of what was working for me and if it helped somebody even just the slightest bit, then I felt like I’d be helping. And that makes me feel good about what I’m doing, and I want to give back to everybody. So I decided to start podcasting and giving back and giving people what I’ve been given.
So I say I started with the podcast and moved quickly into the books, and they probably run on about par for me, where I feel like I just … I love them both and it’s hard for me to decide which one I feel like listening to at any given time because I feel like they’re both so perfect for my learning style. So today all I’m going to talk about is some audio. I’m going to go into some other things that I’ve used for my learning over the last couple of years, but for today, let’s just stick with audio. Take a look at your different versions around you. There are free versions, like I said, go and check out your local library, and ask them if they have a service like the Hoopla service that I have for my library system here. And I’ll bet you, they have something for you and it’s free. And for those of you who have a couple dollars to spend,it’s not a lot of money, but it is a couple bucks a month, and I would totally suggest checking out Audibleas well.
All right, everybody, it’s Matt from The Business Mind podcast. I got to run. But if you guys havesome time and you could share this episode, if you liked it, with everybody out there that you know, that would be great. Just take a screenshot of this thing and post it up on your Instagram, your Facebook,your TikTok, wherever you’re at. If you’re listening on Spotify, if you could follow this, you’ll get the updates every time I release a new episode, so please follow me on Spotify. And if you’re on iTunes, please go and leave me a review. I would greatly, greatly appreciate it. All right, everyone, it’s Matt from The Business Mind podcast. Talk to you guys again soon.