Bradley R. Staats - Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself, and Thrive

My paternal grandfather, Preston William Staats Sr., grew up in New Braunfels, Texas, where his father owned the Candy Kitchen, a small store that sold sweets and soft drinks. Recognizing a growth opportunity when he saw one, my great-grandfather, Preston Seniors father, had secured Coca-Cola bottling rights for the region. Preston Senior worked at the plant as a child and then, when the time was right, headed forty-five miles up the road to Austin to attend the University of Texas. After college he returned to New Braunfels to run the Coke plant. My maternal grandfather, Brooks Woolford, grew up in Houston, where he worked as a credit manager for most of his adult life. My grandfathers lived outside their respective hometowns only while they served in World War II.

Contrast their experience with that of their two grandchildrenmy brother, Trent, and me. We grew up in Austin, and we both went to the University of Texas at Austin for our undergraduate degrees (Hook em, Horns!). Trent stayed on to get his PhD in engineering and then started a company that enabled real-time monitoring of power transmission lines for electricity traders. After he sold the company, he headed to Harvard Business School to get an MBA. He stayed in Boston for the next ten years, working at startups in biotechnology, biofuels, and chemical waste reclamation.

After I graduated from UT-Austin, I went to work in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, first in New York and then in Houston. I moved to Boston to get my own MBA at Harvard Business School (HBS), and then I worked at Dell Computer in Austin, doing strategic planning, and at a venture capital firm in Tampa that focused primarily on technology and health care services. I headed back to Boston to get a doctorate at HBS and moved to Chapel Hill as a professor at the University of North Carolinas Kenan-Flagler Business School, where Ive been ever since, with the exception of a year as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School in Philadelphia.

The contrast between our grandfathers experience and Trents and mine is not atypical. Careers today usually involve multiple employers and often multiple industries. Data that tracks individuals over time is sparse, but a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that followed workers aged eighteen to forty-eight over the years 1978 to 2012 found that on average, workers held twelve different jobs.5.4 percent were holding the same job theyd held from age thirty to thirty-four. For most people, the only constant is change.

To succeed in this new environment requires continual learninghow to do existing tasks better and how to do entirely new things. If we fail to learn, we risk becoming irrelevant. We end up solving yesterdays problems too late instead of tackling tomorrows problems before someone else does.

But were bad at learning. Supremely bad. In fact, were our own worst enemies. Instead of doing the things that will help us learn, we often do just the opposite. We are unwilling to take risks that might lead to failure. We obsess about outcomes while neglecting to examine carefully the process through which we achieve them. We rush to answers instead of asking questions. We want to be seen doing somethinganythingso we dont step back to recharge and reflect. We follow the path that others have beaten rather than forge one of our own. We look to fix irrelevant weaknesses instead of playing to our strengths. We focus narrowly rather than draw on broad experience. We treat learning as an individual exercise and neglect the important role played by others.