At Wharton, in Prof Jeremey Siegel’s class, we had no place to sit for the first 10 minutes since people would crowd for his ‘daily market updates’.
He was a rockstar professor but had one quirk — to keep his teaching material exclusive, he would give his course notes only in printed form, not PDF. Even as a Wharton student, you could not get his course material without registering in his course.
Today, teachers as amazing as him from Wharton and other schools are freely accessible via Coursera, EdX, etc. But are we jostling to do those courses? Is there a stampede waiting to happen? Nope.
We have a reason though — I am busy, you are busy, we are all busy. So busy, in fact, that in the last 2 years, Netflix’s valuation has nearly doubled 🙂
The truth is that learning is important but rarely urgent. And our brains are wired to prioritize the urgent over the important.
On top of that, our attention span has already been chopped and sold off to advertisers.
Let us fight back by rebuilding our focus and make learning a daily priority. It is not easy but then, nothing worthwhile is easy.
We have all done hard things — we can do one more.
– Rajan