Lifelong Learning

Arie de Geus

‘Your ability to learn faster than your competitor may be your only sustainable competitive advantage’, is a quote by Arie de Geus that I often use because of the great message it carries.
Arie de Geus gets my admiration because he is not a pure academic only. He started out in ‘the real world’ and progressed to management in Royal Dutch Shell, retiring after working there for 38 years.
He was largely responsible for developing the concept of the learning organisation. His reputation as an academic came after his …

Philosophical
Since November last year, my articles focused quite a bit on my philosophy of success. Philosophical discussions are often controversial and spark lots of debate, but it’s something I quite like.
You should perhaps also develop your ‘own philosophy of life’. This will ensure that there is always a higher purpose for everything that you do.
Getting Practical
During the first few articles of this year, it started to get more practical, where you actually had to define what it is you wanted to achieve and by when.
Last week’s article on Goal Setting …

Before I start with this week’s article, I would like to address a comment by Tim Fulford on last week’s post. He criticised my Mind Map for not using one word per line and the lack of images. You can see his comments on the post at MindMapTutor.com.
Even though I gave him my reasons for not following the Mind Map rules strictly, I welcome his passion and input around puristic Mind Maps as advocated by Tony Buzan, the inventor of Mind Maps. Tim is a certified Buzan instructor and obviously …

Living on Purpose
Last week’s article, living on purpose, introduced you to big picture thinking of your life. If you always have the big picture in mind, passion, which is a primary ingredient of success, is usually sustainable.
Single-minded focus is undoubtedly the biggest guarantee of success and a Mind Map is the ideal tool to document this focus, as a Mind Map always has a central theme – a single focus.
While having a single purpose and focusing on it, will dramatically increase the chances of you achieving success, does it bring …

Strangely, this was one of the more difficult articles to write. It surprised me, as I was thinking for some time about the first article for 2010. It had to be inspirational but not one of those New Year’s resolution ones that have already been forgotten.
The scene had already been set in previous articles, Your results are a reflection of a year’s work, Passion makes perfect and MindMapTutor guidelines.
I had the idea fixed quite clearly in my mind, as well as the points I wanted to get across to you, …

Last week’s article ‘passion makes perfect’, set the scene for the year.
This week’s article gives you an overview of how information will be delivered on MindMapTutor.com in 2010.
The MindMapTutor
The first major change is the use of what I now call a MindMapTutor.  A MindMapTutor opens with a Mind Map Summary and follows with information based on the Mind Map.
This allows you to Preview the article and get an Overview before you commence with reading. It also serves as a Review after you have read the article.
I suggest that you have …

While browsing through my bookshelves yesterday, I came across the book, ‘Passion makes perfect’, by Peter Cheales. The copy I have, was published in 1995, but I think the material is as pertinent today as it was back then.
I thought this would be the perfect title for my last article of 2009, as it succinctly summarises my philosophy of success.
On 1 January 2009, I published tips for 2009. My success philosophy stated in that article was simply:

Find your passion
Become the best you can be at it

While that still holds true, …