Since I graduated with a degree in mathematics, many of my college peers became teachers. Through them, I’ve had many opportunities to meet teacher friends. Once, I met a economics teacher, let’s call her Ms. Wong. While discussing the current economic situation, I was surprised to discover that Ms. Wong had never applied her professional outside of work. He didn’t even know who the current Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve was, nor was she aware of the state of the real economy.

It turns out that Ms. Wong chose to study economics because her family believed that a business degree had better prospects. After graduation, she became a teacher because the job was stable. Although she pursued a master’s degree in economics, it was purely for work purposes, not because of interest. During her off-hours, she wouldn’t engage with anything related to economics, nor would she follow economic news.

Thinking about it later, I realized that there are actually many people like Ms. Wong around me, some of whom are even professionals. After their school years, they only engage in learning out of necessity for their jobs. For these people, learning is a painful experience. With my limited knowledge of psychology, this likely ties back to their upbringing. If we were taught during our learning years that studying was a chore, constantly emphasizing its necessity rather than its joys, those unpleasant memories of learning would be ingrained in our consciousness. Even after graduation, these memories continue to affect us, leading us to unconsciously avoid learning anything new unless absolutely necessary.

If you find learning enjoyable, congratulations. But if you find yourself resisting it, the best approach is to start with something you’re genuinely interested in. Gradually, you can cultivate your curiosity about learning and adjust your mindset to truly learn how to learn. My suggestion is to see your company as a work laboratory, applying the methods you believe to be effective directly to your tasks and observing the results. The satisfaction of validating a successful method can make work much more interesting.

During training sessions, I noticed that many colleagues weren’t unwilling to learn—they simply couldn’t find an effective way to do so. This is mainly because the training provided by their previous companies was mostly something practical, where colleagues learned necessary skills through experience. While this is a very effective method, it’s challenging to address issues that fall outside of that experience. At work, we often face unknown, unexpected challenges, and relying solely on experience may not be enough. In such situations, we need to seek out new knowledge to fill the gaps in our abilities.

Supervisors shouldn’t just verbally encourage their colleagues to learn new knowledge; they should personally absorb the latest knowledge and technologies and introduce them into their team’s work. When colleagues use new techniques to complete their tasks more efficiently, the satisfaction they gain from this success will be imprinted in their minds. They’ll be more willing to explore new things and figure out how to apply new knowledge to their work, eventually developing this into a habit.

The next step is to enhance learning skills. The key to learning skills isn’t about how fast you can learn, but whether you can integrate new knowledge with existing knowledge and apply it to your practical work through experience. A supervisor’s role is to guide the team, using their own experience to help the team think about how to apply new knowledge to their current tasks, and then transform this into the team’s collective mindset. This way, whenever members encounter something new, they will naturally think about how to apply it.

According to the learning curve, mastering a new skill and becoming an expert requires 10,000 hours of practice, but to get the basics of a skill, it only takes 20 hours. This is not a high barrier, and the return on investment is quite good. Therefore, learning is a matter of whether you choose to do it or not. As long as we adjust our mindset, develop it into a habit, and improve our way of thinking, we can actually learn a lot in our daily lives.

Simon So

Chief Experience Officer of Hantec Group