Your Growth Depends on Your Thirst For Learning

We have summer contracts for our children. They have worked on these every summer since they turned five years old. There are three categories for their “jobs.” The categories are:

1) Grow your Passions

2) Contribute to Society

3) Expand your Horizons.

My favorite example is when my son Anthony picked “paint a painting” under his Expand category. It is my favorite because the year after it was in his ‘Expand’ category, he had painting in his ‘Grow’ category. Pretty cool, because, he’d taken something he learned he had both passion and a talent for it and made it an ongoing thing. I think my favorite artwork of his is a rendering of the Miami Heat logo he painted when he was six.

I ‘ve been blessed to be around many passionate individuals in my life. I love learning things from them. I’ve found that my own thirst for learning has also been valuable in my business life. Our company has a saying:

In life, we usually get about 30% of the information to start something. It is then up to us to go find out more, so we can accomplish those things.

I love that saying, because it really gives me the outlook that anything is possible. And if anything is possible, then it’s up to me to find out what is possible.

Finding out possibilities in my life have brought me more happiness. Pushing the envelope and asking what’s next, or what else is possible has been a source of great happiness for me. I like to think that I’ve learned a lot, but that I’m embarking on a lifetime of learning. If I ever think that I have learned it all—well, just ask my toddler, Vince. He usually gets me scratching my head and saying “I didn’t know that.” More learning for me equals more happiness, and I like that equation.

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