Essay
Learners are Seekers
Build an anti-fragile identity.
Re-orienting what your ego is based around. What you build your self-esteem around matters.
Most people build it around being right, good, worthy.
These are dead ends. You will inevitably run into things you are not right about or not good at.
If you build around being praised for end results and not the process, you will hit a dead end.
Re-orient around being a learner, then you are anti-fragile.
-Tom Bilyeu
I've been thinking about what it means to be a good learner — to absorb, understand, and apply new ideas and new information.
To emerge from a learning process as a changed person.
I've come to realize it's an identity you must embody. You can't dabble. You can't try to impress. You can't be arrogant, lazy, or careless. These are not traits of a learner.
Learners are seekers. They're on a quest. They're open; they receive. They put up a large surface area for interaction. They're responsive to anything on the path.
They set aside judgment. They trust — they trust that there’s an answer. They trust that the process will lead to something meaningful. They trust themselves and they trust the universe.
Because you can't be open without trust. If you're walled off, you're not learning. Even the bad apples who test your faith play a role in the larger puzzle.
When learners encounter a problem, when something doesn't work, they don't blame the thing. They look inward. They ask why it doesn't work. They ask what they can do differently. They ask what they can add, what they can remove.
They ask questions. Questions are gold. Questions are themselves challenges. They don't just seek good answers — they seek good questions. Sometimes the answers are easy, but the questions are hard.
Learners don't make mistakes — they make experiments. Any result from an experiment, positive or negative, is valuable. It forms the basis for the next experiment. It does not exist in isolation. It's part of a chain. And as part of a chain, each link contributes. It's not a failure; it's a finding.
Arriving at this remote location, the mountain man walks Leonard through a chronological tour of the mountain man’s sculptures. At one point, he indicates to Leonard that he had lost his spark, lost his artistry, had stopped being a learner.
“Tell me. How can I be a learner?” to which Leonard responded, “It’s simple. To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.”
- George Leonard, Author of ‘Mastery’