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Why Continous Learning Is The Best Investment You Ever Make

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Learning is essential for you. Even more, if working for yourself.

The easiest mistake that anyone can make is ignoring constant and continuous learning.

Remote work starts your independence and if processed and led properly, it will become your nature.

You may stay and work on one thing for months or even years but you’ll be restless after some time, anyway. If you accept your calling, you won’t be able to accept routine and monotonous work anymore.

How can you avoid that?

By learning and expanding your knowledge and skills.

The challenge is when to learn.

You want to be independent, work only sociable hours and enjoy the rest of your private life?

Choose priorities


First of all, choose your priorities.

Work on a project you are being paid for as a high priority. Even the highest. Learning has to be the second and a very close one to it though. What does it mean?

If you schedule your work time, include the learning time too. Learn in the prime time not when tired and unable to comprehend anything anymore.

Sure, the world is full of stories about people working nights and days and making it at the end. A few. The rest got burned out before achieving anything. Nobody writes about those, right?

What should you learn?

Anything that challenges you, interests you and can work for you.
If you need a few examples, look at it from the natural path perspective.

Are you a developer? You should become a salesman. Or a marketing guy. It would allow you to understand differences between developing and selling stuff. It is what I call a natural path.

Or, if you work in marketing. What do you know about human psychology? How do you apply the marketing rules to be more precise and not too generic?

Do you work as a VP? You don’t read this article most likely as you feel you know it all. I suggest you learn more core stuff about the product. Is it a code? An electronic device? Some medical equipment? Learn about the core. Try to understand the coding principles, electronic rules or chemical reactions responsible for the existence of your device. Is it necessary? Probably not. But, you keep learning and getting better at what you are doing, anyway.

## Conclusion
Lack of learning new things is one of the top reasons people get sucked into an “I am already too old for this” way of thinking.

If learning is not a continuous process, it will become even harder later on. As a remote worker, you don’t want to get there. The whole of your existence is based on your ability to be as flexible as possible.

Learn in small chunks, often, all your free time. That is the best investment you can ever make.

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I always wanted to be a remotee

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I always wanted to work remotely.

When I moved to Oxford, I used to run at 6am to my work. Each day, mostly in dark, I ran along a house where a light was on.

I could not see inside but I saw a room full of bookshelves, a desk, a lamp and a man behind the desk. The man was always writing something.

Every morning, unless I rode my bike, the same view. I wanted to be at his place very much.

I did not know what he was doing and whether he liked it. It did not matter.

It looked as a home office to me. The man was doing what he wanted and when he wanted it.

And I wanted the same really badly. So I decided that one day I’ll be a guy in the window too.

For many, remote work sounds like something dark. Something that compromises or even damage their private life.

Instead of going to the office and coming back from work, they feel at work all the time.

It can be true.

Remote work is not an answer to everything and certainly does not work for everyone.

Remote work is not a private life destroyed either though.

Most people I’ve talked to in recent years could not grasp a concept of remote work.

For some it is unimaginable to work from a place with so many familiar distractions, for others it “can’t work” for the nature of their work.

We have been living in a dogma setting all our life.

Our parents went to work 40 hours a week every week. The same place, the same hours.

Considering work as something we can do wherever we are anytime we want is often too much.

I always wanted more from my life. I always wanted to be a remotee.

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Every Job Can Be Done Remotely

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People are often convinced that everything but their particular job can be done remotely. Either because ever needed connection with the team, the phone line, or in-person meeting with clients. Sometimes even a complete conviction of their absolutely needed presence is in the play.

When analysing it, almost any job role can be performed anywhere. It is just a rigid thinking staying in the way and making it impossible.

The most common positions considered being strictly office based are sales, accounting, support, finance or marketing.

It is obvious that one has to be in the office if dealing with customers, internal documents, reports and marketing planning right?

What makes those roles so different to developers?

Developers work with computers and lines of codes that can be written anywhere. Right.

Wait a minute. 

Sales representatives prepare offers, fill the charts, send emails and call the clients. Account admins process and organise all requests from partners. Support people email or phone with customers, do remote sessions from their computers or research the issues that need to be addressed. Finance people spend most of the time making charts, processing data, submiting payments, evaluating purchases and orders. Marketing people prepare documents, presentations or write copies. 

I know, it is a very simplified view of all those roles. 

Nonetheless, as a ballpark guess it is what it is. And what it is? 

None of these jobs are bound to one place, one office, one meeting room. All of them can be done remotely and as efficiently as from the office. Perhaps even a bit better.

Dogmatic thinking is the only real barrier on the road. We remove that and see everything is possible. We may even see marketing or finance people smiling and live a balanced life for once.